Elisabeth Israels Perry

Perry was born in New York City, the daughter of Irma Commanday Bauman and her first husband, attorney Carlos Lindner Israels.^[1][2] Her mother and stepfather, singer Mordecai Bauman, co-founded and ran the Indian Hill Music Workshop in Massachusetts.^[3][4] Her brother is jazz musician Chuck Israels; their paternal grandmother was activist Belle Moskowitz.^[5][6]

Perry attended Hunter College High School, graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1960, and completed her doctoral studies in French history there in 1967,^[7] based on research she conducted in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship.^[8][9][10]

Perry taught at the University of Colorado Boulder,^[7] the University of Cincinnati, the University of Iowa, Vanderbilt University,^[6][11] and Brooklyn College.^[8][9] She and her husband held a joint faculty appointment at Saint Louis University, where she was chair of the history department and interim chair of the women's studies department.^[12][13] In 1994 she was named director of the master's program in women's history at Sarah Lawrence College.^[11] She directed the NEH Summer Seminar in Women's History seven times.^[8]

Perry was president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) from 1998 to 2000.^[14] She contributed articles to the Jewish Women's Archive^[15] and The Encyclopedia of New York City,^[16] and was a member of the editorial advisory board of Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997).^[15]

Perry's research appeared in scholarly journals including Labor History,^[17] American Quarterly,^[18] Canadian Review of American Studies,^[19] New York History,^[20][21] Tennessee Historical Quarterly,^[22] Journal of Women's History,^[23] National Forum,^[24] OAH Magazine of History,^[25] and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.^[26]

• From Theology to History: French Religious Controversy and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1973)^[27]
• "Industrial reform in New York City: Belle Moskowitz and the protocol of peace, 1913–1916" (1982)^[17]
• "'The General Motherhood of the Commonwealth': Dance Hall Reform in the Progressive Era" (1985)^[18]
• "Scholars Confront the ERA" (1987, review essay)^[19]
• "Women's Political Choices After Suffrage: The Women's City Club of New York, 1915-1990" (1990)^[20]
• Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (1992)^[28]
• The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (1992, co-editor with Sara Alpern, Joyce Antler, and Ingrid Winther Scobie)^[29]
• ""The Very Best Influence": Josephine Holloway and Girl Scouting in Nashville's African-American Community" (1993)^[22]
• "From Achievement to Happiness: Girl Scouting In Middle Tennessee, 1910s-1960s" (1993)^[23]
• Women in Action: Rebels and Reformers 1920-1980 (1995, for the League of Women Voters)^[30]
• America: Pathways to the Present (1995, textbook, with Andrew Cayton, Linda Reed, and Allan M. Winkler)^[31][32]
• "Critical Journey: From Belle Moskowitz to Women's History" (1997)^[24]
• "The Changing Meanings of the Progressive Era" (1999)^[25]
• "Rhetoric, Strategy, and Politics in the New York Campaign for Women's Jury Service, 1917-1975" (2001)^[21]
• "Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era" (2002)^[26]
• After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia’s New York (2018)^[33]

Elisabeth Israels married Bulgarian-born composer Henri Lazarof in 1958.^[10][34] She married fellow historian Lewis Perry in 1970. They had two children together, Susanna and David. She died from cancer in 2018, at the age of 79, in Omaha, Nebraska.^[8][9]