Susan Porter Benson

BENSON, Susan Porter Susan Porter Benson died peacefully at home, surrounded by her family and friends, on Monday (June 20, 2005). She was born in Washington, PA, on 26 July, 1943, the daughter of Alvin and Loraine Porter. She graduated from Simmons College with a degree in Government in 1964, and earned a Master's Degree in American Civilization from Brown University in 1968. Sue taught at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA from 1968 to 1982, where she ended her career as Chair of the Social Sciences Division. She took leave for several years, first to do labor education for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union, on a grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was the first of three times Sue was funded by NEH; the second was in 1992 for a book on the ways families make economic decisions, and the third was in 2002 for a book on the way workers saw their work lives. Sue earned a Ph.D. in History from Boston University in 1983, and joined the faculty of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom as Visiting Senior Lecturer in American Labour History, after which she moved to the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1986, as an Associate Professor of History. Her first book was "Counter-Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940," published by the University of Illinois Press in 1986. She also co-wrote "Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society" from Pantheon in 1992, and co-edited "Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public" from the Temple University Press in 1986; she has also published numerous articles and reviews. In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut at Storrs as Director of the program in Women's Studies. In 1998, she returned to full-time work in the History department there. Sue treasured her students and the countless colleagues across the world with whom she built lasting relationships, just as she did in the last years of her life with the medical professionals and other patients fighting ovarian cancer. Sue's greatest pleasure, and skill, was as a mentor, to graduate students and colleagues, even those of her own age. She was a finalist for the Nancy Lyman Roelker award of the American Historical Association for mentoring. She is survived by her husband Edward, of Manchester, her daughter, Katherine Musler of Ashford, and her mother, Loraine Porter, also of Manchester, by whom she is, and will always be desperately missed, as well as by a large but very close group of loving and supportive friends. A celebration of Sue's life and relationships is planned for August in Providence.