Sally Fox
Driven to document the real lives of women often ignored by male writers and historians, Sally Fox used photographs, paintings, and political cartoons to reveal the history of women at work and at play. Fox earned a BA in art history from Queens College in New York in 1950 and worked for four years for the publicity department of the Museum of Modern Art. After a brief stint with the Archives of American Art, she joined Houghton Mifflin first as a freelance photographer and then picture researcher and editor. In her fifteen years there she earned praise and respect throughout the art history field for her interpretation of images and her eye for detail. In 1985 she published The Medieval Woman, a collection of manuscript illuminations and wood cuts that revealed women participating in a startling variety of activities, defying long-held preconceptions about women’s work and interests. She followed this with The Victorian Woman in 1987 and The Sporting Woman in 1989, which included pictures of Victorian-era cyclists, boxers, and mountaineers.