Baker was an instructor of history at Notre Dame of Maryland University from 1967 to 1969. She began her career at Goucher College as an instructor in 1969. She worked as an assistant professor at Goucher before becoming an associate professor of history. In 1979, she was made a full professor of history until 1982 when she became the Elizabeth Todd Professor of History. In 1979, she was an editor for the Maryland Historical Magazine, a publication of the Maryland Historical Society. As of 2018, Baker is a professor emerita at Goucher College and the Bennett-Hartwood Professor of History. She also taught courses at the Jessup Correctional Institution as part of the Goucher prison education program. Baker was a visiting professor at Harvard College. Baker is a member of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and Phi Beta Kappa. Her books have received positive reviews. Baker played an important role in advocating for increased recognition of the role of women in society. In her experience, women were frequently excluded from historical and academic narratives. The Women's Movement empowered Baker to explore these deficits. She wrote stories on suffragists including Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, and Frances Willard. The New York Times lauded Baker's work as "wider in scope than previous work and making use of sophisticated feminist historical and sociological scholarship." In anticipation of the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, Baker was featured in WYPR's Beyond the Ballot program that features "the contributions of extraordinary Maryland women."
Awards and honors
In 1976, Baker was elected an American Council of Learned Societies fellow. In 1979, she won a faculty teaching prize at Goucher College. She was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1982 and won the Berkshire Prize in History in 1983 for her book Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Baker won the Willie Lee Rose prize in Southern History in 1989. She was a 1991 Newberry Library fellow.
Personal life
Baker lives in Baltimore, Maryland. On September 12, 1953, she married Ralph Robinson Baker, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins University. They have four children, Susan Dixon, Robinson Scott, Robert Walker, Jean Harvey. Baker is a Democrat and an Episcopalian, and enjoys playing tennis and swimming. As a hobby, Baker reads mystery stories.
