baldwin has been held up as an example of the key issues in the intellectual life of women in the early twentieth century. upon her retirement, she ordered that her papers and notes be sealed for twenty years. upon their unveiling, it was revealed that baldwin had struggled bitterly with her role as a female educator and on the education of women in general. she had found little documentation of interest in her research in the lives of women in colonial times, and left unfinished many papers and treatises in which she expressed the disdain she uncovered for the education of women in america.