Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial grouping of elite current and former women's colleges in the northeastern United States. Wellesley's endowment of $3.226 billion is the largest out of all women's colleges and the 49th largest among all colleges and universities in the United States in 2019. Wellesley is frequently considered to be one of the best liberal arts colleges in the United States. The college is currently ranked #5 on the National Liberal Arts College list produced by U.S. News & World Report.
Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
The life course approach, also known as the life course perspective or life course theory, refers to an approach developed in the 1960s for analyzing people's lives within structural, social, and cultural contexts. The origins of this approach can be traced back to pioneering studies of the 1920s such as William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America and Karl Mannheim's essay on the "Problem of Generations".
Claudia Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist who is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy Study Group and was the director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. Goldin's research covers a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Her recently completed book Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity was released on October 5, 2021.
Barrie Thorne is a professor of sociology and of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Catherine Hakim is a British sociologist who specialises in women's employment and women's issues. She is known for developing the preference theory, for her work on erotic capital and more recently for a sex-deficit theory. She is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society (Civitas), and has formerly worked in British central government and been a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Policy Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin.
Preference theory is a multidisciplinary theory developed by Catherine Hakim. It seeks both to explain and predict women's choices regarding investment in productive or reproductive work.
Jessie Shirley Bernard was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award. Jessie Bernard was a prolific writer, having published 15 sole-authored books, 9 co-authored books, over 75 journal articles, and over 40 book chapters. The final chapter of her book American Community Behavior is heavily based on Raphael Lemkin's work and is considered one of the earliest sociological studies of genocide.
Alice S. Rossi was a pioneering American feminist and sociologist.
Judith Lorber is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.
Rosalind C. Barnett, Ph.D. is a research psychologist, author, and public speaker. She has been invited to lecture at venues in the U.S. and abroad and has hosted the annual Ann Richards Roundtable on Gender and the Media at Brandeis University. Barnett has been identified as one of the top 25 work-family researchers in the world.
Barbara Risman is Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ann Hunter Popkin is a long-time social justice and women's movement activist. As a northern college student she traveled to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer in 1964. She was a founding member of Bread and Roses, a women's liberation organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1969, and produced the first scholarly study of its appeal and impact. A photographer, film-maker, teacher, and counselor, Popkin has worked in a variety of university and community settings.
Thelma Gorfinkle Alper was an American clinical psychologist, known for creating a study measure for women's achievement motivation. She was also the first Jewish woman to receive a Ph.D from Harvard, having careers at multiple institutions as she conducted studies primarily on memory of tasks, with an interest in its relation to women.
Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology.
Anne Pitts Carter is an American educator and economist, specializing in technical change and technology transfer.
Janet Lever is an American sociologist and professor emerita of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. She is recognized for her research on sex, intimate relationships, gender, and sport.
Mary Roberts Coolidge, also known as Mary Roberts Smith, was an American sociologist and author. She was an instructor at Wellesley College before joining the faculty of Stanford University, where she became the first full-time American professor of sociology. She later founded the sociology department of Mills College.
Gaye Tuchman is an American sociologist. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Tuchman is best known for her 1978 book, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, about the sociology of news production. She is a past president of the Eastern Sociological Society.
