After spending several frustrating years in a dead-end job in a non-profit charitable organization whose executives were women volunteers, Cynthia put her skepticism to the task of figuring out why, despite these women’s administrative abilities, they were regarded as lacking the capacity to run a business or a government. Her “progressive” education from grade school through college and her forward-looking family fostered her abilities, but once she graduated, she ran into the sexism of the fifties, which provided few professional opportunities for women. Being exposed to the consequences of labeling and categories, Cynthia became interested in the ways in which marks of status shape popular and social scientific thinking. Politics was very much at the forefront during the early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy sent his supporters in the Ohio congress delegation to locate and harass left-leaning faculty members, some of whose careers were entirely destroyed. Antioch was an early innovator in student participation in the running of the college and also had a co-op work program for students. During slavery, it was a refuge on the Underground Railroad that sent runaway slaves to non-slave territories. ![]() Cynthia’s parents sent her to Antioch College in Ohio, a place known for its liberal politics. He outgrew some of his early idealism about the possibility of creating an egalitarian society, but he was an untiring worker in the reform wing of the Democratic Party until his death at the age of 91.Ĭynthia participated in a Zionist youth group that subscribed to the socialist ideals of the Israeli kibbutz, which also had the idealistic goal (not always achieved) of gender equality. The family emigrated to the United States in stages, and grew up in the back of their father’s shop on the lower East Side of New York City.Ĭynthia’s father graduated from Stuyvesant High School and had one year of college, where he became a socialist. In her essay for a book about her experiences at Antioch, Courses in Courage, Cynthia says that she learned that “knowledge for its own sake is good but requires probing questions and rigor in pursuing answers, and one must always be asking the question, knowledge for what?” Scholarship and political activism were to become the two prongs of her professional career.Īs a student in college, and even before, Cynthia was aware of the processes that defined groups of people as “other.” Her grandfather was an uneducated shoemaker in Poland at the time of Russian pogroms against Jews. That glint of ironic humor is evident in Cynthia’s slight smile in her 1955 senior yearbook picture at Antioch College her revolutionary determination is also evident in her no-nonsense gaze. Instead they co-edited the papers for a book Access to Power: Cross-National Studies on Women and Elites, published in 1981. The pressures of assembling an international group of scholars to speak about women in elite occupations in Eastern and Western Europe and Israel interfered and they never got beyond the title. Because they also shared a love of gourmet food, they thought they might also consider writing a cookbook – Fast, Easy, and Healthy Food for Women Revolutionaries. In 1976, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Rose Laub Coser were in England organizing an international conference on women elites at King’s College, Cambridge. Pushing Social Boundaries: Cynthia Fuchs Epsteinīy Judith Lorber, Graduate School and Brooklyn College, City University of New York Countries Eligible for International Associate Membership.Solicitation and Gift Acceptance Policy.First-Generation and Working-Class Sociologists.URM Scholars in Sociology and Economics.Howery Teaching Enhancement Fund Grants.Community Action Research Initiative Grants.ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants. ![]()
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