in the 1930s. As a woman, MacLean was largely excluded from conventional academic positions in her field. Unlike male students, she was not hired into the sociology department, even though she "far surpassed the productivity of her male peers". Her initial teaching posts after her graduate study were at Royal Victoria College in Montreal, where she taught from 1900 to 1901, and at Stetson University in Florida, where she taught sociology from 1901 to 1903. She taught correspondence courses in the University of Chicago's Home Study Department from 1903 to a few months before her death in 1934. In addition, she taught as a professor of sociology at Adelphi College from 1906 to 1916, and at the YWCA National Training School from 1903–1916. In the Home Study Department at the U of C, MacLean worked alongside other notable women sociologists, including Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge. She taught courses on subjects including rural life, social technology, and immigration. In the course of her career as a correspondence-school professor, she taught 799 students. Sociological and writing career MacLean was a highly sophisticated methodologist, using a pragmatic blend of methods to address the specific practical questions at hand. Her techniques included participant observation, social surveys, and social worlds. MacLean's research career reached its peak with a 1907-1908 study that she supervised under the auspices of the YWCA, using a staff of twenty-nine women sociologists surveying 400 companies employing a total of 135,000 women in more than twenty cities. The study led to her pathbreaking work on women's employment, Wage-Earning Women (1910). Later life and legacy In the 1920s, ill health forced MacLean to retire from non-correspondence teaching. She died on May 1, 1934, at her home in Pasadena, California. She had been living there with her sister Mildred since 1925. MacLean's use of participant observation, well ahead of the time that this technique became mainstream, has earned her the title of "mother of ethnography", However, the accuracy of this name has been disputed by scholars of her work, who note much earlier ethnographic work by Harriet Martineau. MacLean's biographer Mary Jo Deegan has identified her as a predecessor to later work in case study research, contemporary critical ethnography, and feminist ethnography. MacLean's dedicated work as a correspondence educator, a relatively new phenomenon at the time, has also attracted contemporary attention. Bibliography Books Wage-Earning Women (1910) Mary Ann's Malady (1916) Women Workers and