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| Martha Saxton | |
Historian Martha Saxton, "whose penetrating examinations of women's lives led her to new insights into figures ranging from the author Louisa May Alcott to the 1950s actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield to Mary Washington, the mother of the first president of the United States," died July 18, the New York Times reported. She was 77.
"I have spent my life studying and writing North American women's history to try to retrieve some of what has been lost, to try to replace incomprehension or criticism with historical context, and to substitute evidence for stereotypes and sentiment," she wrote in The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington (2019).
"Saxton showed that Mary Washington was very much a person of her time, and that her life was a window into the experiences of women in 18th-century Virginia," the Times noted, adding that she "brought the same perspective to her first book, Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties (1976), which was also the first serious assessment of an actress better known for her physical endowments than her dramatic skills." She followed the Mansfield book with Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography (1977), writing: "Little Women became a handbook for girls desiring wisdom about becoming good women."
After establishing herself as a published author, Saxton decided to pursue a Ph.D. in history at Columbia University. She received her doctorate in 1989, eventually publishing her dissertation in 2003 as the book Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America. She joined the Amherst faculty in 1997, and received emerita status in 2015.
"As an academic, Professor Saxton expanded her scope of historical inquiry, looking beyond middle-class white women to examine the lives of women of color, enslaved women and incarcerated women," the Times wrote. With Amherst colleague Amrita Basu, she developed courses on human rights activism and gender and the environment.
At her death, Saxton was nearing completion (all that she lacked was a final chapter) of her last book, a biography of the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon. Author Judith Thurman, a close friend, and Basu said they would be finishing the draft.