ANN DEXTER GORDON – 1944-2025 
by Barry V. Qualls
Ann Dexter Gordon, a distinguished historian of women’s history and editor of the six-volume edition of the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, died on March 19, 2025, of a heart attack at her home in New Brunswick, NJ. She was 80.
A research professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, Ann Gordon was widely recognized for her pioneering work on women’s suffrage and the debates around it. She was also the chief editor of African American Women and the Vote 1837-1965 (1997), which charted the tensions over race in the suffrage movement and showed how African American women’s struggle for suffrage pre-dated and indeed encouraged the struggles of white women. She gave numerous talks throughout the nation on women’s history and the suffrage movement. In 2012, she won the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Association’s Silent Sentinel Award for her work on voting equality. Professor Gordon worked with the American Association for State and Local History on preserving historical records at the state and local level. She was a strong spokesperson for documentary editing. She served as Director of the Historical Documents Study, a project of the American Council of Learned Societies in cooperation with the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. In 2009-10, she served as chair of the Butterfield Award Committee of the Association for Documentary Editing. Equally important to her was her leadership activity in anti- Vietnam war demonstrations and her lifelong championing of labor issues at universities, especially those involving teaching assistants and non-tenure track faculty.
Ann Gordon was born on May 24, 1944, in Providence, Rhode Island, one of four children of Patricia Gordon (nee Jencks) and Edward Joseph Gordon, both teachers, her father at Yale and her mother at various high schools in Connecticut and Philadelphia. She attended the Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and graduated from the North Haven (Connecticut) High School in 1962. She earned a BA in History from Smith College in 1966 (her mother had also graduated from Smith) and MA and PhD degrees in American History from the University of Wisconsin in 1975. Stanley Katz served as her mentor. In Madison she first began studying women’s history, working closely with Ellen DuBois and Mari Jo Buhle, who also became distinguished scholars of American women’s history. While a graduate student, she was an active member of the Students for a Democratic Society (a group she first joined at Smith) and co-edited Madison’s first “underground” newspaper, Connections, as well as writing for the Radical America magazine.
In summer 1976 she served as an intern at the Institute for the editing of Historical Document. The position determined her career path. Joining the Department of Education at Northwestern University in 1971 as an Assistant Professor, she moved to the Jane Addams Papers as Associate Editor in 1975, then to the Woodrow Wilson Papers as Assistant Editor in 1977. During this period she held positions as a Lecturer in History and in Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and then as an adjunct assistant professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she began working as co-editor with Patricia Holland on creating the microfilm edition of all the known Stanton-Anthony papers. In 1979 she married James Marketti, a union organizer that she had met in Madison when she was organizing a Teaching Assistants strike. Their son Daniel Edward Marketti was born in 1982. They later divorced.
Professor Gordon relocated to New Brunswick when her husband became a union representative for the Rutgers AAUP, the faculty union. She brought the Stanton-Anthony papers to Rutgers and served as its editor through the publication of the sixth and final volume in 2013. During this period she became a research professor in the Rutgers History Department, where she taught historical editing and women’s history. She held this position until her retirement in 2012. She also was a leader in championing non-tenure track faculty. Beginning in 2007, she served as a member of the Rutgers President’s Non-Tenure Track Faculty Task Force. For the Rutgers chapter of the AAUP, she spoke vigorously about the need for better pay and better working conditions for these faculty. She continued this work after her retirement.
Professor Gordon was predeceased by her parents and her brothers Peter Lane Gordon and David Jewel Gordon. Her sister Sarah Herbert Gordon and her son Daniel Marketti and grandson Yuri survive.
Note: This obituary has been prepared using earlier obituaries written by Sarah H. Gordon and by Ellen DuBois for the American Historical Association. I am especially grateful to Daniel Marketti for his help.
Publications
The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Volume 5
Rutgers University Press, 2009
African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997