Expertise

Janet Giele is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Social Policy, and Women's Studies. Her specialties include family policy, changing roles of women, and aging and the life course.

Profile

Professor Giele came to the Heller school in 1976 and from 1990-1996 was the founding Director of the Family and Children's Policy Center that eventually became the Institute on Children, Youth, and Families. Giele was Acting Dean of the Heller School in 1993-94.

Her ten books and numerous articles illustrate three interlocking trends: the changing roles of men and women, increasing longevity and new life course patterns, and the evolving nature of family life. Before the resurgence of modern feminism in the late1960s, her 1961 doctoral dissertation (published in 1995 as Two Paths to Women's Equality) compared the temperance and suffrage branches of the 19th century women's movement and demonstrated the ways in which changes in women's lives led them to champion reforms not only in the public realm (suffrage) but also in the family (temperance). As a faculty member of Wellesley College in the 1960s, and later as a Bunting fellow and principal consultant to the Ford Foundation Task Force on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women (1972-1976), she examined the connections between changing gender roles, new forms of family life, and the need for more comprehensive social policies to support the four key functions of the family – caregiving, income provision, shelter, and transmission of citizenship – a synthesis that has just been published in her new book Family Policy and the American Safety Net (2012).

Between her earliest work on the women's movement and her most recent book on family policy, Professor Giele has explored the variations in women's roles across countries and within the United States in Women, Roles and Status in Eight Countries (1977), Women and the Future (1978), and Women and Work: the Continuing Struggle Worldwide (1993). In a number of articles and books she has also documented the changing life course patterns of women college graduates over the course of the 20th century and has edited or co-edited books on Women in the Middle Years (1982), Methods of Life Course Research (1998), and The Craft of Life Course Research (2009).

As a result of working with policy experts at the Heller School, Professor Giele has learned how to use sociological knowledge to advance social change. In her own town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, she has taken a leadership role in two civic projects: the first to establish Neighborhood Conservation Districts (NCDs) in order to conserve local architecture and neighborhoods; and the second to establish a virtual retirement community, Wellesley at Home, which is part of the larger village movement occurring throughout the country to create caring communities that help seniors to remain in their own homes as long as possible.

Dr. Giele's next project is a guidebook on how to undertake and complete a PhD dissertation. In 2009-2010 she led the dissertation workshop of the Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies based at MIT. Over the course of her Heller career she has served on approximately 50 doctoral dissertation committees.