Nina Baym, The Professor Who Found The Women, Has Died At 82

The University of Illinois professor had a question. She “was writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1975 when she began to wonder why 19th-century American literature was so male-dominated. Hawthorne himself helped pique her curiosity. In 1855 he had famously complained that ‘a damned mob of scribbling women’ was cutting into his sales.” So she found those scribblers, and a whole lot more.