Hilda L. Smith (1941 – October 24, 2023) was an American historian who specialized in the gender analysis of political theory and intellectual history. She was a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati.

Smith was born in 1941.^[1] She was an undergraduate at Missouri State University, trained as a high school teacher, and subsequently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1975.^[2] Her dissertation was titled Feminism in Seventeenth-century England.^[3]

Smith was a faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a humanities administrator.^[2] In 1987, she joined the University of Cincinnati.^[2] She specialized in the gender analysis of political theory and intellectual history and the "political, philosophical, and scientific writings of early modern women.^[2]

Smith died on October 24, 2023.^[1]

• Smith, Hilda L. (1982). Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-century English Feminists. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-00912-9.^[4]
• Smith, Hilda L., ed. (1998). Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58509-5.^[5]
• Smith, Hilda L.; Carroll, Berenice A., eds. (2000). Women's Political & Social Thought: An Anthology. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-33758-0.
• Smith, Hilda L. (2010). All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832. Penn State Press. ISBN 978-0-271-04604-4.
• Smith, Hilda L.; Zook, Melinda S., eds. (2018). Generations of Women Historians: Within and Beyond the Academy. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-77568-5.