Mary Davidson was born Feburary 11th, 1926 in Saint Louis, Missouri. She attended Washington University and earned a Master’s Degree from there in 1949. In 1981 she earned a Ph.D from the University of Kansas.

Davidson married Jack Davidson in 1949, who went on to become the head of KU's Physics and Astronomy department. They had four sons and moved to Lawrence, Kansas in 1966, and Davidson began teaching as an instuctor and later lecturer at KU. She taught in both the English Department and briefly in Women's Studies.

Davdison also served as an assistant professor at Baker University from 1974-1976 and as an instructor for the Live-In English Program at Fujen University in Taiwan in the summer of 1969. She received a Kansas Committee for the Humanities grant to serve as humanist-in-residence at Independence (Kan.) Community College in 1983-1984 in order to organize a national conference on the Kansas-born playwright William Inge (1913-1973). She held a position as administrative assistant in the English Department at KU in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and she was assistant director of the core curriculum at Baker in 1975-1976.

Courses Davidson taught included focuses in theatre (including Shakespeare), women in literature, biography and autobiography, as well as writing composition and technical writing, among other courses.

Davidson retired in 1996, and became politically active. She worked with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and was nominated as a Democratic National Convention (DNC) delegate in 2000. Davidson died on May 26, 2014.

[Information retrieved from Mary Davdison's curriculum vitae and other materials in the collection.]