Saturday, April 21, 2007

The Way Dr. Epstein Became an Academic

As a youth, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein participated in a Zionist youth group. This youth group had the socialist ideals associated with the Israeli Kibbutz. This ideology also had the goal of gender equality, even though it was not always achieved. She attended Antioch College which is located in Ohio and is a politically liberal college. She received her B.A. in 1955. Through her time at Antioch College, she became “interested in the ways in which marks of status shape popular and social scientific thinking” (asanet.org). While she was at Antioch College, she became close with a group of students in the political science department who were studying with Professor Heinz Eulau. According to Dr. Epstein, he made each class an experiment and they had weekly essays on their readings. Through this professor, Dr. Epstein received a scholarship to the University of Chicago Law School.

Her time at the University of Chicago was an “abortive experience” because she found law to be “incompatible with [her] humanistic-behavioral orientation” (Epstein 354). Her main reason for going to law school was because of the scholarship she was offered and because at that time, she had not thought about pursuing graduate work in political science. She primarily thought of law “as a field of learning that turned one into a real professional, that is to say, a lawyer, a person with a marketable skill” (Epstein 354). After six months, she left law school, but she felt guilty about this choice because she felt that she had let all women down.

After leaving law school, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein had to face the sexism that was prevalent during the 1950s. She worked for a non-profit charitable organization, whose executives were women volunteers. From this job, she decided to figure out why these women she worked with were considered to have deficient capacities to run a business or government, even though they had the administrative abilities that were required of these jobs. With these influences in mind, she went to the New School for Social Research at night where she received her M.A. in 1960. Due to the encouragement of Henry Lennard, went to Columbia University to get a Ph.D.
While she was at Columbia, she worked as William J. Goode’s research assistant. As his research assistant, she worked on a project that was focused on family structure and the cross-national differences in family structures. Through this project, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein “not only saw how much women’s roles differed cross-culturally, but also the way similar rationales about women’s ‘nature’ were used to explain completely different behaviors” (asanet.org). She was also taught by Robert Merton and in these classes, “social theory and social structure suggested how individuals’ choices are made within structural constraints” (asanet.org). Cynthia Fuchs Epstein would later rely upon Merton’s theoretical approach of status sets and opportunity structures in her dissertation, which “analyzed the factors that’s contributed to professional women’s inclusion and exclusion” in the legal profession (asanet.org). During her work on her dissertation, she met Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan is the author of The Feminine Mystique. In 1966, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein joined in the formation of the National Organization for Women in New York City. Betty Friedan and many other academic women and professional women were a part of forming this organization.

Dr. Epstein was a student for a long time because she took various teaching and research jobs in-between her schooling. She was also afraid of taking comprehensive exams. While she was working towards her Ph.D., she and her husband (Howard Epstein) had a child. She received her Ph.D. in 1968.

Dr. Epstein’s first teaching job was at Finch College from 1961-1962 in anthropology. Since then, she has taught at Columbia University, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Queens College of the City of New York, Stanford University School of Law, and she is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center for the City University of New York. She was appointed to this position in 1990.


This information is from:

Http://www.asanet.org/page.ww?section=Presidents&name=Cynthia+Fuchs+Epstein

"Personal Reflections with a Sociological Eye" by Cynthia Fuchs Epstein in Authors of Their Lives edited by Bennett M. Berger. 1990. Los Angeles: University of California Press, Ltd.

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002.

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