Hester Eisenstein retired (with very mixed feelings!) from Queens College in August 2020. She was a Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, from 1996. From then until 2001 she served as the Director of Women’s Studies at Queens. She also served as the founding director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center from 2015 to 2017.
At Queens she taught courses on women and work, the sociology of gender, and global feminism. Her most recent book is Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Taylor and Francis, 2009). Her previous books include Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State (1994), Gender Shock: Practicing Feminism on Two Continents (1991) and Contemporary Feminist Thought (1984). She serves on the board of the journal Socialism and Democracy and is a frequent contributor to the annual Historical Materialism conference in London.
She taught previously at Yale University, Barnard College (Columbia University), and the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she spent eight years in the 1980s as a “femocrat” in the state government of Neville Wran in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She received her Ph.D. in history from Yale in 1967. She is married to the economist Michael Tanzer and has three stepsons and two step-granddaughters.