Reimagining the Family: Introduction

Born in New York in 1960, Jane F. Levey attended Brown University, where Mari Jo Buhle inspired her interest in U.S. women's history. After she graduated from Brown, Jane worked as a manuscript editor at Yale University Press for several years before entering the Ph.D. program in American Studies at Yale in 1989. Jane was writing a dissertation on the restructuring of gender relations in the American family in the post-World War II era, under Nancy Cott's supervision, when she was diagnosed, in March 1998, with leukemia of an especially aggressive kind. After two unsuccessful rounds of chemotherapy at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, she was released with a nearly hopeless prognosis. She nonetheless underwent experimental chemotherapy at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and an experimental bone marrow transplant at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Connecticut, both of which proved unsuccessful. Jane died in New Haven on 4 April 1999.

While Jane was deeply engaged in her intellectual work, she also devoted herself to friends. Possessing rare personal grace and an extraordinary ability to connect with people, she formed around her a community drawn from all her life interests. Many in this circle were, like herself, aspiring historians who offered moral and intellectual support to one another. Jane's meditation on the isolation of a rural housewife in The Egg and I strikingly reminds her friends of how profoundly she herself defied isolation. During her illness, Jane's friends, family, and colleagues formed a "Friends of Jane" (FOJ) network to coordinate support and provide medical updates, communicating by means of e-mail. The FOJ Papers constitute an unusual archive, which was donated in June 1999 to the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Many of Jane's friends felt fervently that her intellectual efforts, prevented from achieving fruition in a completed dissertation, should result in some publication. She wrote drafts of four chapters before she died. The essay below (completed in 1996) was to be the first chapter and stands on its own as an introduction to her approach. After editing it slightly, we asked a number of prominent historians whose prior work was mentioned in Jane's footnotes if they would consider responding to the essay for publication. Everyone responded generously, with the commentary below as a result. Another chapter of Jane Levey's dissertation, with the title "'Spock, I Love Him,'" appeared in the Colby Quarterly (winter 2000), a special issue on American studies

 

Nancy F. Cott is Sterling Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Her latest book is Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000).

Jill Lepore is associate professor of history and American studies at Boston University and author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998) and A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (forthcoming, 2002). She is also coeditor of Common-Place (www.common-place.org).

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