Author talk:Mary Roberts Smith

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 Roberts earned her bachelor's degree in 1880 and her master's degree in 1882 at Cornell. She taught economics and history at Wellesley College from 1886 to 1890.

In 1890 Roberts married Albert W. Smith. The couple moved to California in 1894, where he accepted a faculty position and she studied sociology as a graduate student at the new Leland Stanford Jr. University. She earned her doctorate and attained a full-time academic appointment in sociology at Stanford, where she taught a wide range of sociological courses from 1894 to 1903. She published a major study, ALMSHOUSE WOMEN, in 1896, and contributed professional articles to the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY and the PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION.

Mary Roberts Smith and her husband divorced in 1903, and she resigned from Stanford for reasons of health. Upon recovering, she accepted the position of director of South Park Settlement -- social settlement that aided the poor, the elderly, women, laborers, and immigrants -- in San Francisco. This institution was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. That year, Mary Roberts Smith married her former student Dane Coolidge, a writer of ethnographies of cowboys and Western novels. She continued her research and writing, publishing two widely recognized books, CHINESE IMMIGRATION (1909) and WHY WOMEN ARE SO (1912).

In 1918 Mary Roberts Coolidge accepted an academic position at Mills College, where she established the department of sociology and served as its first chair. After her retirement in 1926, she and her husband coauthored THE NAVAJO INDIANS (1930) and THE LAST OF THE SERIS (1939), and she wrote THE RAINMAKER: INDIANS OF ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO (1929).

Mary Roberts Coolidge died on April 13, 1945.