Sonya Rose

Sonya Orleans Rose (1935 – October 15, 2020)

Career Rose was born in 1935 and grew up in New York and Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Antioch College and pursued postgraduate studies in sociology at Northwestern University where she earned a Master of Arts degree in 1962 and a doctorate in 1974. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Managing uncertainty: The honeymoon period of new patients on an adolescent ward. She began her academic career at Colby College in 1974 before moving to the University of Michigan in 1993.

As well as teaching sociology and women's studies, Rose became increasingly interested in cultural history and, in particular, gender history in the context of the United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th centuries. She published Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (1992) which explored the relationship between gender and capitalism in a range of industries during the Industrial Revolution. Historian Angela Woollacott notes that according to Rose, class and gender are not separate systems or structures in 19th century industrial England, but the "content of class relations is gendered and the content of gender distinctions and gender relations is 'classed'". She also co-edited Gender and Class in Modern Europe (1996) and Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities (2002). After this, she was involved in the "imperial turn" in British historiography and co-edited At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006).