- Date Of Birth: August 19, 1933
- Date Of Death: October 1, 2018
- State: Connecticut
Ruth MacKenzie Barnes Moynihan, grandmother of 19, mother of 7, wife of Bill, passed away at her home in Storrs CT, surrounded by her family at sunset on October 1, 2018, after a valiant struggle with ALS. Ruth was born on August 19, 1933, in Wallingford CT to Helen MacKenzie and Russell Barnes. From an early age she was an academic superstar. As valedictorian at the MacDuffie School, she won a full scholarship to Smith College. In her freshman year at Smith she beat out her friend Sylvia Plath to win the College’s annual writing prize. Always a passionate romantic, in her sophomore year she fell in love with, and married, the brilliant and handsome Marine, William Trumbull Moynihan. As a result, however, she was forced to give up her scholarship and leave Smith. While heartbroken by her ejection from school, she immediately redirected her energy to other pursuits. She supported Bill’s work to get his Ph.D. in English, wrote articles for a variety of journals, and gave birth to 6 children by the time she was 31. Never one to allow the constraints of everyday life to limit her, she felt she could do more to make the world a better place. She researched, and then sought out, a child in great need of a home, and adopted him in 1967 to complete the family. After the older children were able to fend for themselves a little, Ruth went back to college herself. She completed undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut in 1973 and then earned a Danforth Fellowship to Yale University, where she completed a Ph.D. in American History in 1979. She was fascinated by the women, mostly unknown, in American history, from her own ancestors in New England to the women who were essential in settling the West. Her dissertation, later published as the book Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway, profiled the suffragist of the Gilded Age who wrote the amendment to Oregon’s constitution to give women the right to vote.
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