Cynthia Eagle Russett

Cynthia Eagle Russett (Feb. 1, 1937 - Dec. 5, 2013) was an American historian, noted for her studies of 19th century American intellectual history, and women and gender.

Russett was born Cynthia Eagle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 1, 1937.^[1] She studied history as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor's degree, and then did graduate work at Yale University, earning a Master's from Yale in 1959 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1964.^[1][2] Her dissertation was awarded Yale's highest honor for American history dissertations, the George Washington Eggleston Prize.^[2]

She joined the Yale faculty in 1967, and was eventually appointed the Larnard Professor of History.^[1]

Russett's spouse is a fellow Yale faculty member, Bruce Russett, and the couple had four children together.^[1]

Notable works

• The Extraordinary Mrs. R: A Friend Remembers Eleanor Roosevelt (1999, with William Turner Levy)
• Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women (1993), edited with Ruth Barnes Moynihan and Laurie Crumpacker
• Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989, Harvard University Press) (winner, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Annual Book Award)^[2]
• Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865-1912 (1976)
• The Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought (1968)

Notes