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The Lost Scholars

The Lost Scholars

Last updated on: August 23, 2024 at 10:43 am by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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The Lost Scholars 2024-08-23T10:43:51-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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A few years ago, Jill Paton Walsh, who was authorized to continue the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane story after Dorothy L. Sayers’ death, came out with the last of her officially authorized novels before Walsh’s own death. It was called The Late Scholar. That’s not what this post is about.

That disambiguation out of the way, here’s the story. From 2012-2023, I was the managing editor of Christian History magazine. (Now I am the senior editor, which means I get to come up with ideas and other people get to do them). To ease the transition between me and my successor, the estimable Kaylena Ratcliff, we decided to do an issue’s worth of reprints of some of our most famous articles. (You can read it here.) When crediting the contributors, we decided to update their bio information to say what they were doing now. Some had died, of course (CH is now 40 years old). Some had gone on to very different positions, changed denominations, altered names, written famous books, and done all manner of things. And two of them had vanished.

By vanished, I mean I could simply find no trace of their later scholarly life when I was looking for them in late 2023. They were Ann K. Warren, who was at the time of writing her article an adjunct professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, and Patricia Stallings Kruppa, who was an associate professor of history at UT-Austin. They had both written books in the 1980s that seemed clearly to be the time-honored first-book-that-started-out-as-a-dissertation (I have one of those, too); Kruppa had also helped pioneer a women’s studies program at UT. That much I could find out. And after that, the internet seemed to have decided they didn’t exist.

Now, there were a lot of women who wrote for past issues of CH and we did find information on the current whereabouts, or honored deaths, of the rest of the women in the issue just as we did for the men. So in a way I wondered if I was making too much of this. But I could tell that these two women were roughly the same age – which is to say my mother’s generation – and I wondered if they had vanished for roughly the same reasons. It did get me thinking of that generation of female scholars who had preceded me: the ones who were the first at everything, the ones who got mocked for their double-barreled names and were always the first women in the department and the only women at the faculty meetings, the ones that got asked to make the coffee and the photocopies. Because of women like this, I was admitted to a Ph.D. program without anyone batting an eye. I stand on the shoulders of giants, I thought, and I can’t even find them.

I was originally going to post this post in December as we were finishing up our reprint issue, to see if you all could help me find the two of them. I am sorry I did not do it then, because googling their names again now I found an obituary for, as she was named at the time of her death, Patricia Stallings Kruppa Savage. She died while we were working on the issue, and she seems to have had a stellar career as a scholar and teacher that flew completely under Google’s radar; she retired in 2005, but most of her famous publications seem to be earlier than that. I encourage you to read the obituary – especially the story about the time she won a man’s watch in a high school debate competition and demanded she be given a woman’s watch instead. May her memory be for a blessing.

Ann K. Warren is still out there. (I did find this obituary for someone of that name, but it makes no mention of an academic career and given her birthdate this woman would have been publishing that first-book-that-was-a-dissertation at age 58. On the other hand, maybe it took her that long to fight through the patriarchy.)

And maybe, if you’ve ever read any of the story of Lord Peter and Harriet, Harriet would have had something to say about this after all.

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.” **** “The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed … or find a still greater man to marry her. … The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.” **** “Harriet agreed that intellectual women should marry and reproduce their kind; but she pointed out the English husband had something to say in the matter and that, very often, he did not care for an intellectual wife.” (Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night)

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

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