Biography

Margaret L. Andersen grew up in Oakland, located in the Bay Area of California, for the first ten years of her life; from about 1948 to 1958. She lived in what she was a working class urban community which possessed a mixture of mostly white and Asian families. Her family moved a lot because of her father’s occupation, so her childhood was not unfamiliar to new places. Sadly her father also died when she was a teenager and consequently Dr. Andersen and her mother relocated again.
Margaret Andersen’s father’s transfers led to her move from Oakland, as previously mentioned an urban town, to a small town in Georgia in 1958; of course at the height of the civil rights movement. Dr. Andersen describes Georgia as being a completely different environment than the one she had been used to in California. The school she attended was completely segregated and had a homogeneous population of all white students. It was in this atmosphere that she most clearly remembers seeing and being exposed to “serious” racial segregation. (An exposure which she later realized greatly contributed to her interest in race relations and structural oppression of disadvantaged groups) She also described her experience in Georgia as one full of teasing and name-calling because of the size of the town and her status as a new-comer and an outsider. She and her family lived in Georgia for three years, until she was about thirteen years old, and then relocated again this time to Boston, Massachusetts.
This setting was also segregated but “not the same [way] as Georgia.” Looking back, Dr. Andersen acknowledges the fact that being exposed to these different environments had a great impact in her interest in racial and ethnic relationships and perceptions. She also now realizes the different gendered perceptions and roles in each of these atmospheres contributed to her dedication to women’s studies. As she states, the “gender norms were different” in each respective place. In California, she remembers being treated as if she could do anything she set her mind to, as long as she put in the effort; however, in Georgia, this American ideal didn’t seem as applicable to women. In fact those women who were seen as intellectuals and academics were treated as outcasts of sorts; instead beauty was a valued characteristic for women. But the opposite was true of Boston; there intelligence seemed to matter whether for men or women. Again being in and out of these various settings essentially “laid the seed” for her work in the discipline of sociology, particularly in regards to her interest in the intersection of race, class, and gender in society.
Currently, Dr. Andersen holds the esteemed position of the Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of sociology as well as Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware. In addition to the University of Delaware, her resume boasts visiting positions from both Sanford University and the Massachusetts Institution of Technology as professor in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (Stanford) and Women’s Studies (M.I.T.) She is clearly ambitious and has shown a proclivity for higher education, a fact that is all too clear through her acquisition of a bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University at Atlanta in 1970, a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1973, and lastly a doctorate from the same institution in 1976.
Dr Andersen has written and published a variety of books as wells as numerous scholarly articles regarding the disciplines of sociology and women’s studies. Her books accurately depict her interests which include, but are not necessarily limited to, social inequalities and the social structures which perpetuate and enforce these; the sociology of race and ethnicity, as well as that of sex and gender and finally sociological theory.
Her most recent work is a book titled On Land and On Sea: Women in the Rosenfeld Collection, a photographic essay of women across the course of the twentieth century. Her other notable books include Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender currently in its 7th edition; Race, Class and Gender, co-authored with fellow feminist sociologist Patricia Hills Collins in its 6th edition; Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society and Sociology: The Essentials both written with Howard F. Taylor; Understanding Society: Readings in Sociology in and written with the help of former student Kim A. Logio and finally Social Problems co-authored with Frank R. Scarpitti and Laura L. O’Toole.