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Part of this work was presented at the Three Societies Conference of the BSHS, HSS and CSHPS dedicated to Connecting Disciplines, Keble College, Oxford, 4-6 July 2008. I wish to thank Kevin Lambert for sharing his enthusiasm for Mary Everest Boole and this project, as well as for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. The anonymous reviewers also provided many helpful suggestions, and I am equally grateful for their contributions.
The influential member and sometime head of the respected Department of Education at the University of Chicago, Ralph Tyler, employed language imbued with historical significance when he declared his admiration for Mary Everest Boole. According to his mid-twentieth-century testimonial, 'her conceptions of child psychology and of learning, as well as her understanding of the psychological nature of mathematics and science, make her a pioneer in this generation as in the last'.1 This is high praise, to be sure. But it also strongly suggests that her reputation, while deserving of note, was at that time undervalued. If that were truly Tyler's concern then, it continues now. More than fifty years after this assessment, it is disheartening to find that this remarkably dedicated and formidably gifted woman remains an obscure figure in the modern history of science. Many will associate her with her husband, George Boole, the innovative mathematician and logician, yet few will be in a position to fully appreciate the scope of the mission she undertook in her half-century of widowhood. Her work may well have found its initial and continued inspiration in a desire to commemorate and contextualize George's genius as only she could. However, as Tyler's tribute clearly indicates, Mary eventually transcended her role as a biographer by undertaking forays into a variety of intellectual and professional domains.2
Contemporary scholarship has primarily recognized Mary's accomplishments by providing a sense of her contributions to educational discourse and practice in the early twentieth century. Some references, such as the one found in Geoffrey Howson's survey of mathematics education in Britain, simply note her efforts in passing. Others, such as Mary Creese's entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, justly give these greater prominence.3 Readers interested in more focused accounts of...