Margaret T. Cussler

Cussler taught in Schuylersville,^[7] and was head of the English department at Arlington High School in the 1930s.^[5] In 1940, she pretended to be a teenager and enrolled in a high school to write about the students' point of view.^[10]

During World War II she worked for the National Research Council, studying foodways in the American South. As part of this work she and Mary L. De Give made a short film, You Can't Eat Tobacco (1942).^[11] The two women formed a production company, Social Documentary Films, and made two more films, Not By Books Alone (1945)^[12][13] and Hopi Horizons (1946).^[4]

Cussler taught sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1947 to 1951, and from 1954 into the 1970s.^[3] She became an assistant professor in 1956 and an associate professor in 1962. In 1959 she won a faculty fellowship to attend the Summer Institute for Social Gerontology.^[14] In the 1970s she sued the university for sex bias, unsuccessfully,^[15][16] when the school refused her full professor status, removed her from committees, paid her less than colleagues, and otherwise restricted her career.^[17][18] The State of Maryland, in turn, sued the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for encouraging Cussler's lawsuit and others.^[19][20]

Cussler died from cancer in 1987, at the age of 75. Her papers are in the collection of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard.^[21] Her older brother Henry was also a college professor.^[22]

• "The Educational Whirl" (1937, 1938)^[23][24]
• "Emotional Maturity for Teachers" (1939)^[25]
• "Alias Sweet 16: An English Teacher's Adventure" (1941)^[10]
• "The Innocent Eye" (1942, with Mary L. De Give)^[26]
• " The effect of human relations on food habits in the rural southeast" (1942, with Mary L. De Give)^[27]
• "Let's Look it in the Eye" (1942, with Mary L. De Give)
• "Foods and nutrition in our rural Southeast" (1942, with Mary L. De Give)
• "Outline of Studies on Food Habits in Rural Southeast" (1943, with Mary L. De Give)^[28]
• "Assignment for Tomorrow: Shall we Desert School for Some 'Easy Money'?" (1943)^[29]
• "Filmmaking as a Focus of Social Forces in an Indian Tribe" (1946)

• Not By A Long Shot: Adventures of a Documentary Film Producer (1951)^[30][31]
• ‘Twixt the Cup and the Lip (1952, with Mary L. De Give)^[32]
• The Woman Executive (1958)^[33]
• Dentists, Patients, and Auxiliaries (1968)^[21]

• You Can't Eat Tobacco (1942)^[4][34]
• Not By Books Alone (1945)^[12][35]
• Hopi Horizons (1946)^[4]