Eleanor Touroff Glueck

Background

Glueck was born Leonia Touroff on April 12, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, the only daughter of Russian immigrant Bernard Leo and Polish immigrant Anna Wodzislawska, although she had two brothers.

Education

Glueck graduated from Hunter College High School in 1916, received a B. A. in English from Barnard College in 1920, and earned a diploma in community organization at the New York School of Social Work in 1921. Through the influence of one of her teachers, Bernard Glueck, a psychiatrist, Eleanor became a settlement house social worker in Boston from 1921 to 1922, whereupon she began graduate studies at Harvard University. Glueck received her M. Ed. in 1923 and her Ed. D. in 1925 from Harvard. In 1958, Sheldon and Eleanor became the first husband-and-wife team to receive the honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from Harvard.

Career

Glueck joined her husband on the faculty of Harvard's Department of Social Ethics in 1925, and they later both moved to the Harvard Law School Crime Survey in 1928. Sheldon became professor of criminology in 1931 and in 1950 was named Roscoe Pound Professor of Law. Eleanor worked with him as a research criminologist (1925-1928), research assistant (1930-1953), research associate (1953-1972), and codirector of the Harvard Law School program Research into the Causes, Treatment and Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency (1966-1972). Their various titles notwithstanding, Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck were a creative, prolific team pioneering in longitudinal field studies of American crime and delinquency for fifty years. Eleanor's publications include her doctoral thesis, The Community Use of Schools (1927); Extended Use of School Buildings (1927); Evaluative Research in Social Work (1936); and more than one hundred articles, reports, and reviews. She and her husband were also coauthors of eighteen books, including Five Hundred Criminal Careers (1930); Five Hundred Delinquent Women (1934); One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents (1934); Later Criminal Careers (1937); Juvenile Delinquents Grown Up (1940); Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950); Delinquents in the Making (1952); Predicting Delinquency and Crime (1959); and Delinquents and Nondelinquents in Perspective (1968). Their work yielded new insights for public policy, law, and medicine because they demonstrated how ineffective educational, police, penal, and social-welfare practices had been on youthful lawbreakers. In the United States and abroad, assumptions about the socioeconomic, somatic, intellectual, and emotional factors in juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior changed as a result of these painstaking, exhaustive research projects. Although finding a method of early detection and prevention of juvenile delinquency remained an unfulfilled goal, one major contribution of Eleanor Glueck's work was statistical evidence that the quality of a child's family life was the most important factor in determining juvenile delinquency. This was alarming and discouraging news in the Great Depression and postwar years, as national concern about juvenile delinquency and social problems created a new interest in criminology. Yet the implications of the Gluecks' research, that the roots of crime lie in the foundation of American society, were only slowly accepted in the New Deal and Great Society eras. As research criminologists, the Gluecks were professionally isolated at Harvard Law School and never received the attention their work may have won in academic circles. Eleanor also encountered some gender and religious biases, but she proved to be as effective a fund-raiser as she was a researcher. This was necessary because much of the Gluecks' research was supported by private foundations rather than by Harvard University or public funds. Eleanor's warm and engaging manner also won her respect and friendship among social-welfare and juvenile-justice professionals. Working outside the academic mainstream, with no graduate students or close professional colleagues, the Gluecks persevered in their original empirical research. The interdisciplinary nature of their work, at a time when criminology was defining its own area of specialization, and Eleanor's background in social work and education contributed to her marginal position. An out-of-fashion moralistic attitude toward her research subjects, free of sociology's jargon, also obscured her most useful contributions. Despite a lifetime of scientific research, she retained her professional ties to social work and the casework method, and she was a trustee of the Judge Baker Guidance Center for forty years. As a result, the validity of Eleanor Glueck's longterm work with young lawbreakers has only recently been recognized by sociologists and criminologists. Eleanor retired from Harvard Law School in 1964, but continued researching and writing with her husband until she accidentally drowned in a bathtub at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 74.

Achievements

• Glueck was a criminologist, whose numerous studies of criminal behaviour and of the results of correctional treatment profoundly influenced criminal justice, both legislatively and administratively.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ventures in Criminology

    ( Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative ventur...)

  • Delinquents and Nondelinquents in Perspective

    (A study of the causes and treatment of delinquency that e...)

  • Delinquents in the Making: Paths to Prevention,

    (This book is based on one of the most ambitious social su...)

  • Five Hundred Delinquent Women

    (Alfred A. Knopf; First Edition edition (1934))

  • Family Environment and Delinquency
  • Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency

Connections

On April 16, 1922, Eleanor married Dr. Glueck's brother, Sheldon Glueck, a lawyer and fellow graduate student at Harvard. The Gluecks had one child, a daughter, who predeceased her parents.

Father:

Bernard Leo Touroff

Mother:

Anna Wodzislawska

Spouse:

Sheldon Glueck

He was a Polish-American criminologist.

References

• Lives of Labor, Lives of Love: Fragments of Friendly Autobiographies (An Exposition-Banner book)