Berenice Carroll

1932 - 2018

Berenice Carroll

Lafayette - Berenice A. Carroll, an outstanding scholar and activist who worked for world peace and stood up for women, people of color, workers, and victims of injustice everywhere, died on Thursday, May 10, 2018, in Lafayette, Indiana.

She was born on December 14, 1932, in New York, the daughter of Margaret and Morris Jacobs. She did her undergraduate work at Queens College in New York and earned her doctorate from Brown University in 1960.

She is survived by a brother, Roger Jacobs, two sons, David and Malcolm Carroll (through marriage to her first husband, Robert Carroll), four grandchildren Katherine, Annette, Sophie, and Max Carroll, two nephews and many cousins. She was a loving presence in the lives of her family, while providing inspiration and a strong voice guiding right from wrong. Her sense of family was open-armed. It was exemplified by how she made her home a place where friends frequently gathered to form a community and students were "adopted," forming an extended family. Berenice Carroll has left an indelible presence in peace research, women's studies, academic associations, and political activism in peace and women's movements. She was a role model, mentor, and supporter of countless students, colleagues, other activists, and friends.

Berenice Carroll grew up in the aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War period. She was moved to action very early in life, exemplified by her volunteering to work on a kibbutz in Israel in the early 1950s. As a young scholar, she saw the necessity of connecting research and teaching to build a peaceful world. Increasingly, she saw the interconnections between patriarchy (structures that disempower women and privilege men) and the problems of war and social injustice.

Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich, her first book, prefigures her career as a peace researcher. It reviews the concept of total war as envisioned by the Nazi regime and the development in Germany of what later would be called the military-industrial complex. Part of the research was done in Germany, as a Fulbright scholar, relatively soon after the war. Her subsequent peace research publications explored how wars end, the impacts of war, the power of peace and justice movements, and the connections between feminist theory and peace.

As a student and young academic, Berenice Carroll realized that the role of women was marginalized not only in history but also in the history profession. With the rise of the women's movement, she embarked on studies of the centrality of women as political theorists and activists. She published studies on Christine de Pizan, Mary Beard, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Jane Addams. Her most important work on women includes Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays; Women's Political and Social Thought: An Anthology; and a special issue of the Women's Studies International Forum titled "In a Great Company of Women," a collection of essays on women throughout the world who have engaged in nonviolent direct action.

Her research and publications alone impacted the growing fields of peace and women's studies. She also became a force in the transformation of professional associations of political scientists, historians, and peace researchers. She played a leading role in building a women's caucus in both the American Political Science Association and the American Historical Association. She went on to become the president of the National Women's Studies Association. Along with international scholar/activists, she built the International Peace Research Association and the Consortium on Peace Research, Education, and Development (COPRED), which became the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA). She chaired COPRED in the 1980s. In addition, she edited Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research. Carroll served as the director of Women's Studies at the universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Maryland at College Park, and Purdue. She also served as a core faculty member of Purdue University's Committee on Peace Studies.

Throughout her academic career, Berenice put forward ways to link theory and practice, or as a 2007 celebration of her work was titled, "Pen and Protest." From her early activism against the spread of nuclear weapons as a SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) activist, to protest against wars in Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, she was always on the front lines in support of peace and justice.

Her activism in support of women equaled her activism against war. She played a significant role in establishing a women's residential crisis center in Urbana, Illinois, in the 1970s. She was also a member of the Grassroots Group of Second-Class Citizens who chained themselves to the brass railing outside the Illinois Senate, which began a month-long series of demonstrations and civil disobedience protesting the Illinois state legislature's refusal to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment in June 1982.

In her writing and activism, Berenice Carroll was inspired by women peace activists such as Jane Addams. In 2007, she and Clint Fink (her second husband and partner of 45 years) edited and republished Addams's classic essay, "Newer Ideals of Peace," originally published in 1907. They wrote a compelling introduction that captured the connections between Addams's theoretical and practical work for peace and justice.

As Carroll and Fink indicate, Addams postulated that the tasks of peace activists must go beyond just stopping war. According to Addams, achieving what peace researchers later called "negative peace," ending wars, must be coupled with "positive peace." Positive peace includes transformations of the societies that engaged in warfare. These transformations must include the end of hierarchies of all kinds, including patriarchy, the criminal justice system, and systems of domination and subordination at the workplace. In sum, advocating for social and economic justice was needed along with demanding an end to shooting wars. This summary of Addams's theory and practice captures the engaged life of Berenice Carroll.

Berenice Carroll will be missed by her activist comrades, her colleagues, her students, and her loving family and friends.