Edith Gelles is a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford where she has also taught since 1983. As a historian of early America and women's history, she has written biographies of Abigail Adams and, most recently edited the Library of America's Letters of Abigail Adams. Her previous books include a prize-winner from the American Historical Association and a finalist for the prestigious George Washington Prize. Educated at Cornell, Yale and the University of California, Irvine, she grew up in Lake Placid, New York.

Gelles has published numerous articles and reviews that have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Early American Studies, White House History, the American Quarterly, the Journal of Early American History, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and has appeared on several TV documentaries about the Adamses and her work.

She has two sons, Adam, professor of computer science at Princeton and Noah, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and four grandchildren. She lives in Palo Alto with her husband Michael Weiss and poodle, Teddy. She swims with Rinconada Masters Team where her competitive event for a decade, but no longer, was the 1650 yard butterfly.