About the Authors

LAUREL RICHARDSON is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University. She has published seven books and over 100 articles. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 1997) tells the story of her strategies to create a university that is more inviting to women and minorities. The book received the prestigious C. H. Cooley award. She is currently working on two books, Confessions of a Retirement Resistor and Double Vision: Seeing Through the Ethnographic–Literary Divide (with Ernest Lockridge).

VERTA TAYLOR is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She teaches courses on gender, feminism, women’s studies, and social movements and has won numerous teaching awards, including an Ohio State University Distinguished Teaching Award, a Multicultural Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Studies, and—most recently—a University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award for her role as Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Professor Taylor also received the Sociologists for Women in Society’s Mentoring Award and has served as Feminist Lecturer for Sociologists for Women in Society. She has served on more than a dozen editorial boards, as Chair of the Sex and Gender and the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Sections of the American Sociological Association, and as Chair of the Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Sociologists of the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Rock-a-by Baby: Feminism, Self-Help and Postpartum Depression; and coauthor with Leila J. Rupp of Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s, and Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. Her writings have appeared in numerous scholarly collections and journals such as Signs, Gender & Society, The American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Mobilization, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Homosexuality, and Journal of Marriage and the Family.

NANCY WHITTIER is Associate Professor of Sociology and a member of the Women’s Studies Program Committee at Smith College. She teaches courses on gender, social movements, queer politics, and research methods. She is the author of Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement, and co-editor of Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State. Her work on the women’s movement, social movement culture and collective identity, activist generations, and activism against child sexual abuse has appeared in numerous scholarly collections and journals.