Judith Blake (sociologist)

For other people named Judith Blake, see Judith Blake (disambiguation).

Judith Blake (1926–1993) was a sociologist and the first holder of an endowed chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Life

Blake was born and raised in New York City. She was raised by three generations of female family members, as her father went to work in California for most of her life growing up. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University in 1951, and graduated magna cum laude. While at college, she became interested in social demography. She was often ill for most of her life. In 1961, she received her PhD from Columbia University. She had a husband and a daughter.

Career and honors

While Blake was a graduate student, she was a research assistant working at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. Blake's early research was centered on Jamaica and Puerto Rico, and she worked for the Conservation Foundation as a research associate and co-director of field research. Blake moved to Berkeley, California in 1955, and became a lecturer at various institutions. In 1957-1959, she was a lecturer at the School of Nursing at University of California, San Francisco, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology in 1957, and finally a lecturer in the Department of Speech from 1961-1962. Blake later remarked that she felt that the university did not want female lecturers on staff. In 1956, she wrote an article entitled Social Structure and Fertility: An Analytic Framework with Kingsley Davis, which became a classic paper in her field. In 1962 Blake became an acting assistant professor of demography at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. In 1969, she established a program in demography, which became the Department of Demography. The school trained a large amount of demographers working in the United States and abroad. Blake continued to study families, and published a book entitled Family Size and Achievement in 1989 which concluded that single children were not worse off than those from two-children families. The book won the American Sociological Association's William J. Goode Book Award in 1990. In 1976, she became the first holder of an endowed chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was named the Fred H. Bixby Professor of Population Policy. In 1981, Blake was elected president of the Population Association of America. She was also the editor of the Annual review of Sociology at her death. She was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1982 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.

Books

• Family Structure in Jamaica: The Social Context of Reproduction (1961)
• Family Size and Achievement (1989)