 For her dissertation and first book, "The Negro Woman's College Education" (published in 1956), Noble examined the lives of 1,000 African-American women graduates who had been out of college at least five years.An early nonfiction book written by an African-American woman about African-American women for a white audience, it was one of the first studies to consider gender in concert with race.Pioneering educator Esther Lloyd-Jones wrote the foreword to this ground-breaking, progressive work.