Janet Zollinger Giele, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology Heller Graduate School, Brandeis University
	One of the first of her generation of sociologists to analyze the changing roles of women, Janet Giele began her research with her 1961 Harvard dissertation that eventually became Two Paths to Women's Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (Twayne, 1995). In the early 1970s, Giele's work on women's roles branched into public policy with a project for the Ford Foundation that resulted in Women and the Future (Free Press, 1978) and Women's Roles in Eight Countries (Wiley, 1977). A 1975 study for the National Science Foundation on the growth of family policy led her to a faculty position at the Heller Graduate School where she is currently professor of sociology and a principal faculty member in the Family and Children's Policy Center that she founded and directed from 1990-96.
	Janet Zollinger Giele, is professor and director of the Family and Children's Policy Center and teaches courses on sociology and the family. She has studied changing life course patterns of women in the U.S. and Germany, and her work has been supported by the Lilly Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, National Institute on Aging, and the German Marshall Fund.
The main theme in Giele's work is the vast innovation that has occurred in women's lives with enormous consequences for families, children, society, and women themselves. A central question is how this change occurred. In her 1982 study of 3000 college alumnae, funded by the Lilly Endowment, she discovered a massive shift in the cohorts born in the 1930s and 1940s. During her sabbatical year in Berlin with a grant from the German Marshall Fund she discovered a similar shift in East and West German women's lives that occurred at roughly the same time. Work on these questions is part of the growing new field of life course studies described in her latest book co-edited with Glen Elder, Methods of Life Course Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Sage, 1998).Her interests also include social movements and the emergence of family policy to provide care for children and the elderly.
She is author or editor of five books on women's changing roles and changing lives throughout the world, including Two Paths to Equality: Women's Temperance and Women's Suffrage 1830-1930, published in 1995. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on the life course, Crafting Life Studies: The Intersection of Personal and Social History.
Giele received her B. A. from Earlham College, where she graduated first in her class. She is the recipient of many honors and awards including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, honorary election to Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe, a Ford Faculty Fellowship, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Earlham College, and a Resident Fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.
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