Celebrating Ellen DuBois, transformative women’s historian

Recently retired Columbia University professor of history Eric Foner, an authority on slave and free labor in the United States, keynoted an all-day celebration of the career of Ellen Carol DuBois, retiring professor of history at UCLA, which took place on February 24th at the UCLA Faculty Center. Her writings, he said in his talk “The Integration of Women’s and Gender History into 19th-Century History,” have transformed our understanding of the past. “Her work has affected scholars outside her field into the historical consciousness—the real measure of her legacy as a historian.”

As a graduate student, DuBois was drawn into the women’s liberation movement, which led her to become one of the early pioneers of women’s history. Her doctoral dissertation on the origins of the U.S. woman suffrage movement was published as Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement, 1848-1869.

After 16 years at the University of Buffalo, DuBois came to UCLA in 1988. This new environment resulted in her collaboration with fellow historian Vicki Ruiz on Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, a classroom textbook aiming to rescue the experiences of women of color, immigrants, and lesbians. Another textbook, co-written with Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents, has become the essential foundational resource in women’s history courses.

A prizewinning second monograph by DuBois was Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, a sensitive portrayal of the career of a woman who was the daughter of the strong-willed women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton and who was herself a leader.

Currently DuBois is working on several new projects, a transnational history of the U.S., a study of international feminism between the world wars, and a popular history to be published by Simon & Schuster, Suffrage: Women’s Long Road to the Ballot Box. ...