Historian and Suffragist. Beard attended public schools in Indianapolis and graduated as valedictorian of her high school class. She enrolled at DePauw University in 1893, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta and president of her class. At DePauw she met and started a relationship with the man she would later marry, Charles Austin Beard. After graduating from DePauw in 1897, Mary went to work in a public school as a German teacher. She and Charles were wed in March 1900, and moved to New York City in 1902 where they enrolled as graduate students at Columbia University. Beard became involved in the suffrage movement through her activism in women’s labor organizations, and became a leader within the New York City Suffrage Party. She left the NYCSP in 1913 to join the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, where she became an executive member of its board and editor of its weekly magazine The Suffragist. Mary and Charles Beard published a number of books together, starting in 1914. In 1915 Mary published the first of six books that she would publish alone. Beard helped found the World Center for Women's Archives in 1935. As director of the Center, Beard worked to collect all manner of women's published and unpublished records, and to establish an educational institution that would aid in the writing of history and the education of women. She directed the Center for five years before resigning in 1940. Beard's next project was to work with a team of female scholars to write an analysis of Encyclopedia Britannica's representation of women. Despite their work, the recommendations of the report were ignored. Beard was disappointed with the effort and later suggested that women no longer write for the Britannica. Despite Beard's extensive work in acquiring the personal papers of women throughout the world, she, along with her husband, destroyed nearly all of their papers and manuscripts before their deaths.