Mary Margaret grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, a blue-collar union town, during the heyday of steel production and union power.  She spent her undergraduate years during the late sixties at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, known for its vibrant student and anti-war movements.  Mary Margaret received her PhD in sociology from The Ohio State University where she studied social movements and gender and wrote a dissertation about the union activism of women steelworkers that she eventually published as Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America. Throughout her 40-year career in higher education, she continued to write about union feminism and to teach courses about women, work, and labor activism.  She published two books about transnational union feminism, Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances between Women and Labor (with Suzanne Franzway) and, Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership (ed. with Suzanne Franzway and Valentine M. Moghadam). She is currently working on an essay about Queer labor activism and an essay on women’s labor union leadership. 

Mary Margaret has been committed to building space inside the academy where students and scholars can create new knowledge about the intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality, and disability. She joined the faculty at Arizona State University after a twenty-year career at Ohio State where she helped to build the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the founding Director of ASU's School of Social Transformation that houses the Center for Work and Democracy and is a member of its advisory board. Her future work will center on ways to build the social-movement leadership capacity of students, particularly in movements for economic justice.

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(Image credit: Jacen Sievers, FLOWSTATE Films)