Chair and Associate Professor
My research and teaching interests focus on women’s business ownership since World
War II, exploring the question of what has led so many women to start businesses in the
postwar decades. As a 20 th century U.S. social historian, my work situates
entrepreneurship in the context of people’s lives, delving into women’s goals in starting
businesses, the impact of their personal lives and professional experiences in launching
their ventures, the role of access to credit in shaping their businesses, and whether
business can be a tool for social change – topics explored in my book She’s the Boss:
The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II (Rutgers, 2025.) I am also
interested in the links between social entrepreneurship today with its historical legacies
in earlier eras. In 2016, I was a consultant/member of the scholar working group
assisting the Congressional Commission for the proposed American Museum of
Women’s History in Washington, D.C.
Debra Michals, She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship Since World
War II (Rutgers University Press, April 2025).
Debra Michals, “Selling Out or Staying True? Fear, Anxiety, and Debates about
Feminist Entrepreneurship in the 1970s Women’s Movement” in Andrew Popp and
Mandy Cooper, editors, The Business of Emotions in Modern History. (Bloomsbury
Press, February 2023.)
Debra Michals, “Muriel Siebert.” American National Biography. Oxford University Press
(Spring 2022.) https://www.anb.org/display/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-
9780198606697-e-17230
Debra Michals, “The Buck Stops Where? 1970s Feminist Credit Unions, Women’s
Banks, and the Gendering of Money,” Business and Economic History On-Line. Vol. 16
2018.
Debra Michals, “Dads Can Cuddle, Too: Feminism, ’60s Sitcoms and the Making of
Modern Fatherhood” in Nicole Willey and Dan Friedman, editors, Feminist
Fathering/Fathering Feminists (Demeter Press, 2018).
Debra Michals, “The Rise of the Woman Entrepreneur in the Postwar Era,” A Different
Point of View (a publication of the National Women’s History Museum) Volume 25,
December 2016.
Debra Michals, “From ‘Consciousness Expansion’ to ‘Consciousness Raising’:
Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self,” in Peter Braunstein and Michael
William Doyle, editors, Imagine Nation: American Countercultures in the 1960s and ’70s
(New York: Routledge Press: 2002), 41-68.
Mary Beth Norton, Debra Michals, et al. A People and a Nation (concise, 8th edition,
2009; concise 9th edition, 2011; concise 10th edition, 2014). (Boston:
Wadsworth/Cengage).
The Lowell Youth Leadership Program, co-founded by Andres Lopez M’18, aims to enrich children’s social skills and their physical health.
