Lucile Eaves

Lucile Eaves was an American sociologist, university professor, and activist born in 1869. She taught at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska, and Simmons College. She studied and advocated for the working class, women with disabilities, and labor law.

Lucile Eaves was born in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1869 and went to high school in Peoria, Illinois. She enrolled at Stanford University in 1892, shortly after it opened as one of the very few universities in the United States to admit women. After graduation, she taught high school history for a while in San Diego but moved to continue her education at the University of Chicago and then Columbia University.

She returned to California to aid in the relief effort following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She worked as a history instructor at Stanford, and published the book A History of California Labor Legislation in 1907. After finishing the book, she accepted a job teaching applied sociology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where she taught about European and American labor legislation, social betterment movements, poverty, and criminology. She was a member of the Nebraska Women's Suffrage Society, the American Association for Labor Legislation, and other organizations promoting labor reform and women's rights in Nebraska and nationally.

She would resign the job in Lincoln in 1915 because of low pay. She moved to Boston to teach at a Simmons College graduate program operated through Women's Educational and Industrial Union. In Boston, Eaves became one of the first sociologists to study medical sociology, especially women with physical disabilities. Her work prefigured modern sociology's concern with the structural ties between class and sex.

When Lucile Eaves died in 1953 in Brookline, Massachusetts she was professor emeritus at Simmons and the school's oldest faculty member then living.

Eaves enjoyed swimming, rowing, and aesthetic dancing.