Biography

Dr. Joan Acker has become one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the country, and has been at the University of Oregon for more than thirty years. From exploring both her autobiographical information and her path to becoming an academic, it is clear that her earlier experiences shaped this legacy.
Dr. Acker grew up in Indiana as the child of a politically liberal mother and father. Her father was a writer who had a good job with the American Legion. Her mother was a college graduate who came from an impoverished upper-middle-class intellectual family. Her mother always worked and was a political activist. As a result, Acker saw both as what women normally did.
While growing up in Indiana, she started to notice strange things going on between different races that she perceived as very undemocratic. This started her interest in politics, but she wouldn’t develop a true political education until college.
She attended Hunter College in New York, which is where she began her political education. She had a new stepfather who was a radical and a mother who agreed with her stepfather. She also met radical people among her peers and had professors who connected race and class to subject matter. At Hunter, she majored in sociology and social work.
During her teenage years, she wanted a life of adventure. Specifically, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. She pursued this goal during her high school and early college years by becoming the editor of her high school news paper and of her college literary magazine. However, she recognized before she was twenty that this did not fit in with her other goals: Becoming a wife and a mother.
She also decided that something else was important to her career path while still in college: She did not want to contribute to capitalist domination. Initially, this led her to become a social worker. She wanted to do something that could be done in most communities so that she could enhance her ability to combine marriage and work. This was also a path chosen to honor Acker’s political commitment to not exploit other people.
Although her social worker career did not directly lead her to becoming an academic, her study of sociology did lead Acker to begin considering “the woman question”. She wrote a paper comparing explanations of women’s positions in Thorsten Veblen and Robert Park’s work. In addition, she did an honor’s thesis on the family court in Manhattan.
After graduating from Hunter College, Acker received her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948. Around this time, she got married and pregnant. This led her to work part-time as a social worker in order to take care of her family (which soon grew to three children). The balancing act between work and children was possible (if difficult) in New York City, but it became impossible once her family moved to Mountain View, CA. There, she spent a couple of years outside of the work force. Eventually, she went back to school and became a tenured faculty member at the University of Oregon.