Linda Gordon

In 2017, Gordon published The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.

Gordon was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.

Pitied But Not Entitled, her history of welfare, won the Berkshire Prize for best book in women's history and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award. Gordon was active with the failed campaign of a group of scholars of welfare protesting the repeal of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.

Changing direction in the 1990s, Gordon began to explore narrative, story-telling history, as a way of bringing large-scale historical developments to life. A westerner herself, she wanted to write stories that would help to counteract the East Coast bias in the way American history has been told. Her book The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, the story of a vigilante action against Mexican-Americans, won the Bancroft Prize for best book in American history and the Beveridge Award for best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere.

In 1988 she published a historical study of how the U.S. has dealt with family violence, including child abuse, spousal violence and sexual abuse, Heroes of Their Own Lives, which won the Joan Kelly prize of the American Historical Association.

Linda Gordon is an American feminist and historian. She lives in New York City and in Madison, Wisconsin. She won the Marfield Prize for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, and the Antonovych Prize for Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine (SUNY Press, 1983).

Starting in the 1970s, Gordon's research and writing examined the historical roots of contemporary social policy debates in the US, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. Her book on these topics, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (published in 1976 and reissued in 1990), remains the definitive history of birth control politics in the US. It was completely revised and re-published in 2002 as The Moral Property of Women.

She taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston from 1968 to 1984, and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1984 to 1999. The University of Wisconsin awarded her the university's most prestigious chair professorship, the Vilas Research Chair. Today, she is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University. Gordon was a founding associate editor of the Journal of Women's History and serves on the advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Linda Gordon was born on April 12, 1953 in Hamilton Air Force Base, California, USA.