Mary Kenner’s personal life, including her marriages, her friendships, and the daily texture of her existence, is less documented than her professional achievements.

This is itself a kind of historical silence — a reminder that the historical record is constructed from the fragments that survive, and that the fragments that survive from the lives of people who were not already famous tend to be the professional and public fragments rather than the personal ones.

Recognition: Coming Late But Coming

Mary Kenner lived long enough — she died in 2006, at the age of 93 — to see herself recognized as a pioneer.

The recognition came gradually, and it came from a specific direction: the movement to recover the histories of Black American inventors and women inventors that gained significant momentum in the 1980s and 1990s.