Mary H. Blewett (born 1938) is an author and academic specializing in American

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

women's history Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history and the methods required to do so. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, personal achievement over a period of ...

, and labor history. She is an

emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, having retired in 1999 after 36 years. She is the author or co-author of six academic monographs and numerous articles as well as two novels.

Early life

She was a lifelong friend of

Gabriele Annan Gabriele Annan, Baroness Annan (née Ullstein, 1921–2013), was a German-born British author and literary and film critic, and the wife of the military intelligence officer, author, and academic Noel Annan, Baron Annan. Early life She was born ...

. They met at a progressive boarding school in England.

Education

Blewett received her B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Universit ...

Career

Blewett arrived in Lowell in 1965, initially joining the History Department at Lowell State College, later to become the University of Massachusetts Lowell. In the 1970s, Blewett became increasingly involved with community history projects in the

Merrimack Valley The Merrimack Valley is a bi-state region along the Merrimack River in the U.S. states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The Merrimack is one of the larger waterways in New England and has helped to define the livelihood and culture of those l ...

, including with the creation of the

Lowell National Historical Park Lowell National Historical Park is a National Historical Park of the United States located in Lowell, Massachusetts. Established in 1978 a few years after Lowell Heritage State Park, it is operated by the National Park Service and comprises a g ...

and associated oral history projects. In 1976, Blewett co-founded, together with Joan Rothschild, the Women's Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. From 1976 to 1978, Blewett served as the first female president of the Lowell Historical Society. Upon her retirement, the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell named an annual prize for student a research paper in Blewett's honor.

Select Publications

Academic Monographs

* 1989, ''Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910'' , University of Illinois Press. * 1990, ''The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960'' and ''Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth Century New England'', University of Massachusetts Press. * 1991, ''We Will Rise in Our Might: Working Women's Voices from Nineteenth-Century New England (Documents in American Social History),'' Cornell University Press * 1995, (co-author with Christine McKenna) ''To Enrich and to Serve: The Centennial History of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell'' * 2000, ''Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England,'' University of Massachusetts Press. * 2009, ''The Yankee Yorkshireman: Migration Lived and Imagined (Studies of World Migrations),'' University of Illinois Press.

Novels

* 2014, ''Dealt Hands: A Novel of the Seventies'', CF Publishing Group * 2018'', The Unforeseen'', Archway Publishing

Awards

Blewett's ''Men, Women and Work'' won, together with Joan Wallach Scott, the 1989 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History by the

American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, the AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional s ...

, the 1989

Herbert G. Gutman Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history. Early life and education Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigran ...

Award for outstanding dissertation, and the New England Historical Association Book Award, 1989. She also lectured for twenty years at various museums and historical societies in Massachusetts.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blewett, Mary 1938 births Writers from Massachusetts Social historians Feminist historians Labor historians Living people 21st-century American historians American women historians Women's historians 21st-century American women writers