Anita Garey (1981)

Associate Professor of Family Studies and Sociology, University of Connecticut

Anita Garey passed away on September 24,  2014

As a second-generation immigrant and the first person in my family to go to college, I entered the doctoral program in Sociology in 1981 with very little idea of what graduate school was all about. My interests in the sociology of motherhood and in work/family issues were encouraged and furthered by working with Arlie Hochschild and Nancy Chodorow, and in 1991 I taught a senior seminar on the sociology of motherhood, a topic I still teach.

Berkeley influenced my development as a sociologist is many ways, but perhaps most importantly in the strong grounding I received in qualitative methods and interpretive analysis. A few years ago, one of my graduate students told me that what was noticeable about my approach to qualitative research was that I was not apologetic about it and I like to think that is one way that I take Berkeley Sociology out into the world.

After finishing my dissertation (later revised and published as Weaving Work and Motherhood), I spent a year conducting fieldwork on women's employment and kinship-based patterns of childcare in a village in Botswana. From 1995 to 2000, I was a faculty member in the Sociology Department at the University of New Hampshire, and am now an Associate Professor in the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut. In 1999, I spent a wonderful year at the Berkeley Center for Working Families and found myself again immersed in and inspired by the Berkeley intellectual tradition at the lively weekly seminars facilitated by Arlie Hochschild and Barrie Thorne. My work continues to focus on families and their interconnections with other social institutions. With Karen V. Hansen, another Berkeley alumna, I co-edited Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics, an interdisciplinary collection of core readings that reflects our Berkeley Sociology roots.12.30.23

Dissertation Title
Constructing Identities as `Working Mothers': Time, Space, and Family in a Study of Women Hospital Workers
Dissertation Book Title
Weaving work and motherhood
Philadelphia
Entry Year