Anne Coffin Hanson, Art History

Anne Coffin Hanson was an art historian renowned for her research on the works of Edouard Manet and twentieth-century Italian art movement, Futurism. She was the first woman to be hired at Yale with the rank of full professor, and in 1978 she was named the John Hay Whitney Professor of the History of Art. She was a member of the Department of the History of Art from 1970 until her retirement in 1992 and, from 1974-1978, served as the first female Chair of any department at Yale.

Hanson was an avid advocate of women’s rights and fought for gender equity at Yale from the first year she taught at the University. In 1971, Hanson became one of the plaintiffs in a suit against the eating club Mory’s, which at the time only admitted women for dinner service. As a result, female faculty were often excluded from informal department lunches and meetings, and female students at Yale (who began to be admitted in 1969) missed out on what was then an integral part of a Yale undergraduate experience. Support for the admission of women to Mory’s grew over time, and in 1972 the club’s liquor license renewal was denied based on this exclusion. Finally, in 1974, Mory’s changed its policies so that women could enter at any time of day. Although Hanson and the other female signatories on this petition were undoubtedly the relevant party in this effort, a New York Times article written at the time (1971), entitled Will the Words Go: ‘To the Women Down at Mory’s’?, described it in the following way (emphasis added): “Signatories [to the petition] included Louis Pollak, former dean of the Yale Law School; John Perry Miller, director of the university’s Institute of Social Science, and five women as well.”

Notable works of Anne Coffin Hanson:

  • Hanson, Anne Coffin. Manet and the modern tradition. Yale University Press, 1977.
  • Severini futurista, 1912-1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1995.
  • Hanson, Anne Coffin. Édouard Manet, 1832-1883: Exhibition Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 3-December 11, 1966; the Art Institute of Chicago, January 13-February 19, 1967. Falcon Press, 1966.
  • Hanson, Anne Coffin. Jacopo Della Quercia’s Fonte Gaia. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965. XIV, 123 S., 30 Bl. Abb. 4°. Vol. 3. Oxford, Clarendon P, 1965.

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Profile by Sarah Babinski, PhD candidate in Linguistics