Dillon, Mary Earhart, 1898-1992

Mary Earhart Dillon was born Ferburary 5, 1898. While an assistant professor of political science, Mary Earhart Dillon wrote Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (published under the name Mary Earhart by University of Chicago Press in 1944). Due to the difficulty of finding primary source material, Dillon contacted various women in the Midwest (especially the Chicago lawyer and suffragist, Catharine Waugh McCulloch) who had been active in temperance, woman's suffrage, and related movements and activities. These women gave her books and papers they had created or accumulated during their work for these causes. Dillon, as a member of the faculty of Northwestern University, arranged with the university library that she would deposit the materials there when she had completed her research.

When the time came, she was told that the library had no space for the collection, nor funds to process it and make it available to other researchers, and she was asked to remove it as soon as possible from the basement of the building in which her office had been. Dillon was unable to find a taker until, in June 1948, she wrote to the Women's Archives (later the Schlesinger Library) at Radcliffe College, and received a positive and enthusiastic response.

In September, 1948, joined the Department of Government at Queen's College in New York. She later published a biography of Wendell Willkie, and was for many years a National Consultant for the Schlesinger Library. She moved in Memphis, Tenn. upon her retirement and died there on February 5, 1992.