March 3, 1997

22nd Grant Memorial Lecture: “Women

and the Law”

Noted historian Joan Hoff delivered the 22nd Charles

S. Grant Memorial Lecture, entitled “Women and the Law,”

to a Middlebury College audience recently, at the Center for the

Arts.

Joan Hoff earned her Ph.D. at the University of California,

Berkeley, and is a specialist in 20th Century American foreign

policy, politics, and the legal status of women. Her early writings

include American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920-1933

(1971), which received the Bernath prize; Ideology and Economics:

United States Relations with the Soviet Union, 1918-1933 (1974);

and a biography, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive

(1975).

Professor Hoff has taught courses and written extensively

in the field of women’s history. Two of her articles won the 1977

Berkshire Prize and the 1980 Vivian Paladin Award. She received

an NEH research grant to study the impact of the American Revolution

on the legal status of women, and continued this project at the

Radcliffe Institute, Harvard Law School, and at the Brookings

Institution. She has co-edited essays on Eleanor Roosevelt, the

ERA, and on the legal history of U.S. Women, and she authored

Nixon Reconsidered which appeared in 1994.

From 1987 to 1996, Professor Hoff co-founded and

co-edited the international Journal of Women’s History.

Most recently, she served as president of the Center for the

Study of the Presidency. During the past year, her interviews

and lectures on presidents and presidential politics have included

frequent appearances on CNN and Fox Cable News.

Charles S. Grant had been a member of the Middlebury

history department for several years prior to his untimely death

in 1961. A gifted, much loved teacher and esteemed scholar, Professor

Grant won wide acclaim for his book, Democracy in the Connecticut

Frontier Town of Kent, which was published in 1961, not long

before his death. Shortly thereafter, several of his colleagues

and friends in the Middlebury community formed a committee and

created a fund to establish an annual lectureship in American

history as a fitting and enduring tribute to him.