SEW Mission

LUCY TOWNSEND

LucyTownsend

Executive director of the Country Schools Association of America, Lucy Townsend is also curator emerits of the Blackwell History of Education Museum at Northern Illinois University, where she is professor emerita of Educational Foundations. She has served as president of the Society for Educating Women (SEW) in 2008, Midwest History of Education Society (now known as the Organization of Educational Historians), president (twice) of the International Society of Educational Biography, secretary of the American Educational Studies Association, and co-editor of Vitae Scholasticae. Project director of the Emma Willard Papers, she and Barbara Wiley published The Emma Willard Papers, 1787-1870(2004), a microform collection of some 15,000 pages of documents and texts, as well as a 64-page guide (2005). She has published a biography of the founder of Rockford College (The Best Helpers of One Another, 1988) and edited, with Gaby Weiner, Women: A Global Perspective (2002). She and Weiner have just published Deconstructing and Reconstructing Lives: Using Auto/Biography in Educational Settings (Althouse Press, University of Western Ontario, 2011). She is currently researching the lives of the first two hundred women to earn the American doctorate. Having served as 2008 Conference Chair of the Society for Educating Women, Prof. Townsend has edited a special issue of Vitae Scholasticae and Educational Studies, both of which featured selected articles from the inaugural SEW conference. She has also edited, with Susan Franzosa, the inaugural issue of the online Journal of The Society for Educating Women.

To order a copy of Deconstructing and Reconstructing Lives, visit http://www.edu.uwo.ca/althousepress/

Contact: ltownsend@niu.edu

SUSAN DOUGLAS FRANZOSA

SusanFranzosa

Professor and Dean of Education and Allied Professions at Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, Susan Douglas Franzosa was president of both the Society for Educating Women and the American Educational Studies Association in 2009. A past Associate Editor of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Journal with a long history of participation in Women's Studies and leadership on campus women's issues,she was involved in early development of Summer Institutes on women's studies across the curriculum for school teachers, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities. She edited Ordinary Lessons: Girlhoods of the 1950's, to which all founders of the SEW contributed. With Karen Mazza she co-authored Integrating Women's Studies into the Curriculum: An Annotated Bibliography; also, she authored Civic Education: Its Limits and Conditions. She is currently at work on an educating woman's biography, organized the SEW's conference on "Changing the Educational Landscape for Girls and Women" in 2009, and (with Lucy Townsend) edited a special issue of Vitae Scholisticae featuring SEW authors as well as the inaugural issue of SEW's new e-journal Educating Women.

Contact: sfranzosa@mail.fairfield.edu

SUSAN LAIRD

susanlaird

Susan Laird is the author of Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother of Coeducation, volume 15 of the Continuum Library of Educational Thought (2008). Thought on coeducation continues to be the focus of her philosophical-historical inquiry, along with educational aesthetics. She edited Philosophy of Education in 1997 and has contributed to Philosophy of Education yearbooks and other journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias over the past two decades. Recently honored for her teaching/advising, she is Professor of Educational Studies, Women's & Gender Studies, and Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma. There she now also serves as founding faculty adviser of the Oklahoma Educational Studies Association (affiliated with the American Educational Studies Association) and the Oklahoma Mothers & Educators Collaborative (working for a more family-friendly campus), both led by graduate students, who collaborated with Oklahoma graduate alumnae and Demetria Martinez to host SEW's 2010 conference in Albuquerque, "Educating Women Again: Crossing the Borderlands of Town and Gown." While theorizing an educational life-practice of "befriending girls," she founded and advised a Campus Girl Scouts group with whom she led a racially and sexually diverse Girl Scout troop of economically challenged teens. Active in the Ithaca Feminist Education Coalition as a public-high-school English teacher in the early 1980s, she participated in founding the National Women's Studies Association's PreK-12 Caucus. President of the Society for Educating Women in 2010 and of the Philosophy of Education Society in 2007, Prof. Laird is now president-elect of the Society of Philosophy & History of Education and general editor of the new e-journal Educating Women.

Contact: laird@ou.edu

To order a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophical Mother of Coeducation, visit http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=131544&SeriesId=2166.