Bell, Susan Groag, 1926-2015

Susan Groag Bell (25 January 1926 – 24 June 2015) was a Czech-American pioneer in Women's Studies. At a time when there were no academic courses nor textbooks, offered in women's history, Bell compiled images of women's participation in society from artworks and began presenting lectures to present roles women had held in society. In 1971, a year after the first women's studies course was offered in the United States, Bell taught her own class on the subject and prepared a reading guide for the course which would become one of the first textbooks to treat women's history from an academic perspective. She taught and researched for more than four decades as an independent scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Posthumously, a conference named in her honor was held at Stanford and a plaque recognizing her contributions to women's history was dedicated by the history department of Stanford University.