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HELENA ZNANIECKA LOPATA was the first woman in her family to raise her own children and be a full-time homemaker. After ten years of this life in the United States, she visited her Polish homeland and was inspired to rekindle her scholarly ambition. She chose women's social roles of homemaker, mother, worker, and widow as major areas of her research agenda. Since that time she amassed an astounding record: author or coauthor of ten books, series editor for Research on the Interweave of Social Roles and for Current Research on Occupations and Professions, thirty -five journal articles, contributor to twentyeight book chapters, and leadership positions in more than ten professional organizations. A full professor and director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Social Roles at Loyola University in Chicago, Lopata found that she could write much faster as she became more confident of her abilities.
BIOGRAPHY
Born October 1, 1925, in Poznan, Poland, Helena Znaniecka Lopata was the only child of Florian and Eileen Markley Znaniecki. Her father was born in 1882 into the landed gentry that was part of the Polish intelligentsia. He studied at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, earning his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Crakow. Znaniecki quickly published two books, but was unable to obtain a chair at a university for political reasons, mainly his previous involvement in student protest activities (Bierstadt 1969). He took a position at the Emigrant Protective Society, and it was because of this work that William I. Thomas (husband of Dorothy Swaine Thomas) invited him to the United States to work on a project about Polish immigrants.
While in Chicago, Znaniecki's first wife died suddenly. Shortly after that he met Eileen Markley, who became his second wife and Helena's mother. A remarkable person in her own right, Markley had received a bachelor' s degree in English Literature from Smith College, a master's degree in history from Columbia University, and a law degree from the University of Chicago, even though, as a woman, she had to sit in the hall outside the classroom for many of her classes. On her marriage, she quit her job with the Legal Aid Society and worked with her husband on the writing of The...