Marilyn J. Boxer

Marilyn J. Boxer (born 1930) is a historian in the field of women's studies, one of the earliest in that field. She served as chair of the women's studies program at San Diego State University, the first program of its kind in the U.S., and later in various academic and administrative leadership roles there and at San Francisco State University.

She was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and attended Wellesley College on a scholarship but dropped out before graduating. She became a high school teacher, but felt that her intellectual needs remained unsatisfied, and in 1970, despite financial insecurity due to a recent divorce, entered the doctoral program in history at the University of California, Riverside. She moved to San Francisco State University in 1989, serving as vice-president for academic affairs from 1989 to 1996 and professor of history until 2003, when she became emeritus. She received the 2004 Helen Hawkins Feminist Activist Award for Betterment of Women's Lives. Reviewers called it "a major contribution" and "enormously valuable as a history of the first twenty-five years of women's studies."

She is co-editor of: The Socialist Women’s Secretary: Clara Zetkin in National and International Contexts (London: Socialist History Society, 2012), ed. with John S. Partington Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, second edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ed. with Jean H. Quataert Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Elsevier, 1978), ed. with Jean H. Quataert