Helen Lynd

Helen Merrell Lynd (1896 to 1982) was an American sociologist, social philosopher, educator and author, best known for the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, carried out with her husband Robert Staughton Lynd. Born in La Grange, Illinois, she studied philosophy at Wellesley College, took a master's degree in the history of ideas at Columbia University in 1922 and a doctorate in history and philosophy there in 1944. In 1924 the Lynds moved to Muncie for an eighteen-month study of everyday life, which compared the town in 1890 and 1924 and appeared as Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture in 1929, followed by Middletown in Transition in 1937; the work is regarded as the first sociological study of an American community and a pioneering use of social surveys, though it was criticized for centring the town's white Protestant majority. Lynd lectured at Vassar College and taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1929 to 1964. Her later books include England in the 1880s and On Shame and the Search for Identity, and she was called before Congress in 1953 during the McCarthy era.