Sally Fox; Studied history of women via images
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: BY MICHAEL NAUGHTON, BOSTON GLOBE
Sally (Cherniavsky) Fox would do anything for her research,
even if it meant haggling with street vendors in France.
"Haggling and bargaining for these images was always a lot
of fun for her, and she would remember the details of how
she acquired them what the people were wearing, what it
smelled like, and what the weather was," said Kathryn
Allamong Jacob, curator of manuscripts at the Schlesinger
Library at Harvard University.
Mrs. Fox, a researcher who dedicated her life to teaching
the history of women through visual images, died Saturday of
complications from lung cancer at Mount Auburn Hospital in
Cambridge. She was 76.
Born in Hollywood, Calif., Mrs. Fox grew up in New York City
and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and
Performing Arts. She earned her bachelor's degree in
painting and art history from Queens College in 1950 and
lived in New York City before moving to Cambridge in 1962.
She lived in Brookline from 1975 until 1993, when she moved
back to Cambridge.
Mrs. Fox's passion for images and photography started soon
after her graduation, when she began working as an assistant
to the publicity director and librarian for the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. She remained there four years,
eventually working at the Archive of American Art and later
at Houghton Mifflin Co. She worked as a freelance
photographer for Houghton Mifflin starting in the early
1970s and became coordinator of picture research and picture
editor, said her son Jonathan of Santa Cruz, Calif., and
Washington, D.C.
In 1985 she researched and edited one of her best-selling
books, "The Medieval Woman: An Illuminated Book of Days,"
which has been translated into eight languages and sold more
than 300,000 copies.
"I am driven to try to document what women are really doing,
so they won't be taken for granted," Fox said in a 1990
interview with the Globe.
She researched and edited other books, including "The
Victorian Woman: A Book of Days" and "The Sporting Woman: A
Book of Days," which she transformed into a traveling
exhibit called "The Sporting Woman: InSights from her past."
The exhibit visited more than 37 college campuses, including
Boston University, Brandeis University, and Northeastern
University, and is on tour with the Women's Sports
Foundation in New York.
"The idea is to show women have participated in sports
throughout history," she said in a separate 1990 interview
with the Globe. "You don't read about it. History is written
by men. So I concluded it can be documented only by
pictures."
In 1987, Mrs. Fox was awarded the Ann Novotny Award for
Original Picture Research from the American Society of
Picture Professionals for her efforts to gain professional
recognition for the field of picture research.
"She was a pioneer," Jacob said. "She had a wonderful eye
for reading photos, and reading photos with a feminist eye."
Traveling around the world, Mrs. Fox amassed a collection of
countless images, and in 2005 donated "hundreds and
hundreds" of images to the Schlesinger Library. A sampling
of Fox's donated collection will be displayed at the library
in October, Jacob said.
In addition to her son Jonathan, she leaves her husband of
more than 50 years, Maurice; two other sons, Gregory of
Lexington, Ky., and Michael of Cambridge; three grandsons;
and one granddaughter.
Services have been held.