Although the center closed in 1940, largely due to internal issues and lack of funding, her efforts encouraged several colleges and universities to begin collecting similar records on women's history.

[2] Due to weak eyesight, resulting from exposure during the war, Eli Ritter relied on his wife, Narcissa, to read to him during his legal studies.

[5][6] Around the age of sixteen, she enrolled in 1893 at DePauw University, the alma mater of her father and her other siblings, and became a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.

[citation needed] While attending college, Ritter met and began a relationship with Charles Austin Beard, a fellow student and her future husband.

After attending Spiceland Academy (a Quaker school in Henry County), Beard enrolled at DePauw University in 1894, and became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in 1898.

A month later, they moved to England, where they initially lived at Oxford, then relocated to Manchester while Charles continued his studies and worked as director of Ruskin Hall's extension department.

[8][7] In 1902, after deciding to return to the United States, the Beards settled in New York City, where they both enrolled as graduate students in the School of Political Science at Columbia University.

The Beards' son, William, was born in 1907, the same year they bought a sixteen-room home in New Milford, Connecticut, where they frequently entertained guests.

He resigned his professorship in 1917 as a protest, following the dismissal of three anti-war faculty members during World War I, but continued his career as a writer and historian.

[7][15][16] Beard came to believe that suffrage would give women a tool to elect political leaders who would, in turn, implement social justice reforms and governmental regulations to improve economic conditions and the lives of the working class.

[7] Shortly before her resignation from the National Woman's Party's Advisory Council, Beard lead a New York delegation to Washington, D.C., in November 1917 to show support for the women's suffrage activists (Silent Sentinels) who were picketing in front of the White House.

[20] From their home in Connecticut, Mary and Charles Beard co-authored seven books together, beginning with American Citizenship (1914), a high school textbook.

[24] Mary Beard's Woman's Work in Municipalities (1915), the first of six books that she wrote as a solo author, argued that women's social reform efforts could be considered political activities as well.

[27][28] To increase interest in research on women's history, Beard used multiple channels of communication, including pamphlets, radio shows, articles, speeches, and books.

[28] With the successful passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, Beard began to concentrate more on her writing and to further develop her philosophy concerning women in history, which frequently set her at odds with the feminist movement.

[35] To Beard, the traditional feminist view of women's oppression was not only inaccurate but unhelpful, and that striving for equality with men was an inadequate goal, especially in relation to education.

[33] In 1935, international peace activist and feminist Rosika Schwimmer suggested the idea to Beard of establishing the World Center for Women's Archives (WCWA), which held its first organizational meeting in New York City in October 1935.

[37] As director of the center for the next five years, Beard broadened the scope of the project beyond collecting the documents related to women in the peace movement.

She also planned to establish an institution for women's research, education, and political initiatives, as well as supporting efforts to aid in the writing of history.

Beard chose the center's motto, "No documents, no history," from a quote by French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges.

In addition, Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, Harriet Stanton Blatch, and other prominent women such as Alice Paul, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fannie Hurst, and Inez Haynes Irwin also offered their support.

Schwimmer resigned from the center's board of directors in 1936, but Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins endorsed the WCWA, which was officially launched in New York City on December 15, 1937.

The center initially gained publicity and support for its efforts to collect materials, preserve records, and generate interest in women's history.

However, as director of the center, Beard dealt with a multitude of competing interests, a result of long-standing differences within the women's movement, as well as insufficient funding and disagreements among its leadership.

[44] Beard convened a team of fellow female scholars (Dora Edinger, Janet A. Selig, and Marjorie White) to produce A Study of the Encyclopædia Britannica in Relation to its Treatment of Women.

Arguing that it was more than a moral question, the researchers proposed that abortion was also relevant to population, political, health, medical, and social issues.

[42] Before their deaths, she and her husband, whose pacifist stance proved controversial in the last decade of his life, destroyed nearly all of their personal correspondence and papers that they considered confidential.

[43] One of Mary Beard's indirect legacies was the development of women's history courses, which have become standard offerings on American college campuses.