Dorothy Swaine Thomas

Dorothy Swaine Thomas (1899 to 1977) was an American sociologist and economist, the 42nd president of the American Sociological Association and the first woman to hold that office. Born in Baltimore, she took her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in 1922 and her doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1924. She held research and teaching posts at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia Teachers College, the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and the Institute of Social Science at Stockholm University, and from 1948 worked at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she directed the Population Studies Center. With William I. Thomas, whom she married in 1935, she wrote The Child in America (1928), in which the Thomas theorem was formulated. Her main research field was population growth and its statistical side, including a multi-volume study with Simon Kuznets of population and economic growth in the United States, and she led Japanese American evacuation research. She was president of the Population Association of America in 1958 to 1959 and died in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1977.