Sara Rose Diamond
Entering Cohort: 1986
Writer and Lawyer
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My dissertation became my second book, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, published in 1995 by the Guilford Press. After that, Common Courage Press published a collection of my magazine and newspaper articles in 1996. Then I published another book with Guilford, called Not by Politics Alone: the Enduring Influence of the Christian Right, in 1998. By then I had decided to stop working on the Right, after 15 years of doing it full-time. The Bancroft Library created the ?Sara Diamond Collection on the U.S. Right,? an archive of about 63 boxes of primary source materials I had collected on a range of right-wing movements.
I stopped doing research and publishing about the Right not because of any negative experience I had with ?them.? I worked on the subject so intensely for so many years that I really was losing interest. The academic project was part of a political mission I?d been: I wanted the Left to take the Right seriously, not to mimic the Right but to understand how religion and culture serve as bases for a successful social movement. I grew tired of being a ?voice in the wilderness,? warning that the Christian Right was in the process of taking over the Republican Party, etc., etc.
Because I was committed to staying in the Bay area, I did not do a nationwide job search. Instead, I taught Sociology as an adjunct at Cal State Hayward from 1995-2000, at a time when the full-time job market within the CSU system was withering away.
In the late 1990s I started work on a book about long-time spiritual practitioners and did pilot interviews with people in the spiritual counter-culture. I was circulating a book proposal to agents when my long-term domestic partnership fell apart and I had to take a break from writing. I also had to figure out how to make a living. I decided to go to law school.
I went to U.C. Hastings in San Francisco. It?s a place oriented toward corporate conformity, not welcoming to leftists or to ?older? students making mid-life career changes. The 20-something law students had mostly never heard of the famous litigants in our case books: Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Diana Ross, Leon Russell, et al.
I decided I wanted to practice law for the benefit of aging baby boomers. We?re the largest demographic group, and there is going to be a shortage of elder law attorneys as well as shortages in health care and other services for seniors in the coming decades. I anticipate political struggles around the right to age humanely.
Now I practice elder law in downtown Oakland. I work with seniors and their grown children, doing estate planning, conservatorships, trust administration, etc. I?ve also just been hired to teach Elder Law at JFK University Law School, which is a step toward my goal of eventually integrating my three careers: writer, teacher, lawyer. The successful practice of elder law requires one to understand individual psychology, family dynamics, and how society deals with aging. My clients and colleagues appreciate a lawyer with a sociological perspective.
Dissertation: Right-Wing Movements in the United States, 1945-1952