Faculty and Staff
Elizabeth Pleck
Professor of History
Elizabeth H. Pleck specializes in the history of women and of the family in the U.S., with emphasis on the twentieth century. She teaches a two semester undergraduate survey course in U.S. women’s and gender history and offers graduate courses in U.S. gender history. She is the author of four historical monographs: Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1870-1900 (New York: Academic Press, 1979); Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence, revised edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Celebrating the Family: Ritual, Consumer Culture and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and with Cele Otnes, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 2003). She expanded her interest in ritual from Celebrating the Family into a lengthier answer to the question of why lavish weddings have become so popular not only in North America but around the world. In Cinderella Dreams she and her coauthor, Cele Otnes, show how consumer culture and ideas of romance were wedded to each other in the development and persistence of a vestige of Victorian heritage, the lavish wedding. Elizabeth Pleck has also edited in anthology combining social history and women’s history, A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), with Nancy F. Cott and an anthology in men’s history, The American Man(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980). She is now researching changing attitudes toward cohabitation in the U.S. from 1968 to 1990. She is examining how acceptance among the middle-class of cohabitation emerged out of the New Left and generational conflict and became contested as part of the debate about family values in the 1980s.
In 2002 Elizabeth Pleck received the Woman to Woman: Making a Difference Award from the Office of Women’s Issues, State of Illinois. She is the recipient of a Mellon Inititative award to bring to the University of Illinois campus a distinguished scholar in March-April, 2004. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Women’s History and will serve as an associate editor of the journal beginning in 2004.
