Maxine Baca Zinn, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University, is spending the fall term at the Henry A. Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College, researching the lives of women from different racial and ethnic families. Baca Zinn has spent more than two decades studying the impact of social and economic change on the family, particularly Latino and African-American families. She is the coeditor of a volume of original essays, Women of Color in U.S. Society (Temple University Press, 1994) and of the popular family textbook, Diversity in Families, which is now in its fourth edition.

"My scholarship challenges conventional ideas, social science concepts, and even the emergent feminist wisdom about women and men of different races and ethnicities," says Baca Zinn.

Much of Baca Zinn's research relates to the racial subtext of the national debate about family values. According to Baca Zinn, racial and ethnic preconceptions have created a hierarchy in which the same family structure is more acceptable for some members of society than others. For example, as more middle-class white women enter the labor force, female-headed households are gaining acceptance. On the other hand, black families, headed by females, have been labeled deviant and pathological, although 50 percent of black women have been in the labor force since 1880.

"Dr. Baca Zinn brings a valuable dimension to the research being done at the Murray Research Center," says Anne Colby, director of the Murray Center. "We are pleased that she will be drawing on some of the studies of diverse racial and ethnic groups that are archived here."

Baca Zinn joins seven other returning scholars at the Murray Research Center. They are: Rosalind Barnett, an expert on family, work, and stress, who is researching a new book on women in the 21st century; Anne Marie Cammisa, who is studying women in public office; Sarah Elizabeth Holmes, who is examining mother/adult-child relationships; John Laub, who is working on a longitudinal study of juvenile delinquents; Eileen McDonagh, who will continue her work on reframing the abortion debate; Catherine Nye, who is looking at how society's changing ideas about gender have affected women's lives; and Laura Pappano, who will use Murray Center data to investigate how changing social conditions, technology, narcissism, and consumerism are driving Americans to lead lonelier lives.