A Tribute to Betty Wood (February 23, 1945—September 3, 2021)

Betty Wood was singular. In every way. Betty was born during the final year of WWII while her father was away fighting in the Allied Forces, returning later to secure employment as a Railway Guard. Betty’s first years were spent at a farm cottage on Hunworth Green, Norfolk. The family drew their supply of water from a well because the cottage lacked indoor plumbing. From Hunworth, the Woods moved to Melton Constable in the mid-1950s, where Betty and her brother Phil attended primary and grammar school. Later, the family traveled again this time to Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire. Betty remained fiercely loyal to Norfolk and East Anglia despite the relocation to Lincolnshire. Yet she also succumbed to the allures of “The Iron,” aka, Scunthorpe United F.C., a lifetime passion. From the industrial environs of Scunthorpe, Betty migrated over 100 miles southwest to Keele University in Staffordshire, making the trek soon thereafter to London and its renowned School of Economics (LSE). At LSE, she joined student activists inspired by the radicalism of their peers at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the late 1960s, LSE students took over campus buildings, protested the war in Vietnam, and contested the class-based hierarchy ruling the academy. Betty was certainly in her element at LSE because egalitarianism, activism, and social justice remained cornerstone features of her academic writing and her civic engagement. 

In the early 1970s, Betty journeyed again, this time across the Atlantic, setting her sights on the seedbed of the American Revolution, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Exchanging London’s Beatrice Webb and the Fabians for Philly City’s Benjamin Franklin, Wood dived into her lifelong study of early American history amid the Romanesque and Gothic Revival buildings dotting the Penn campus. There, Betty meditated on the classed reading of American history, slavery and the South, and women and labor—topics remaining at the forefront of our historical enterprise with Professor Woods as philosophical pioneer.

Wood’s peripatetic trajectory halted in the Victorian red brick enclave of Girton College, where she began her professional career appropriately enough at the first Cambridge College for women founded in 1869. The move to Cambridge importantly returned Betty to her homeland of East Anglia. While her physical wanderings may have ended, her mental acuity accelerated and innovated. Creating a paradigm for the early American South that anticipated current models of historical thinking with their drive to cut through seemingly neat geographical and chronological boundaries, Betty connected the South to the broader cultural, social, and economic rhythms of the Caribbean and beyond. She used to quip: New Orleans is not an American city; it is a Caribbean one. Or, one of my favorites: The American Revolution started in Canada. Her prose style mirrored her personality: on point, austere, clear, sharp. She once told me that excessive adjectives presented an unnecessary burden to the reader, a distraction from the real business at hand, the hard lessons of history.

The list of Betty’s published work is vast. Some tomes and essays were co-written with her dear friend Professor Sylvia Frey (Tulane University), who died earlier this year. They are classics in the history profession, most especially Come Shouting to Zion (Georgia, 1998), which mined the complexities of the spiritual world of enslaved African Americans and the central role played by women in the formation of black Protestantism. For Betty, the real prize was the cohort of talented doctoral students she mentored and matriculated during her forty years at Cambridge University. Wood’s professional life as an historian took residence in James Stirling’s modernist History Faculty building, which was finished about the same time Betty entered the volatile campus of LSE. In Stirling’s modernist maze of glass and steel, Betty would greet everyone equally, from the students rushing to lecture to the women working in the tearoom to the colleagues slowly trudging to faculty meetings. Egalitarian in every way, not in a performative or perfunctory manner but in a spirit genuinely expressed and meted out consistently anywhere, anytime, to anyone.

The History Faculty also produced a space for Betty and fellow historian of the American South, Jesus College’s Michael O’Brien (d. 2015), who similarly had made pilgrimage to the U.S. and back, to strike up an enduring friendship centered on shared intellectual terrain, vexing faculty politics, and a mutual love of British football. Together, Betty, “Mike,” and Tricia O’Brien forged a lively trinity of camaraderie with roots extending from Cambridge to the Deep South. Feline companions similarly joined the festivities—Mim, Runt, Ruthie, and Mr. Gibson—for spirited football afternoons or long conversations about the “paranoid style” of American politics.  

For me, traveling with Betty was the treasure of a lifetime. Her tolerance for visiting medieval sites with this medieval historian, including Castle Acre Priory and Bury St Edmunds, was matched by her patience in dealing with an eclectic assortment of American academics who came into her orbit. She was a polestar to women historians working across the American South, a region where Betty had spent a great deal of scholarly time and friendly revelry, from Athens, Georgia, to New Orleans, Louisiana, the home of her academic partner-in-crime Sylvia, up again to Oxford, Mississippi, and even westward across the mighty Mississippi to Fayetteville, Arkansas, nestled in the ancient hills of the Ozark Mountains.

For us, Betty Wood will always be the quintessential historian, feminist, sage, compatriot, and friend. We miss her steady hand, quick wit, aversion to adjectives, and compassion. But, for me, she is forever sitting in her lovely back garden, which was designed by longtime friend Lorna McNeur. This garden, located at 103 Chesterton Road across from the River Cam, was the site of so many adventures with an incredible cast of characters spanning the globe and the diverse fields of Betty’s calling—history.

Lynda Coon

University of Arkansas