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Frances Fox Piven, born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1932, is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1962. In 2006-2007 she served as the President of the American Sociological Association. She was married to her long-time collaborator, Richard Cloward, who died in 2001.

Activism

Throughout her career, Piven has combined academic work with activism. One example: In 1983, she was cofounder of Human SERVE, an organization dedicated to getting people to register to vote. The group's proposition was that people should be asked to register to vote when applying for social services or using the services of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Since it is particularly the poor who often fail to register to vote—Piven knew this from her research—they tended to be disenfranchised. Human SERVE's initiative was taken up by the Clinton administration and made it into the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, colloquially called the "motor voter bill" (Ehrenreich 2006).

Honors and Awards

She has been honored with the American Sociological Association Career Award for the Practice of Sociology (2000), the Mary Lepper Award of the Womens' Caucus of the American Political Science Association (1998); the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociology Association; the Tides Foundation Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy (1995); the Annual Award of the National Association of Secretaries of State (1994); President's Award of the American Public Health Association (1993), Lee/Founders Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Prize; and the C. Wright Mills Award. (http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Sociology/faculty/)

Bibliography

• Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006)
• The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism (New Press, 2004)
• Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (Oxford University Press, 1992)

With Richard Cloward:

• Why Americans Still Don't Vote: And Why Politicians Want it That Way (Beacon, 2000)
• The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New Press, 1997)
• Why Americans Don't Vote: And Why Politicians Want it That Way (Beacon, 1988)
• New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (Pantheon, 1982)
• Poor People's Movements: Why the Succeed, How they Fail (Pantheon, 1977)
• Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (Pantheon, 1971)

With Lee Staples and Richard Cloward:

• Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing (Praeger, 1984)

The Frances Fox Piven Papers are held by Smith College; the Fivecolleges.edu website outlines the Scope and Contents of the Collection

Sources and References

• Barbara Ehrenreich, "2007 President is Defender of the 'Poorest of the Poor'", November 2006 issue of Footnotes (newsletter of the American Sociological Association)

• Frances Fox Piven faculty page at CUNY Graduate Center website

• Frances Fox Piven biography at Fivecolleges.edu

• Frances Fox Piven biography at Yale.edu

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