Joanne Meyerowitz

Joanne Meyerowitz received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.  She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002), and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) and History and September 11th (2003).  Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2004, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati, and for five years she edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.  Meyerowitz has won fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council.  She is vice president of the Organization of American Historians and director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.

Her current project is a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s.   It begins with the decline of modernization programs and ends with the rise of microcredit, and it shows how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women.

Recent publications include:

• “The Liberal 1950s? Reinterpreting Postwar U.S. Sexual Culture,” in Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel, eds., Gender and the Long Postwar: Reconsiderations of the United States and the Two Germanys, 1945-1989 (Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2014), 297-319
• “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’:  Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” Journal of American History 96:4 (March 2010), 1057-1084
• “Transnational Sex and U.S. History,” American Historical Review 114:5 (December 2009), 1273-1286
• “A History of ‘Gender,’” American Historical Review 113:5 (December, 2008), 1346-1356

WGSS 201 Women in American 20th Century
WGSS 340 History of Feminist Thought
WGSS 712 Readings in the History of Sexuality
WGSS 744 Readings in the History of Gender
WGSS 750 Research in Gender and Sexuality