Although Elizabeth F. Ellet was not quite the first woman historian in America, it can fairly be said that she was the first historian of women. Although she published a substantial quantity of popular writings in several areas, she is perhaps best remembered for her patriotic, lively, and well-researched accounts of women's participation in the winning of American independence. As Charles A. and Mary R. Beard observed in 1927: "Complacent political and military historians, following the traditions of their craft, had left women out of their chronicles of the American Revolution; Mrs. Ellet in a domestic history of that cataclysm partly restored the balance of justice." But Elizabeth Ellet did more than recover the history of women in the War of Independence. She was a pioneer social historian who recognized the importance of and wrote ably about phenomena that had escaped the attention of other American historians.

Elizabeth Fries...