Susan Ware

Author

A pioneer in the field of women’s history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, she has taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004). From 2012-2022 she served as the general editor of the American National Biography.

Ware has long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, most recently as the Honorary Women’s Suffrage Centennial Historian. Recent publications include American Women’s Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote 1776-1965 (2020) and American Women: A Concise History (2022). She is currently writing a book about feminist biography and preparing two volumes on Eleanor Roosevelt for the Library of America.  

susan-ware

Credit: Tony Rinaldo

"Ware is an appealing writer and the Earhart she describes is an extremely likable person…. Ware demonstrates a keen sense of period and demonstrates, as well, that Earhart and her generation belong to another American tradition besides feminism – the tradition of optimism."

The New Yorker