ELISABETH BRIANT LEE was born in 1908. A talented artist and intellectual, Lee was the second woman to graduate from Yale with a doctorate in Sociology. Lee is a living testament to the challenges women in Sociology have faced. A brilliant and dedicated student, Lee confronted resistance from Universities whose discrimination against scholarly women prevented her from ever holding a full-time, permanent position in the academic world. Lee has made dramatic impacts on Sociology in a different, much more creative role: editing, reworking and proofing eleven books co-authored by her husband, Alfred McClung Lee. Particularly well known is The Fine Art of Propaganda by A.M. Lee and E.B. Lee where they have made sociological concepts and analysis available to the public in a readable manner. In association with the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, the Lees examined the power and influence of mass communications with important criticism. Her activism has promoted the emancipation of peoples with social problems. As founder, facilitator and major supporter of the Association for a Humanist Sociology, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and Sociological Practice Association, her efforts in this regard have touched most people in the profession today. Lee survives her husband and is currently living in Durham, North Carolina near her family. She insists that she has yet to produce her most significant work: on American women.

HEIDI HENRICKSON is Assistant Editor for a series of brief biographies on women in American Sociology. She and MINDY EPHRAIM interviewed Betty Briant Lee at her Durham, N.C., home.