Linda Gordon

Professor Linda Gordon is Florence Kelley Professor of History and University Professor of Humanities at NYU, teaching courses on historical methods, gender, comparative social movements, imperialism and the 20th-century US. Previously, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and University of Massachusetts, Boston. 

Linda Gordon was born in Chicago but considers Portland, Oregon, her home town.  She did her Doctorate in Russian History at Yale, published her dissertation on the origins of the Zaporogian (Ukrainian) cossacks, but soon left that region behind to become one of a pioneering generation of historians of the US examining women and gender. She has won many prestigious awards, including Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, Radcliffe Institute and New York Public Library's Cullman Center fellowships.

For the first part of her career, Gordon's writing examined the historical roots of social policy in the US, particularly in relation to gender and family structures. Her first book, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America (Viking/Penguin, 1976), published in 1976 and reissued in 1990, remains the definitive history of birth-control politics in the US. It was completely revised and re-published as The Moral Property of Women in 2002. In 1988 she published a historical study of how the US has dealt with family violence, including child abuse, book, spousal violence and sexual abuse. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence (Viking/Penguin, 1988) won the Joan Kelly prize of the American Historical Association. Gordon served on the Departments of Justice/Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women for the Clinton administration (a council abolished by the Bush administration). Her history of welfare, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Free Press, 1994), won the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award.  She is one of only four historians to have won twice the Bancroft Prize for best book in US history.

Changing direction, Gordon turned to narrative as a way of bringing large-scale historical developments to life. Her 1999 book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, the story of a vigilante action against Mexican-Americans, won the Bancroft prize and the Beveridge prize for best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere. Her 2009 Dorothea Lange, a biography of the great depression-era photographer, won the Bancroft prize again as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography.  In the process of that research, she discovered an important group of unnoticed and unpublished Lange photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, commissioned by the US Army but then impounded because they were critical of the internment policy. Gordon selected 119 of this images and published them in 2006, with introductory essays by herself and by historian Gary Okihiro, as Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

 Gordon's most recent book is Feminism Unfinished, a history of 20th-century American women's movements.  She is currently writing a biography of photographer Inge Morath and a major student of social movements in the 20th-century US.