Janet Zollinger Giele
Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women's Studies Heller School for Social Policy and Management
email: giele1@brandeis.edu
|
Focus of Research Women's Changing Roles, Sociology of the Life Course, Family Policy, Social Movements. Education B.A. Earlham College Ph.D., Harvard University |
Professor Giele retired from the Brandeis faculty in 2004. Although she no longer teaches regularly scheduled courses, she continues to serve on doctoral committees and is available for informal advising and occasional lectures related to her interests and expertise.
One of the first of her generation of sociologists to analyze the changing roles of women, Janet Giele began her research with her 1961 Harvard dissertation that eventually became Two Paths to Women's Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (Twayne, 1995). In the early 1970s, Giele's work on women's roles branched into public policy with a project for the Ford Foundation that resulted in Women and the Future (Free Press, 1978) and Women's Roles in Eight Countries (Wiley, 1977). A 1975 study for the National Science Foundation on the growth of family policy led her to a faculty position at the Heller School where she founded and directed the Family and Children's Policy Center from 1990-96.
The main theme in Giele's work is the vast innovation that has occurred in women's lives with enormous consequences for families, children, society and women themselves. A central question is how this change occurred. In her 1982 study of 3000 college alumnae, funded by the Lilly Endowment, she discovered a massive shift in the cohorts born in the 1930s and 1940s. During her 1992-93 sabbatical year in Berlin with a grant from the German Marshall Fund she discovered a similar shift in East and West German women's lives that occurred at roughly the same time. Work on these questions is part of the growing new field of life course studies described in her book co-edited with Glen Elder, Methods of Life Course Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Sage, 1998).
Giele received her B.A. from Earlham College, where she graduated first in her class. She is the recipient of many honors and awards including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, honorary election to Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe, a Ford Faculty Fellowship, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Earlham College, and a Resident Fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Professor Giele also received the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal in 2000 for her "groundbraking scholarship... illuminating our understanding of the complexity of women's roles in contemporary society."
Having served as a chair or member of over fifty doctoral dissertation committees, Professor Giele is currently at work on a guide to writing and the research process that is intended for students and authors who are undertaking a thesis, dissertation or book.
Recent Publications
Women's Equality in the Workplace: A Reference Handbook. with Leslie Stebbins. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO. 2003.
Changing Life Patterns in Western Industrial Societies. Co-edited with Elke Holst. Vol. 8 of Advances in Life Course Research. New York: Elsevier Science. 2004.