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FEMINIST SOCIOLOGISTS want to know how and why women are so restricted in society and in the home, and how femininity is constructed. Mary Roberts Coolidge was one of the first to explain Why Women are So (1912) and her brilliant analysis, like that of many other intellectual women with answers to "the woman problem," is now receiving renewed attention (e.g., Deegan 1991; Rosenberg 1982). In the short autobiographical documents included below, Coolidge explicates her approach to writing and explains why she wrote her ground-breaking book. She documents both her own informed curiosity and her need to make money - situations still facing feminist sociologists today (and pragmatically she cautions would-be writers not to expect grand remuneration). I hope her lively essays encourage readers to find and study her books, especially Why Women Are So, and I invite those who already know her work to learn more about Coolidge the person and scholar.
A major reason for Coolidge's obscurity in sociology is the many names she used during her professional career. Her full name is Mary Elizabeth Burroughs Roberts Smith Coolidge. Bibliographically, her works from different periods of her life are scattered under different names, principally as Mary Roberts Smith and Mary Roberts Coolidge. This professional career problem and the specific ways in which her bewildering number of names obscured our corporate understanding of Coolidge's full corpus are noted in Deegan (1991: 100-109) and discussed more fully elsewhere (Deegan forthcoming).
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs Roberts was born in Kingsbury, Indiana, on October 28, 1860. Her father, Isaac P. Roberts, was a professor and dean of agriculture at Cornell University. Mary earned the Bachelor's degree (1880) and master's degree (1882) at Cornell and taught economics and History at Wellesley College from 1886 to 1890. She married Albert W. Smith in 1890 and moved to California where, in 1896, she studied sociology at the new Leland Stanford Jr. University and earned a doctorate under the tutelage of Amos G. Warner, George E. Howard, and Edward A. Ross, among others. They were a powerful and impressive trio. Warner, a former student of Howard's, was a pioneering sociologist (Howard 1908; Deegan 1989) and both Howard and Ross later became presidents of the American Sociological Society (Ball 1988; Hertzler 1979;...