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Joanna B.Gillespie, Ph.D. Bio/Vita

Joanna Bowen Gillespie, 1929- ; Bluffton University, Bluffton Ohio, BA in Music 1950; Yale University, New Haven CT., B.& M. Mus.1953 and 1954; New York University, PhD in Sociology of Education, 1973.; taught at Drew University, Madison NJ from 1973-1980, then a fill-in teacher and visiting Scholar at College of Wm and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, and Drew Theological Seminary, 1992-6. Senior Fellow, Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

Author and researcher, volunteer in church and politics, I was early exposed to uncovering lives through educator-parents’ example, plus my own love of history, and a quest for discerning meaning in past times and lives.

After high school and college in a Mennonite setting that valued its own religious history, my first exposure to the wider world was a 1949 summer work camp experience in East Harlem for the City Mission Society, New York City. There I was initially exposed to urban poverty and multi-racial communities. I married the Very Rev. David Gillespie in 1951 and had two children.

Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) gave the label to my nagging 1950s dissatisfaction and led to graduate work at NYU. Meanwhile desegregation processes were underway in our suburban NY lives. I was employed in Englewood, NJ public schools in the development of new interracial curriculum and entered the graduate school of Education at NYU. As my PhD degree was completed in 1973, I was offered a job in the Sociology Department at Drew University where I taught institutional sociology—of Education, of Family, of Bureaucratic Organizations, and of Law, each from the historical-evolution perspective. I loved teaching and regretfully resigned to follow my husband to California where I affiliated with the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University (now renamed On Women and Gender).

Unable to find another job in higher education, I turned to writing research papers in women’s history, initially specializing in 18th c. women’s ‘pious memoirs’ (—individual women’s inner reflections on moral and religious concerns, often created from their diaries after their deaths, by a clergyman or a family member). It proved a gratifying immersion in historic women’s lives and stories, uncovering and decoding the cultural constraints of their era and how they coped. This work, among related topics like Sunday School materials and Japanese American experience, has been the joy of my later years. I hope some of my ‘uncovered voices’ here may turn out to be a joy and discovery to the reader. Welcome to my world.