Sonya Michel is an American historian. She is Professor Emerita at the Department History, University of Maryland. She has also taught at Brandeis University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Michel served as Director of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. [1]
Sonya Michel earned her Ph.D. in American civilization from Brown University. [2] Her research interests include care work and old-age security, child care, immigration and civil society, race and gender issues, as well as work-family balance. [2] Sonya Michel was a founding editor of the academic journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society . Reflecting on the wide-ranging influence of Michel's career in 2015, the feminist scholar Eileen Boris writes that:
Sonya Michel's appearances on C-SPAN have included topics such as "Women and Labor Rights" and "Retirement and Social Security". [4]
Since retiring from the University of Maryland in 2016, Michel has become a working artist, specializing in mixed-media collage and assemblage works composed primarily of recycled and found materials. She was a member of the Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC from 2021–23 and has exhibited frequently in juried exhibits at the Maryland Federation for the Arts Circle Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland. In the spring of 2024, she is co-curating the exhibit Paeans to Paper at the Sandy Spring Museum in Olney, Maryland.
Sonya Michel is married to Jeffrey Herf, who is also an American historian and professor at the University of Maryland. [5]
Social welfare, assistance for the ill or otherwise disabled and the old, has long been provided in Japan by both the government and private companies. Beginning in the 1920s, the Japanese government enacted a series of welfare programs, based mainly on European models, to provide medical care and financial support. During the post-war period, a comprehensive system of social security was gradually established. Universal health insurance and a pension system were established in 1960.
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was an American activist, Progressive Era social reformer, social scientist and innovator in higher education. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science and economics then the J.D. at the University of Chicago, and she was the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent her as a delegate to the 7th Pan-American Conference in Uruguay, making her the first woman to represent the U.S. government at an international conference. She led the process of creating the academic professional discipline and degree for social work. During her life she had relationships with Marion Talbot and Edith Abbott.
Paula Hyman was an American social historian who served as the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University.
Jeffrey C. Herf is an American historian of modern Europe, particularly modern Germany. He is Distinguished University Professor, of modern European history, Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust is a 2006 book by University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf, in which the author postulates that the Nazi government maintained its hold on the German people by controlling the press and claiming that Germans were already being attacked by an international Jewish conspiracy. Herf offers in the book a thorough study of the propaganda material disseminated by the National Socialist regime.
Dorothy E. Roberts is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.
Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Sylvia A. Law is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine and Psychiatry and the co-director of the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program at New York University School of Law.
Maternalism is the public expression of domestic values associated with motherhood. It centers on the language of motherhood to justify women's political activities, actions and validate state or public policies. Maternalism is an extension of "empowered motherhood." It defines itself as the extension of feminine moral values of nurturance and care and the home's social caring into a larger community. Under maternalism, the mother-child relationship is essential for maintaining a healthy society. All women are seen united and defined by their ability and shared responsibility to mother all children. Using the foundations of motherhood, mothers within maternalism provide a service to the state or nation by raising "citizen-workers." 20th and 21st-century scholars have shed light on women activists in the context of maternalist politics focused on policies designed to benefit women and children, such as maternal and child health care programs, mother pensions like the ADC program and other various welfare programs. Some scholars consider maternalism to be part of feminist movements and ideologies. On the other hand, others consider it to be different from feminism due to some maternalists incorporating a shared characteristic that the male figure in the household should be the economic provider and that a woman's central role is as a mother.
Bernd Marin is an Austrian social scientist.
Work–family balance in the United States differs significantly for families of different social class. This differs from work–life balance: while work–life balance may refer to the health and living issues that arise from work, work–family balance refers specifically to how work and families intersect and influence each other.
Karen Hagemann is a German-American historian. She holds the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on Modern German, European and Transatlantic history, the history of military and war and women’s and gender history.
Sandra Lynn Morgen was an American feminist anthropologist. At the end of her career, she was a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon, and previously served as vice provost for graduate studies and associate dean of the Graduate School, and director of the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society.
Carolyn Sargent is an American medical anthropologist who is Professor Emerita of Sociocultural Anthropology and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Sargent was the director of women's studies at Southern Methodist University from 2000-2008. Sargent served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology for 2008-2010 and 2011-2012.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Andrew Billingsley is an American sociologist, author, lecturer, and college professor who served as the eighth president of Morgan State University from 1975 to 1984.
Laura Briggs is a feminist critic and historian of reproductive politics and US empire. She works on transnational and transracial adoption and the relationship between race, sex, gender, and US imperialism. Her 2012 book Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption won the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for best book on the history of US race relations and has been featured on numerous college syllabi in the US and Canada. Briggs serves as professor and chair of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Dána-Ain Davis is a professor of urban studies at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society.
The term care drain, coined in 2002 by the feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild, refers to the migration of women working in caregiving roles and the impact on the families and nations they leave behind when seeking employment in countries with stronger economies. It criticizes how the term "brain drain" often overlooks these women while discussing human capital flight, which typically focuses on professionals leaving their home countries. Conversely, "care gain" refers to the benefits for women migrant workers, their families, and the receiving nations.
Premilla Nadasen is an American activist and historian, who specialises in the histories of women of colour in the welfare rights movement. She was President of the National Women's Studies Association from 2018 to 2020. She is the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005) and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2016).