She received her PhD in 1949. She had temporary teaching appointments at Haverford College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in 1961 became assistant professor of history at Duke University. In 1980 Firor Scott became the first female chair of Duke's history department. She worked at Duke for the next three decades, until her retirement in 1991. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the Citizens Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Firor Scott was named the W. K. Boyd Professor Emerita of History at Duke University, as well as an editor of the American Women's History Series at the University of Illinois Press and an editor for UPA. In 1970, her book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930, was published; it is now considered a classic that almost singlehandedly created the modern field of Southern women's history. In 1984, she became president of the Organization of American Historians. In 1987, the Anne Firor Scott Research Fund was created as an endowment to support students conducting independent research in women's history. In 1989 she became president of the Southern Historical Association. The Women's Studies living group at Duke named their dormitory after her. Since 1992 the Organization of American Historians has awarded the annual Lerner-Scott Prize, named for her and historian Gerda Lerner, to the writer each year of the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women's history. In 2002 Firor Scott received the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Service Award. She received the American Historical Association’s Scholarly Achievement Award in 2008. Scott has also served on the advisory boards of the Schlesinger Library, the Princeton University department of history, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Legacy
The Anne Firor Scott papers, 1963–2002, are held at Duke University. Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, a collection of essays drawing inspiration from Scott's 1984 work, Making the Invisible Woman Visible was published in 1993. Writing Women's History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott was published in 2011. It contains essays on how women's history is written in the wake of Scott's book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930. Edited by Elizabeth Anne Payne, the collection has contributions from Scott herself, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Glenda E. Gilmore, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Darlene Clark Hine, Mary Kelley, Markeeva Morgan, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Deborah Gray White. It is based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi's annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History.
