Isabel Gordon Carter

Carter was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, and raised in Nebraska and Tennessee, the daughter of Charles Henry Gordon and Mary Ett Hydorn. Her father was a geology professor at the University of Tennessee.^[1] She graduated from Albion College in 1917,^[2] and earned a master's degree from the University of Tennessee in 1920, with a thesis on poet John Masefield.^[3] She completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University.^[4]

In 1923 Carter collected folk songs and tales in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, including a session with Jane Hicks Gentry, a celebrated singer and storyteller in Hot Springs, North Carolina.^[5][6] She was an active member of the American Anthropological Association in the 1920s.^[7]

Carter was also a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, and chair of the school's Department of Social Research.^[8] Before 1938 she was deputy secretary of public assistance for the state of Pennsylvania.^[9] She was leader of the Public Welfare Institute in North Carolina in 1938.^[10]

• "Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales from the Southern Blue Ridge" (1925)^[11]
• "Reduction of Variability in an Inbred Population" (1928)^[12]
• "Physical measurements of ‘Old American’ college women" (1932)^[13]
• "Some Songs and Ballads from Tennessee and North Carolina" (1933)^[14]
• "Mountain White Riddles" (1934)^[15]
• Pennsylvania Children and the Depression (1935)^[16]
• "Appraising the Social Security Program" (1939, editor)^[17]
• "Legislators Define Childhood" (1940)^[18]

Gordon married Hugh Sevier Carter in 1925. They had daughters Eleanor and Janet.^[19] She died in 1988, at the age of 90, a few weeks before her husband's death. Her papers are in the America Folklife Center, Library of Congress.^[4] There is also a collection of her research materials in the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection at the Knoxville Public Library.^[20]