Bio

About Ellen Carol DuBois

Ellen Carol DuBois

Ellen Carol DuBois is one of the pioneers of  modern U.S. women’s history. In the 1970s, she helped to open up a field that has grown extraordinarily prolific and influential. Her particular interest is in women’s political history. She has demonstrated that the one subject that was dealt with by previous historians – the path of women to full citizenship – was wide open for reinterpretation and new research.

Her work has provided a model for revisioning the history of women’s suffrage in terms of women’s political agency, the internal conflicts and shifts within suffragism itself, and suffragism’s connections to general themes and developments in political history. In many articles and an eventual book, she has been developing these concerns through  an ambitious history of women’s rights globally, outside of Europe and North America, and between 1920 and 1970.  She also deserves recognition for two important initiatives in women’s history teaching texts.

With Vicki Ruiz, she assembled three editions of the innovative anthology, Unequal Sisters:  A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, which challenged and reorganized the field’s canonical research around themes of multiculturalism and diversity.   And, with Lynn Dumenil, she authored Through Women’s Eyes: An American History, the first narrative history of U.S. women written in over twenty years. It is in it fifth edition.

Her next big project will be a much needed major biography of feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Links

AHA Member Spotlight: Ellen Carol DuBois
Wikipedia Bio
Official UCLA Department Website
Celebrating Ellen DuBois, Transformative Women’s Historian