Role: Associate Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College
Northampton, MA

  Contact: cbaker@smith.edu

  Research Interests:
Gender | Public Policy | Social Movements | Women's Legal History

Carrie N. Baker teaches courses on gender, law and public policy, including topical courses on sex trafficking and reproductive justice. She also offers courses in the Archives Concentration and was a founder of the Five College Program and Certificate in Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice. Baker graduated with a degree in philosophy from Yale University and received a doctor of law degree and a master's and doctorate from the Institute of Women’s Studies at Emory University. She was editor in chief of the Emory Law Journal while in law school and later served as a law clerk to United States District Court Judge Marvin Shoob in Atlanta. Before coming to Smith, she was on the faculty of Berry College in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, teaching sociology, women's studies and legal studies courses.

Baker's primary areas of research are women's legal history, gender and public policy, and women's social movements. Her book The Women's Movement Against Sexual Harassment (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which won the National Women's Studies Association 2008 Sara A. Whaley book prize, examines how a diverse grassroots social movement created public policy on sexual harassment in the 1970s and 1980s. The collaboration of women from varying racial, economic and geographic backgrounds strengthened the movement by representing the perspectives and activism of a broad range of women. Based on interviews and voluminous original research, this book shows how the movement against sexual harassment fundamentally changed American life in ways that continue to advance women's opportunities today.

Baker’s research, including several articles on sex trafficking, has also been published in Feminist Studies; Meridian; Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy; Women in Politics; The Journal of Women's History; Journal of Feminist Scholarship; NWSA Journal; Journal of Law and Inequality; Emory Law Journal and Social Movements in the United States.

Baker also writes for Ms. Magazine and Ms. blog. She is currently the secretary of the National Women's Studies Association.