Linda Gordon papers

Pioneering women's historian Linda Gordon was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Helen Lee Appelman (b. 1912) and William Wolf Gordon (b. 1909). She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College (1961), and her M.A. and Ph.D degrees in history from Yale University in 1963 and 1970, respectively. She taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston from 1968 to 1984, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1984 to 2007, and has been at New York University since 1999. In 2001, she was the Eugene Lang Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College, and in 2004 she was the Lawrence Stone Visiting Professor at Princeton University. Gordon's research interests include twentieth-century U.S. social, political, and social policy history; women and gender; family; and U.S. Southwest. She has published numerous works on these topics. Her first book was America's working women: a documentary history, 1600 to the present, edited with Rosalyn Baxandall (1976). Her other books include Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America (1977); Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence (1988); Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994); Dear Sisters, edited with Rosalyn Baxandall (2000), a history of second wave feminism through essays and documents; two biographical works on the photographer Dorothea Lange; and The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and American Political Tradition (2017). Gordon has received many awards for her books. As a domestic violence expert, Gordon serves on the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women. She continues to teach and lecture widely.