Susan Cayleff (born 1954) is an American academic and emeritus professor at San Diego State University, having taught there from 1987 to 2020. She was one the inaugural members of the National Women's Studies Association Lesbian Caucus and served on the organization's Coordinating Council between 1977 and 1979. She founded the Women's History Seminar Series at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, Texas; the Graduate Women's Scholars of Southern California in 1989; and was a co-founder of the SafeZones program at San Diego State University.
Much of her research focused on women and health. She analyzed both how cultural and traditional beliefs shaped women's quest to find health solutions and the difference between beliefs and how institutional medical policies impacted women. Several of her works examined how alternative medical practices enabled women to become economically, socially, and politically active. Her book Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and won the GLAAD Outstanding Book Award in 1996. Her contributions to social equality and inclusion were recognized with the Ashley L. Walker Social Justice Award of the San Diego Human Relations Commission in 2018. The Cayleff and Sakai Faculty Chair of the Pride Center at San Diego State is named in honor of her and Carrie Sakai.
Early life and education
Susan E. Cayleff was born in 1954 in Boston, Massachusetts to Freda "Fritzi" (née Katz) and Nathan Cayleff. She had one sister, Joanie and the family lived in Brockton, Massachusetts, where the sisters' father operated a hardware store. Cayleff stated that though her parents were committed to the Civil Rights Movement and activism against anti-Semitism and for Native American and women's rights, she left home in 1973 because of her parents' homophobia and settled in Provincetown. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in women's studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976. The following year, while a student at Brooklyn College, she attended the inaugural conference of the National Women's Studies Association, having won a lottery to be a student delegate. She was elected to serve on the Coordinating Council as part of the Lesbian Caucus, along with Tucker Farley, Elisa Buenaventura, and Toni McNaron from 1977 to 1979.
In 1978, Cayleff earned her master's degree in women's history from Sarah Lawrence College. Her master's thesis, The Eradication of Female Midwifery was published in 1978 and explored the history of midwifery within the medical profession. Continuing her education, Cayleff earned a master's degree in American civilization in 1979 and her PhD in 1983 from Brown University. Her doctoral thesis continued with the themes of gender and medicine examining the nineteenth-century hydrotherapy movement and women's involvement in it. It was published as Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women's Health in 1987. Her study evaluated women as both users and providers of health therapies and how the traditions regarding their bodies and the environment were perceived and shaped by social norms which defined the doctor-patient relationship. As physicians characterized women as passive, weak, and prone to disease, they asserted authority over their bodies and created strict regimens for women to follow in regulating their menstrual cycles, pregnancies, and childbirth. Scholar Beth A. Robertson noted that Cayleff saw this extreme control and scrutiny as a driving factor in American and Canadian women's search for medical alternatives.
Career
In 1983, Cayleff was hired as an assistant professor of medical humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, Texas. She was the founder of the Women's History Seminar Series at the medical branch's obstetrics of gynecology department in 1984. Her course included making medical students aware of the different needs that their Chicana patients might have. She worked in Texas until 1987, when she took a post as an associate professor at San Diego State University, in California. Cayleff founded the Graduate Women's Scholars of Southern California in 1989 to facilitate networking for women scholars. Until 2002, the organization met in her home. In 2007, she co-founded the SafeZones program, a networking and support group for LGBTQIA+ and their allies. In 1993, Cayleff became a professor in San Diego State's women's studies program and was promoted to its chair in 1996. When the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes was founded to teach students over 50, Cayleff began teaching additional courses in women's history at the facility.