Joanne Meyerowitz

Joanne Meyerowitz received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.  She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002), and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) and History and September 11th (2003). 

 

Her new book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton University Press, 2021), is a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s.   It shows how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.

 

Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2004, she taught at the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University, and for five years she edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.  Meyerowitz has won fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council.  She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and past president of the Organization of American Historians.

 

At Yale, she has served as chair of LGBT Studies, chair of the American Studies Program, and interim chair of the Department of History.  She is currently co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. In 2020, she won the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities.