Susan Armitage

Susan Armitage is an American historian. She is an authority on women in the American West, and was one of the first scholars to consider the role of women in the American West.

Biography

In 1959 Susan Armitage earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Wellesley College, in 1965 she earned a master's degree in American history from San Jose State College, and in 1968 she earned a PhD from the University of London.

Armitage was a visiting assistant history professor at the University of Colorado from 1973 to 1978, and directed the Boulder Women's Oral History Project while there. In 1978 she became Washington State University's first director of women's studies and also became an assistant history professor there. She also directed the WSU American Studies program, and developed and taught the first two undergraduate U.S. women's history courses at WSU. In 1991 she was recruited by the founder of the Women of the West Museum in Colorado, and she worked with the museum until 1997. From February to June 1995 she was the Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History at Moscow State University. As well, from that year until 2003 she edited Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.

In 1984 she was a Mellon Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, and in 1990 she was a Hilliard Scholar at the University of Nevada at Reno. In 2003-2004, she was a Senior Fellow at the Beinecke Library and also the Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University. In 2003 she was invited to the White House due to her work. In 2008 she was declared Washington State University Woman of the Year.

In 2008 she donated a collection of her papers to the Washington State University Libraries.

Selected works

• Out of Many, Volume 1: A History of the American People, co-written with John Mack Faragher, Mari Jo Buhle, and Daniel Czitrom - Prentice Hall, 2005.
• Shaping the Public Good: Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest - Oregon State University Press, 2015.
• Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865-Present, co-edited with Laurie Mercier - Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• The Women's West, co-edited with Elizabeth Jameson - University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
• Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West, co-edited with Elizabeth Jameson (authors: Marian Perales, Ramona Ford, Peggy Pascoe, Yolanda Chavez Leyva , James F. Brooks, Albert L. Hurtado, Darlis A. Miller, and Genaro Padilla) - University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.