Biography

Mary Drake McFeely is a photographer, writer, and former librarian. A native New Yorker, she has lived in Wellfleet, Massachusetts since 1997.

She is a graduate of Smith College (American Studies) with a Master’s degree in Library Science from Southern Connecticut State College. She has studied photography in workshops on Cape Cod with Ron Rosenstock, Misugi Forssen, David Halliday, Khristine Hopkins, and Marian Roth. She is a member of the 2002 Photography Atelier at Radcliffe.

Her work has been exhibited in an invitational show, “Eight Women Artists,” in 2000 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and in the May, 2002 Members' Juried Exhibit (Photographs) of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She is the photographer for a new brochure for the Wellfleet Conservation Trust. Her photographic subjects include corners of the spaces where people live, patterns in nature, and city scenes.

A writer in the field of women’s history, she is the author of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century (2000), Lady Inspectors: the Campaign for a Better Workplace 1893-1921 (1992), and Women’s Work in Britain and America from the Nineties to World War I: an Annotated Bibliography, and editor of the fifth Women’s Annual (1985).

She has been a Resident Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and a Fellow of the Council on Library Resources. She was Assistant Librarian and Head of the Reference Department of the Smith College Library from 1974 to l986.