Barbara Sicherman taught history, American Studies and Women’s Studies, including courses on women’s history and on American culture in its many permutations.  She helped establish the Women’s Studies Program and was closely involved in efforts to increase hiring faculty of color.  

Professor Sicherman is a specialist in women’s history, whose research interests include medical and psychiatric history, women’s biography, and the role of reading in women’s lives. She is currently doing research on reproductive rights, in particular the illegal birth control clinics established in Connecticut in the 1930s . She is also organizing family papers and is experiencing sometimes surprising revelations, as did former students in her family history course.

She was a board member of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center for many years and is currently a volunteer tutor at Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford.  

Books:

• Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Alice Hamilton:  A Life in Letters.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984; reissued by University of Illinois Press, 2003.  
• Notable American Women:  The Modern Period, ed. with Carol Hurd  Green. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. 
• The Quest for Mental Health in America, 1880-1917. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
  

Recent Articles and Chapters:

• Editor, “Reproductive Rights after Griswold: A Fifty Year Retrospective,” Connecticut History, 54 (Fall 2015).
• “‘Let’s Do It’: Women Making History in the Land of Steady Habits,” Connecticut History, 51 (Spring 2012).
• “Reading Marjorie Morningstar: Then and Now,” A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson.  New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010.