Daniel Horowitz

Daniel Horowitz, Mary Higgins Gamble Professor of American Studies, Smith College, is a historian whose work focused on the history of consumer culture and social criticism in the U.S. during the 20th century.

He has spent most of his career at Scripps College in California (1972-88), where he eventually was named Nathaniel Wright Stephenson Professor of History and Biography, and at Smith College (1989 to the present), where he directed the American Studies program for 18 years and was, for a time, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies.  Among the honors he has received are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; one from the National Humanities Center; and an appointment as Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University. In 1997, the American Studies Association awarded him the Constance Rourke Prize for his 1996 article in American Quarterly, "Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique:  Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America."  The American Studies Association honored him again in 2003 with its Mary C. Turpie Prize for "outstanding abilities and achievement in American Studies teaching, advising, and program development at the local or regional level."

Among his publications are The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (1985), selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of 1985; Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994); Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, Modern Feminism (1998); The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2003), selected by Choice as one of the outstanding books of 2004 and winner of the Eugene M. Kayden Prize for the best book published in the humanities in 2004 by a university press.  He has edited two books for Bedford: Suburban Life in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard’s Status Seekers (1995) and Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The Crisis of Confidence Speech of July 15, 1979.

He lives with his wife, the historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in Cambridge and Northhampton, Massachusetts.  They are the parents of two children- Ben, who works as a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and Sarah, who is an Assistant Professor of History at Washington and Lee University.