From a New York Times obit by Clay Risen headlined “Martha Saxton, Historian Who Explored Women’s Lives, Dies at 77”:

Martha Saxton, a historian whose penetrating examinations of women’s lives led her to new insights into figures ranging from the author Louisa May Alcott to the 1950s actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield to Mary Washington, the mother of the first president of the United States, died at her home in Norfolk, Conn.

First as a freelance writer and later as an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at Amherst College, Professor Saxton excavated women’s lives from under the morass of male privilege set down both at her subjects’ time and by historians over the intervening years.