Baxandall, Rosalyn 1939-

(Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall)

PERSONAL: Born June 12, 1939, in New York, NY; daughter of Lewis Martin (a pediatrician) and Irma (a lawyer and art historian) Fraad; married Lee Baxandall (a writer; divorced, 1983); children: Phineas. Ethnicity: “Danish, Russian, German, Hungarian, Austrian.”Education: University of Wisconsin—Madison, B.A., 1961; Columbia University, M.S.W., 1963. Politics: Socialist.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Office—Department of American Studies, State University of New York College at Old Westbury, P.O. Box 210, Old Westbury, NY 11568; fax: 212-982-0194. E-mail—rosybax@aol.com.

CAREER: Worked at Mobilization for Youth, 1963-67, and Hunter School of Social Work, 1967-70; State University of New York College at Old Westbury, Old Westbury, assistant professor of women’s studies and American studies, 1970—, currently Distinguished Teaching Professor and department chair.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and compiler, with Linda Gordon and Susan Reverby) America’s Working Women, Vintage (New York, NY), 1976, revised edition published as America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

(Coauthor) Technology, the Labor Process, and the Working Class: Essays, commentary by Harry Braverman, Monthly Review (New York, NY), 1976.

(Under name Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall; editor) Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1987.

(With Elizabeth Ewen) Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Linda Gordon) Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Rosalyn Baxandall worked with two other women to produce the book America’s Working Women. The 1976 volume was later extensively revised by its editors and published in 1995 as America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present. The expanded collection of fiction and nonfiction selections gives readers “a mind-expanding survey,” commented Donna Seaman in Booklist. Baxandall and her collaborators, Linda Gordon and Susan Reverby, compiled various works of poetry, fiction, articles, letters, diaries, and oral histories to document three centuries of life for North American working women. America’s Working Women presents “a chorus of voices that greatly enhance standing of the issues women still face in the workplace,” assessed Seaman.

Baxandall more recently worked with Elizabeth Ewen to create Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. The book explores the history of suburban communities “in a broad political, cultural and economic context, informed a Publishers Weekly critic. Among the past actions discussed by Baxandall and Ewen, colleagues at State University of New York at Old Westbury, are post-World War II efforts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy against government-controlled housing construction. Along with other research, the authors used interviews with hundreds of suburban residents, many of whom lived in the suburbs prior to the start of World War II. According to the Publishers Weekly review, Picture Windows persuasively demonstrates that “economic, racial, and ethnic diversity as well as new opportunities for women make contemporary suburbs substantively different from their predecessors.” As Mary Carroll noted in Booklist, the authors of the work wonder if, “with no significant public role in house,” the "aging [suburban] communities can meet [the] new needs” its “new immigrants.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present, p. 1288; February 15, 2000, Mary Carroll, review of Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, p. 1056.

Dallas Morning News, June 25, 2000, Carol Roark, “Suburbia Unsettled Works Examine, Shake America’s Foundations,” p. 8J.

New York Times Book Review, February 27, 2000, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, January 17, 2000, review of Picture Windows, p. 51.*