Dorothy Ross, a pioneering historian of the origins of modern social science and the first woman chair of the history department at Johns Hopkins University, died at her home in Washington, D.C. on May 22, 2024. A summer resident of Wellfleet for 50 years, she was 87.
The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Irving Rabin and Ida Holland Rabin, Dorothy was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 13, 1936. Her father ran a dry goods business and sold real estate, and her mother was a secretary for a local utility company.
Dorothy embraced the intellectual stimulation of Smith College, which she attended on scholarship and graduated from in 1958. Soon after, she married Stanford G. Ross, an international tax lawyer who would become commissioner of the Social Security Administration in the Carter administration.
Dorothy earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959 and went on to study with the historian Richard Hofstadter (who had a house in Wellfleet), receiving her Ph.D. in 1965.
She was a fellow in history and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College from 1965 to 1967 before serving as special assistant to the American Historical Association’s newly formed Committee on Women Historians, overseeing efforts to reduce sex discrimination by creating a roster of qualified women historians to be sent to prospective employers.
Between those two appointments, Dorothy developed her dissertation into her first book, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet, published in 1972.
That same year she was appointed assistant professor at Princeton University and then moved on to the University of Virginia in 1978, where she was an associate and then a full professor until 1990.
Dorothy was appointed Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins in 1990. She thrived as a teacher who encouraged intellectual excellence in her students. “Dorothy was a smart, generous and very patient person,” Motoe Sasaki, now a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo, wrote in an online remembrance. “She was not the type of professor who just explained things to students. She let students find their own way to make sense of specific academic issues or problems. This always brought me to a new place.”
Students found that “her ferocious intellect was matched by an unstinting generosity,” wrote Francois Furstenberg in the Washington Post. The Society for U.S. Intellectual History established the annual Dorothy Ross Prize for the best academic article in U.S. intellectual history published by an emerging scholar.
Her major work, The Origins of American Social Science (1991), details the ways in which social science was modeled on both natural science and liberal politics. In it she argues that the field was informed by American exceptionalist ideology, tracing how changes in historical consciousness, political trends, and professional structures fused with the available conceptions of science to form a powerful field of inquiry.
“Dorothy’s work was authoritative, wide-ranging, and scrupulously fair, even as she revealed all the problems that emerged as the social sciences became increasingly ahistorical and individualistic,” said Johns Hopkins Professor Angus Burgin.
“She historicized,” wrote Louis Hyman, the inaugural Dorothy Ross Professor of Political Economy at the Agora Institute. “In a time when it was easy to slip into fashionable theories, her combination of close and wide reading created in Origins an enduring classic of American intellectual history.” She showed “just how American our intellectual history was.”
Always professionally active — as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and as editor of the Johns Hopkins University Press series “New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History,” among many other things — she remained so after she retired. In her mid-80s she published two important articles in Modern Intellectual History that explored liberals’ retreat from social democratic values, a subject that had engaged her in much of her work.
For all her professional accomplishments, Dorothy was a down-to-earth and loyal friend who was devoted to her family. Her modernist house on Chesquessett Neck Road in Wellfleet was the site of many lively dinners and celebrations, where she and Stan shared with guests the natural beauty of the seashore and spectacular sunsets.
Her daughter, Ellen, observed in the Washington Post: “She will be remembered fondly not only for her formidable intellect, but for her fierceness at croquet, hearts, tennis, and all board games; her terrible driving; and her chocolate chip snowman pancakes.” Her son, John, added: “I will always remember the courage, dignity, and generosity of spirit that my mother displayed while dying, and throughout her life, but most of all I will remember her unconditional love for all her children and grandchildren.”
Dorothy is survived by her children, John Ross and wife Choedron of Pagoda Springs, Colo. and Ellen Finn and husband Michael of Houston; grandchildren Emma Finn and Kayla Finn; and her brother Herb Rabin and wife Annie of Chevy Chase, Md.
Her husband, Stanford G. Ross, died in 2020 after 62 years of marriage.
Donations in Dorothy’s memory should be sent to charities devoted to girls’ education in developing countries: Campaign for Female Education at camfed.org and Lotus Outreach International at lotusoutreach.org.
