Albert W. Smith (m. 1890–1903) Dane Coolidge (m. 1906–1940)[1]
Mary Roberts Coolidge (October 28, 1860 – April 13, 1945), also known asMary Roberts Smith, was an American sociologist and author. She was an instructor atWellesley College before joining the faculty ofStanford University, where she became the first full-time American professor of sociology. She later founded the sociology department ofMills College.
Coolidge was born Mary Elizabeth Burroughs Roberts inKingsbury, Indiana, the daughter of Margaret Jane (née Marr) and Isaac Phillips Roberts.[2] Both of her parents were Indiana farmers who emigrated toMount Pleasant, Iowa in 1862. Her father would go on to become Professor of Agriculture at theIowa Agricultural College after 1869, then was offered a similar position atCornell University in 1873. He later became Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Director of theExperiment Station at Cornell.[3]
Mary matriculated to Cornell, graduating with a Ph.B. in 1880 and a M.S. in 1882. She was a member of theKappa Alpha Theta sorority and elected to thePhi Beta Kappa honor society.[4]
Mary Roberts taught at public and private schools from 1880 until 1886,[2][1] then was an instructor with the Department of History atWellesley College until 1890.[5] During her last two years at Wellesley, she served as secretary for the Board of Examiners.[1] On August 28, 1890, she was married to Albert W. Smith,[1] an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell. In 1891, he was professor of machine design at the University of Wisconsin,[6] while she, along with former studentClelia Duel Mosher, continued research on the sexual practices of college women.[7] The couple moved toStanford University,[6][8] where Mary earned her Ph.D. in 1896. The same year she was named assistant professor and later associate professor at Stanford,[1] becoming the first full-time American professor of sociology.[9]
The strain of a dual career family proved too much for the couple, and they were divorced in 1904.[8] This painful event led to a mental breakdown and she had a brief stay at asanitorium. The following year she tried to return to Stanford, but the university would not rehire her.[10] Instead, Roberts became a research assistant at theCarnegie Institution inWashington D.C. until 1907. Starting in 1905, she was a worker for the San FranciscoSettlement Association'sSouth Park Settlement[1] – a center of social welfare work for the city.[11] However, this building was destroyed by theSan Francisco Earthquake in 1906.[12]
It was a few months later in 1906 that she married a former student of hers,Dane Coolidge, a naturalist who would author a series of Western novels.[13] The two would spend time on horseback trips together through the southwest, and she contributed her sociology training to his works.[12] In 1909 she joined theRussell Sage Foundation,[2] and had her workChinese Immigration published, which was considered by some a "remarkable book for its time",[7] coming as it did when theChinese Exclusion Act was in full force. In the book, she refutes anti-Chinese rhetoric and links anti-Chinese agitation in the state of California to the greed and prejudices of early settlers.[14]
During 1910–1912, she served as president of the Settlement Council.[2] Her workWhy Women Are So, a sociological study of whether attitudes toward middle-class women had shaped their behavior, was published in 1912.[15]
For many years following her breakdown that significantly reduced her eminence in the field, Roberts was unable to gain employment in an academic position. This changed in 1918 when she was hired as professor atMills College, where she established the department of sociology and served as its first chair. Finally, she retired in 1926 as professor emeritus.[10] Afterward, she co-authoredThe Rain-makers: Indians of Arizona and New Mexico (1929),The Navajo Indians (1930), andThe Last of the Seris (1939) with her husband.[16]
Smith, Mary Roberts (1895). "Recent tendencies in the education of women".Popular Science Monthly.48:27–33.
Smith, Mary Roberts (1898).Education for domestic life. D. Appleton and Company.
Smith, Mary Roberts (1898). "Shall the College Curriculum Be Modified for Women?".Publications of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae:1–15.
Smith, Mary Roberts (1899). "The Social Aspect of New York Police Courts".American Journal of Sociology.5 (2):145–154.doi:10.1086/210878.S2CID144007605.
Smith, Mary Roberts (1900). "Statistics of College and Non-college Women".Publications of the American Statistical Association.7 (49–50):1–26.doi:10.2307/2276403.JSTOR2276403.
Warner, Amos Griswold; Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1908).American Charities. Vol. 4. Arno Press.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1909). "Chinese Labor Competition on the Pacific Coast".The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.34 (2):120–130.doi:10.1177/000271620903400215.S2CID143922994.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1909).Chinese Immigration. Vol. 73. Arno Press. RetrievedJuly 7, 2019.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1912).Why women are so. Holt. RetrievedJuly 7, 2019.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1929).The Rain-makers: Indians of Arizona and New Mexico. Houghton Mifflin Company.
Coolidge, Dane; Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1930).The Navajo Indians. AMS Press.
Coolidge, Dane; Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1939).The Last of the Seris. New York, E.P. Dutton & Co.
Coolidge, Mary Roberts (1941). "Clelia Duel Mosher, the Scientific Feminist".Research Quarterly, American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation. 12sup3:633–645.doi:10.1080/10671188.1941.10624707.
Deegan, Mary Jo (1998). "A Rose is not a Rosa is not a Roseann is not a Rosemary: The many names of Mary Elizabeth Roberts Smith Coolidge".Advances in Gender Research.3:163–195.
Owen, Elizabeth Kenyon (1945). "Mary Roberts Coolidge, An Appreciation".Mills Quarterly.28:3–4.
Works by or aboutMary Roberts Coolidge atWikisource