Shaping Women’s History
June 3, 1948–Oct. 16, 2020
Faye Dudden, former Charles A. Dana Professor of history, not only contributed to but also helped establish the field of women’s history in the 1970s. A historian interested in the U.S. women’s rights movement and women in the labor force, her many published works and years teaching illustrate an impassioned career as a feminist scholar.
She was raised on a farm in Camillus, and central New York remained an important part of Dudden’s sense of home and research interests throughout her life. She attended Cornell University as an undergraduate before receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees in American history from the University of Rochester. She went on to teach at Union College for 14 years, founding what is now its Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. In 1997, she joined Colgate’s faculty, where she taught a course on upstate history, among other subjects.
Dudden’s published works similarly revolved around New York. She looked at the Knights of Labor in Homer, N.Y., in one notable article and addressed the relationships between mistresses and maids in northern New York through the 1850s in her first book, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. She also spent a great deal of time studying the women’s rights movement and examined the relationship between the advocates of women’s suffrage and Black suffrage in her last book, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. In addition to these research endeavors, she published articles in the Journal of Social History and in Labor History.
Dudden proved as successful a researcher as she was a passionate one, receiving competitive grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Colgate University. She published Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870, which won the George Freedley Memorial Prize. She also served as the history department chair at Colgate from 2000–05 and later as a member of the Promotion and Tenure Committee from 2013–15.
“She was a brilliant, field-changing historian — one of just a handful who shaped the writing of U.S. women’s history over the past 40 years,” says Andy Rotter, who is the Charles A. Dana Professor of history and peace and conflict studies. “Faye typifies a generation of women historians who made a place for themselves in a male-dominated profession because of their determination and excellence.”
Dudden traveled extensively while at Colgate: directing the London history study group on two occasions; joining faculty on a Freeman Foundation trip to Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul; and taking a core curriculum trip to India. She continued traveling after her retirement in 2016, and she pursued her other hobbies. A gardener, Dudden designed the hillsides behind her homes in Syracuse and the garden for an early 19th-century farmhouse she and her husband restored.
At age 72, Dudden passed away. She is survived by her husband, Marshall Blake, as well as her brother, sister, niece, and nephew.