Joan Kelly, 1928-1982

Joan Kelly, historian and feminist, was born in New York City in 1928; her father was a policeman. She took night courses at St. John's University, Queens, New York, working during the day, and received her A.B., summa cum laude, in 1953. That year she was the only woman in New York State to receive a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She received an M.A. (1954) and Ph.D. (1963) in history from Columbia University, having studied with Garret Mattingley, who considered her dissertation to be "the best Columbia dissertation he had ever read"; it became the basis of her first book, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1969). The book embodied the theme of her life's work: the interrelationship of ideology and economic and political forces.

Joan Kelly joined the faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1956, teaching first at Baruch College and later at City College (CCNY) and the Graduate Center. In 1963-1964, she was a visiting professor in Renaissance History at Columbia. In the l960s, JK became politically active, joining the movement against the war in Vietnam, lobbying for Black Studies and for day care facilities, and supporting open enrollment at CCNY. She began to study Marxist thought and incorporated it into her teaching. From 1972 to 1974 she was on leave from CCNY and taught at Sarah Lawrence College where she developed her interest in women's history. Together with Gerda Lerner, she developed the first M.A. program in women's history at Sarah Lawrence and was acting director of the women's studies program at CCNY, 1976-1977. She defined herself as a socialist feminist and developed a Marxist-feminist theoryof history.

JK was author of many articles, including: "Did women have a Renaissance?" and co-author of Households and Kin: Families and Flux, a high-school textbook. She completed "Early feminism and the querelle des femmes" in 1982. A collection of her essays, Women, History and Theory was published posthumously (University of Chicago Press, 1984).

JK served on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America (1971-1976),was chair of the Committee of Women Historians of the American Historical Association (1975, 1977), was one of the organizers of institutes on the integration of women's history into high-school curricula, 1976-1979,and was on the board of the Feminist Press and on the editorial board of Signs . She was the Clark lecturer at Scripps College, 1978-1979.

JK married Eugene Gadol while in graduate school; they were divorced in 1972. She married Martin Fleisher, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, in 1979. She died of cancer in 1982.

From the guide to the Papers, 1973-1984, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)