Mary Sumner Benson

Benson was born in New York City and raised in California, the daughter of Eugene Huntington Benson and Helen Thais Sumner Benson.^[1] Her father was an Episcopal priest. Her grandfather was Charles Burt Sumner,^[2] and her brother George C. S. Benson was the first president of Claremont McKenna College.^[3] She graduated from Pomona College in 1923, and earned her master's degree from Columbia University in 1930. She completed doctoral studies at Columbia in 1935. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.^[4]

Benson's 1935 book based on her dissertation, Women in Eighteenth-Century America, was described by the Times of London as "a solid and documented work that happily escapes dullness."^[5] She taught at Lindenwood College in the 1930s,^[6][7] and at Milwaukee-Downer College in the 1940s.^[8] She was a professor at Mount Holyoke College from 1952 to 1968, and was chair of the history department there from 1958 to 1964. She was a delegate to the International Federation of University Women meetings in the United States,^[9] England, France, Finland, Australia, and Mexico.^[4]

• Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (1935)^[10][11]

In addition to her 1935 book, Benson wrote book reviews for the Mississippi Valley Historical Review,^[8][12] and for Far Eastern Quarterly and its successor, The Journal of Asian Studies.^[13] Her 1935 book was reissued in 1966.^[14]

Benson traveled with her longtime colleague Meribeth E. Cameron to Greece in 1964.^[15][16] She died in 1988, at the age of 85, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.^[4] Her papers are in the Mount Holyoke College Archives.^[17]