Birthdays
Profiles of LGBT people, from the past and today – and celebrating their birthdays! All Birthdays →
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 15, 1936. She received a B.A. from Connecticut Women’s College before receiving a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1968. While Smith-Rosenberg’s early scholarship focused on urban religion in Victorian America, in 1975 she published “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in the feminist journal Signs. Influenced by her past marriage to historian Charles Rosenberg and her more recent lesbian relationships, Smith-Rosenberg’s influential essay explored same-sex love, intimacy, romance, and eroticism among white Victorian women in the United States. “The Female World” was later reprinted in her book Disorderly Conduct and commonly assigned in feminist, women’s studies, sexuality, LGBT, and queer studies courses. Smith-Rosenberg went on to explore lesbian histories in scholarship on the New Women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the medical pathologization of homosexuality during that period. Smith-Rosenberg taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and then at the University of Michigan until 2008. In 2010 Smith-Rosenberg published This Violent Empire, which explored the creation of America’s nation identity. For more on her academic work, life, and legacy, see Matthew Hauptman’s 2021 interview with Carrol Smith-Rosenberg.