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Associate Professor and Department Chair
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Department of History
336 Conklin Hall
(973) 353-5410 ex. 36
berylsatter@mindspring.com
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~history
Beryl Satter's first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California Press, 1999) examined the relationship between New Thought, a popular, proto-New Age religious movement, the late nineteenth-century women's movement, and Progressivism. It traced the ways that New Thought enabled its adherents to engage with and sometimes contest contemporary ideas about gender, race and sexuality. It also showed the influence of ideas about gender, race and sexuality on American religion, health and politics.
It outlined the specific ways that debates on these issues shaped the transition from a Victorian to a modern social order. Her articles "Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality," American Quarterly 47:4 (March 1996): 43-76 and "The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective: Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Twentieth-Century America," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12: 3 (July 2003): 424-464 similarly examine the relationship between gender, politics and sexuality in two distinct cultural moments during the twentieth century.
Dr. Satter is currently completing her second book, Family Properties: Cons, Contracts, and the Fight to Save Chicago's West Side, 1950-1980. This book is aimed at a non-academic audience. It tells the story of Dr. Satter's father, attorney Mark J. Satter, who fought exploitative, racially based real estate speculation in Chicago, and the many community activists who continued this battle after Mark Satter's death. In the late 1960s these activists formed an organization, the Contract Buyers League (CBL). The CBL, which consisted of African-American residents of Chicago's West and South Sides, fought redlining as well as the state and federal laws that enabled racially biased credit policies to flourish. Their efforts ultimately culminated in the passage of two landmark pieces of federal legislation in the 1970s -- the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The book is under contract to Henry Holt/ Metropolitan Press. One part of the story of this mid-twentieth-century battle against housing exploitation is presented in
Dr. Satter's article "'Our greatest moments of glory have been fighting the institutions we love the most': the Rise and Fall of Chicago's Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs, 1958-1969," U.S. Catholic Historian 22:2 (Spring 2004): 33-44.
link to c.v.