Mari Jo Buhle

About Mari Jo's Work

Mari Jo Buhle researches political history and integrates it with the historical and cultural roots of reform movements.

Her book, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (1981), shows how feminist leaders reshaped the meaning of politics to reflect the gender-specific traditions of suffrage, temperance, sexual liberation, and related women’s reform movements. Buhle illustrates how in a broad-based Socialist reform movement, women’s issues were preempted by debates over trade unionism and electoral strategies. Her second book, Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (1998), concerns the relationship between psychoanalytic and feminist theories in the United States since Freud's visit in 1909. Buhle is also the co-author of a two-volume textbook for college students, Out of Many: A History of the American People (8th edition, 2003), and co-editor of The American Radical (1994).

Biography

Since 1974, Buhle has taught in the Departments of American Civilization and History at Brown University, where she is the William R. Kennan Jr. University Professor.

Buhle received a B.A. (1966) from the University of Illinois, an M.A. (1968) from the University of Connecticut, and a Ph.D. (1974) from the University of Wisconsin.