Beryl Satter

Research Interests: 20th-century United States history; history of women; cultural history; urban history.

Beryl Satter's first book, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (University of California Press, 1999) examined the relationship between New Thought, a popular, proto-New Age religious movement, the late nineteenth-century women's movement, and Progressivism. It traced the ways that New Thought adherents engaged with and sometimes contested contemporary ideas about gender, race and sexuality. It also showed the influence of ideas about gender, race and sexuality on American religion, health and politics.  It outlined the ways that debates on these issues shaped the transition from a Victorian to a modern social order. Her articles "Marcus Garvey, Father Divine and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality," American Quarterly 47:4 (March 1996): 43-76 and "The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective: Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Twentieth-Century America," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12: 3 (July 2003): 424-464 similarly examine the relationship between gender, politics and sexuality in two distinct cultural moments during the twentieth century.

Dr. Satter’s second book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), won the Liberty Legacy Award in Civil Rights History and the National Jewish Book Award in History, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Ron Ridenhouer Book Prize.  It told the story of Dr. Satter's father, attorney Mark J. Satter, who fought exploitative, racially based real estate speculation in Chicago, and the many community activists who continued this battle after Mark Satter's death. In the late 1960s these activists formed an organization, the Contract Buyers League (CBL), which consisted of African-American residents of Chicago's West and South Sides.  The CBL fought redlining as well as the state and federal laws that enabled racially biased credit policies to flourish. Their efforts ultimately culminated in the passage of two landmark pieces of federal legislation in the 1970s -- the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.  One part of the story of this mid-twentieth-century battle against housing exploitation is presented in Dr. Satter's article "'Our greatest moments of glory have been fighting the institutions we love the most': the Rise and Fall of Chicago's Interreligious Council on Urban Affairs, 1958-1969," U.S. Catholic Historian 22:2 (Spring 2004): 33-44.

Dr. Satter is a co-founder of the Queer Newark Oral History Project, and has received several awards for her work on behalf of LGBT youth.  She is the author of scholarly articles on topics ranging from black police offers’ struggles against police brutality to the role of therapeutic practices the New Left. She has been interviewed about housing discrimination and police brutality on numerous radio programs and by many media outlets. Ta-Nehisi Coates drew upon her work on contract selling in Chicago for his award-winning article “The Case for Reparations.”  In 2015, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.  She is currently working on a book about credit, racism, and uneven development, which she will analyze through the history of a pioneering community development bank called ShoreBank."

For more information on Dr. Satter's current projects visit http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/beryl-satter.