Mary Maples Dunn

Mary Maples was born on April 6, 1931, in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. Her father, Frederic, owned a clothing store before joining the Army during World War II; he remained in the Army after the war and gave his family a peripatetic life as he was assigned from base to base. Her mother, Eva Moore Maples, was a homemaker. Mary Maples received her bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., in 1954. She earned her master’s, in 1956, and her doctorate, in 1959 — both in colonial American history — from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, another of the Seven Sisters (the other five being Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Vassar and Wellesley). She began teaching at Bryn Mawr while working on her doctorate, then stayed on as a professor and historian who specialized in colonial America as well as the history of women. She became dean of the undergraduate college there in 1978 and academic deputy to the president in 1981. In 1960 she married Richard S. Dunn, a scholar of American colonial history long associated with the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to him and her daughter Cecilia, she is survived by another daughter, Rebecca Dunn; a brother, Fred; and three grandchildren. She became Smith’s eighth president in 1985. In 1999, she was interim dean at Radcliffe College in Cambridge when it merged with Harvard University, its brother school, which had begun admitting women in the 1970s. After leaving Smith, Ms. Dunn was for five years director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at what was then Radcliffe College. She and her husband were co-executive officers of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia from 2002 until they retired in 2007.