Mabel Agnes Elliott,We Hardly Knew You

Sociologist Mabel Agnes Elliott was elected the fourth president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1956–1957 and was the first woman to hold this position. She was an anti-war activist, a feminist and a creative and diligent writer. Yet she experienced many challenges. The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept an active file on Elliott for approximately 30 years, she was the victim of discrimination by her male colleagues at the University of Kansas where she spent much of her career and Professor Robert E. L. Faris used many of the ideas from her Social Disorganization textbook without attribution. In spite of her research productivity her salary was frozen for 18 years. Once she began teaching women at Chatham College she found an institution that appreciated her many talents and rewarded her appropriately. Even so, in a male-dominated discipline, her contributions to criminology and social disorganization have been nearly forgotten.