Fields
Modern American Social History
U.S. Working Class History
U.S. Women and Gender
Teaching
U.S. History 1865–Present
U.S. Women and Gender, 1600–1800; 1800–Present
Gender Relations in the United States, 1950–2000
Graduate Course on Modern U.S. Social History
Graduate Course on Teaching
Education & Training
- PhD, Brown University, 1977
Representative Publications
Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century, coedited with Margo Anderson, University of Pittsburgh Press (1996)
Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States (Greenwood, 1980, Cornell University Press, pb., 1990)
“Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989), 118–149
“Women and Class in Pittsburgh, 1850–1920” in City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh, ed. Samuel P. Hays, University of Pittsburgh Press (1989)
Research Interests
“Advertising, Feminism, and the Demographic Revolution in Women’s Lives, 1865–1995”: In its broadest sense, my study concerns women and U.S. corporate power during a 30-year period of tumultuous change in American society—how women advance in corporations, influence corporate behavior, and fare as business entrepreneurs. More particularly, the advertising industry is my laboratory to examine the history of (1) women’s experiences as professionals within large corporations; (2) feminist activism inside and outside the industry; (3) marketing to women consumers; (4) the rise of women-owned agencies. This study utilizes scholarship from history, sociology, political science, and women’s studies.