Martha Saxton, a historian whose probing examinations of women’s lives led her to new insights into figures ranging from author Louisa May Alcott to 1950s actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield to Mary Washington, the mother of the first president of the United States, died Tuesday at her home in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was 77.
Her daughter, Josephine Saxton Ferorelli, said the cause was lung cancer.
First as a freelance writer and later as an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at Amherst College, Professor Saxton has excavated women’s lives beneath the quagmire of male privilege recorded both in the time of her subjects and by historians in the intervening years.
“I have spent my life studying and writing the history of North American women to try to recover something that has been lost, to try to replace misunderstanding or criticism with historical context, and to replace evidence with stereotypes and sentiments,” she wrote in “The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington.”
That book, published in 2019, centered on a woman who had been dismissed by generations of historians—almost all of them men—as a brutal slave owner who mistreated her famous son. Without appreciating her, Mrs. Saxton showed that Mary Washington was a person of her time and that her life was a window into the experiences of women in 18th-century Virginia.
Professor Saxton brought the same perspective to her first book, “Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties” (1976), which was also the first serious assessment of an actress better known for her physical gifts than for her dramatic skills.
It is a work of feminist history at the beginning of the field. The first sentence reads: “The history of women, unlike the history of men, is also the history of sex” – and if that statement seems less true in 2023 than it did in 1976, it’s partly because of the work of scientists like Professor Saxton.
Jayne Mansfield, Professor Saxton argued, was both a victim and a cop, a sexualized woman who used her image as a mindless centerfold to get ahead in a male-dominated society.
“Only the 1950s could have produced her,” she wrote. “Like most women, she was not allowed to lead, but for a moment she was a uniquely gifted and savvy follower.”
She followed ‘Jayne Mansfield’ a year later with a biography of a completely different figure. “Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography” paints a complicated picture of a woman held in check by an eccentric, domineering father and a patriarchal New England society. But it’s also an in-depth examination of Alcott’s most famous book, Little Women.
“Louisa May Alcott” captures, among other things, one of Professor Saxton’s enduring intellectual themes: that notions of ethics and morality are often gendered, so that what makes a “good” woman can be a “bad” man, and vice versa.
“Little Women,” she wrote, “became a handbook for girls who desired wisdom to become good women.”
Martha Porter Saxton was born on September 3, 1945 in Manhattan and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father, Mark Saxton, and her mother, Josephine (Stocking) Saxton, both worked in publishing.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1967 with a degree in history, she briefly considered a career in law, but instead worked for several years in a New York publishing house while also doing freelance writing, including for The New Yorker.
She married the photographer Enrico Ferorelli in 1977. He died in 2014. Together with her daughter, she is survived by her son Francesco Saxton Ferorelli; her brother, Russell Saxton; and a grandson.
Only after establishing herself as a published author did Professor Saxton decide to pursue a Ph.D. in history at Columbia.
She received her PhD in 1989 and published her dissertation in 2003 as a book, “Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America.” After a number of short-term scientific positions, she joined the Amherst faculty in 1997. In 2015 she received emeritus status.
As an academic, Professor Saxton expanded her scope of historical research, looking beyond middle-class white women to examine the lives of women of color, enslaved women, and incarcerated women.
With an Amherst colleague, Prof. Amrita Basu, she developed courses on human rights activism and gender and the environment. She also, with several collaborators, taught a course called “Inside/Out,” which brought Amherst students together with incarcerated students at Hampshire County Jail in nearby Northampton.
At her death, Mrs. Saxton was nearing completion of her last book, a biography of the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon; all she lacked was a final chapter. The author Judith Thurman, a close friend, and Professor Basu said they would finish the design.
