Anne Firor Scott, a scholar who brought a new prominence to women’s history and taught generations of Duke University students how to study and appreciate it, died on Feb. 5 at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 97.

Her family confirmed her death.

In her books and in her classroom, Professor Scott underscored the contributions that women, especially Southern women, have made to history, individually and through organizations, an area that had been underreported or ignored in the male-dominated field of historical scholarship.

Her 1970 book, “The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930,” challenged the portrait of Southern women as prettily dressed, tea-sipping spectators to the cataclysmic events of the century of the title.

“Far from fitting the conventional image,” the historian Gerda Lerner wrote in a 1971 review in the Journal of American History, “the Southern lady emerges from the pages of this book as a resourceful, strong and resilient woman living in a society which severely restricted her options and opportunities.”