Mary Roberts Coolidge, also known as Mary Roberts Smith, was an American sociologist and author. She was an instructor at Wellesley College before joining the faculty of Stanford University, where she became the first full-time American professor of sociology. She later founded the sociology department of Mills College.
Mary Roberts taught at public and private schools from 1880 until 1886, then was an instructor with the Department of History at Wellesley College until 1890. During her last two years at Wellesley, she served as secretary for the Board of Examiners. On August 28, 1890, she was married to Albert W. Smith, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell. In 1891, he was professor of machine design at the University of Wisconsin, while she, along with former student Clelia Duel Mosher, continued research on the sexual practices of college women. The couple moved to Stanford University, where Mary earned her Ph.D. in 1896. The same year she was named assistant professor and later associate professor at Stanford, becoming the first full-time American professor of sociology. The strain of a dual career family proved too much for the couple, and they were divorced in 1904. This painful event led to a mental breakdown and she had a brief stay at a sanitorium. The following year she tried to return to Stanford, but the University wouldn't rehire her. Instead, Roberts became a research assistant at the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. until 1907. Starting in 1905, she was a worker for the San Francisco Settlement Association's South Park Settlement – a center of social welfare work for the city. However, this building was destroyed by the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. It was a few months later in 1906 that she married a former student of hers, Dane Coolidge, a naturalist who would author a series of Western novels. The two would spend time on horseback trips together through the southwest, and she contributed her sociology training to his works. In 1909 she joined the Russell Sage Foundation, and had her work Chinese Immigration published, which was considered by some a "remarkable book for its time", coming as it did when the Chinese Exclusion Act was in full force. During 1910–1912, she served as president of the Settlement Council. Her work Why Women are so, a sociological study of whether attitudes toward middle-class women had shaped their behavior, was published in 1912. For many years following her breakdown that significantly reduced her eminence in the field, Roberts was unable to gain employment in an academic position. This changed in 1918 when she was hired as professor at Mills College, where she established the department of sociology and served as its first chair. Finally, she retired in 1926 as professor emeritus. Afterward, she co-authored The Rain-makers: Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, The Navajo Indians, and The Last of the Seris with her husband.
