Suzanne Hull, 84; Huntington Library Official Wrote About English Women

Suzanne W. Hull, a longtime director of public administration and education director at the Huntington Library and the first woman to head a division at the San Marino institution, has died. She was 84.

Hull, an authority on the reading habits of English women of the 16th and 17th centuries, died May 8 from complications of cancer at a son’s home in Park City, Utah, her family said.

While a director at the Huntington from 1972 until her retirement in 1986, Hull presided over the construction of a wing of administrative offices and a visitor’s pavilion that was completed in 1981.

Her work at the Huntington also extended to the scholarly.

In 1982, the library published her first book, “Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640.” Scouring texts for clues to what it was like to be a woman then, she found advice on how to make a poultice, keep skin white and bake live birds into a pie.

The book “was one of the most influential works in the field of women’s studies and is still used in college classrooms,” said Lisa Blackburn, a Huntington spokeswoman.

In “Women According to Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women” (1996), Hull expanded on her commentary from the first book in such chapters as “Misconceptions About Conception.”

Her writing was a way to “stitch together her feminist views and her love of England,” said her son, Jim Hull. “She was interested in the idea that women were already beginning to struggle against chauvinism at that time.”

Elizabeth Suzanne White was born Aug. 24, 1921, in Orange, N.J., the eldest of three children of Gordon and Lillian White.

Her father helped administer the so-called Hays Code, which strictly regulated the content of American motion pictures.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1943 from Swarthmore College, she married fellow student George Hull.

An amateur architect, Hull designed a home that was built around 1960 in Woodland Hills.

In 1967, she received a master’s in library science from USC and joined the Huntington two years later.

Hull moved to Los Angeles around 1950 and lived in Pasadena from 1969 until two years ago, when she relocated to Park City.

Her husband died in 1990.

In addition to her son Jim, of La Crescenta, Hull is survived by son George of Park City; daughter Anne Hull Sheldon of Mill Valley, Calif.; four grandchildren; a sister; and a brother.