JOAN ROTHSCHILD

ROTHSCHILD--Joan. Died February 1, 2015 on her 87th birthday. Born in New York City, daughter of Anna (Cohen) and Alfred Rothschild and survived by sister Ruth Mayleas and niece Alexandra Heth, both of NYC. Attended public schools and graduated from Cornell with BA in English in 1948. An activist resident of Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s, Joan participated in the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, helped establish the Village Independent Democrats, joined the coalition of architects to remove 5th Avenue buses from Washington Square Park and was an active member of the League of Women Voters. Subsequently earned MA in government and PhD in politics from NYU. In 1969, Dr. Rothschild relocated to Cambridge to join Harvard's Program on Technology and Science, and in 1972 joined the faculty of Lowell Technological Institute where she chaired the Women's Studies program and taught political science and technology. As feminist research into technology issues proliferated, she organized panels at annual meetings of the New England Women's Studies Association and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The original work of these feminist scholars appeared in Joan's edited collections, "Women, Technology and Innovation" (1982) and "Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology" (1983), which latter collection was used widely as a text and remained in print for 14 years. Upon retirement from UMass Lowell, Dr. Rothschild returned to NYC and was appointed research associate at the Center for Human Environments at the CUNY Graduate Center to a organize a conference "Re-Visioning Design and Technology: Feminist Perspectives" at CUNY in 1995, bringing together practicing as well as academic architects, urban planners and designers, industrial designers, design historians and graphic designers. Her last completed project, the publication of "The Dream of the Perfect Child" in 2005, was the culmination of 15 years of research, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, which traced the development of the Enlightenment ideology of human perfectibility and its wedding to science through the 19th Century Positivists and then the Eugenicists as they upended the dream into an inegalitarian program for racial purity and progress. The book proposes not a ban on such research but asks us to listen and think carefully about where we might be heading. Active in community affairs, Dr. Rothschild was a member of the Women's City Club of New York, the Society for the History of Technology and the National Women's Studies Association. She often celebrated NYC as the perfect place to retire to: public transportation is at your doorstep, theaters, museums, art galleries, concert halls abound, and you are never the oldest person in the audience! A gathering in celebration of her life will be held in the near future.