Ophelia Settle Egypt: Social science research, race and gender in the United States, 1930-1950

Dr Clare Corbould

Ophelia Settle Egypt (1903-1984) worked alongside the well-known African-American sociologists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier as they produced some of their best known and highly regarded work. While Johnson and Frazier remain celebrated figures, Egypt has been all but forgotten. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham recently put together a massive compendium of biographies of African American people, though they asked for someone to write an entry for Egypt, nobody did and she has not been included in the final product.

The primary outcome of this research will be an article on Egypt’s contribution to the development of sociological research in the 1930s and 1940s. Historians have paid attention to the role played by many African American men in the formation of the discipline of sociology, and to the relationship between social science research and political activism, especially the civil rights movement. Including a figure such as Ophelia Egypt might just transform this story in some way. The significance of this study, therefore, will lie in the deeper understanding we gain of the role gender played in the development of sociology and social research in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

The research for this project is supported by a University of Sydney Research and Development Grant.