Hofstra professor encouraged gender equality and supported women and girls.
Selma Weintraub Greenberg (1930-1997)
Gender roles get started as early as the crib, according to Selma Greenberg. In hospitals, babies are labeled with tags: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” What does that tell adults? “You know how to treat them.”
Selma was a professor of education at Hofstra University for 29 years and an expert in gender issues in early childhood. Her 1978 book, Right from the Start: A guide to Nonsexist Child Rearing, debunked the stereotypes and encouraged gender equality.
Selma, who was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Benjamin and Anna Weintraub, was a nationally known advocate for women and girls. She received her bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, her master’s at City University of New York (CUNY) in Queens and her doctorate in education at Columbia University Teachers College.
She and William Greenberg, an accountant, married in 1952 and lived in Great Neck, Long Island. They had two daughters, Ellen and Lisa, and a son, Andrew. She joined the Hofstra faculty in 1966.
In classrooms and at conferences, she sought to re-educate a generation of teachers. Doll corners in nursery schools should be “bombed out,” she told educators and administrators at a 1974 workshop at SUNY Old Westbury on sex-role stereotyping, because “boys pick up very quickly that their role is somehow superior.”
A few months earlier, Selma was quoted in a Newsday story titled Male and Female: The Differences Are Changing. “I would venture to guess,” she said, “that if people were not socialized into sexual differences so early, thoroughly and relentlessly, that most of the differences would have a much greater range within the sex than between the sexes.”
That “early, thorough and relentless” socialization was observed in the Hofstra nursery school, she said. Children from ages 3 to 5 already had firm ideas about who did what: Men were doctors and women were nurses. Men fixed automobiles and women didn’t. They knew it all by age 3, she said.
After the study, Selma helped develop a “basic human needs” curriculum for nursery schools that offered the same opportunities for boys and girls and tried to eliminate traditional roles. “It was never that case that girls would not want to build,” she said, but “boys wouldn’t want to cook or sew.” Eventually, the boys joined in all activities.
Selma dispensed advice for parents, too. “If children grow up seeing one parent giving orders and the other parent taking orders … they will not basically believe that males and females are equal,” she said in a 1979 interview in The New York Times. The mother needs “to establish her own place in the family in such a way that when the children grow up, they will see her as a powerful person,” she said.
In addition to teaching, Selma was chair of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra and served two terms as Speaker of the Faculty and one term as Affirmative Action Officer. She received the Outstanding Alumna Award from Teachers College at Columbia, Woman of the Year from Women on the Job, and the 1966 Woman of Valor Award from Educational Equity Concepts.
Selma Weintraub Greenberg died of cancer in May 1997. She was 66. In tribute, all flags at Hofstra were lowered to half-staff. Her fund at The New York Community Trust supports programs for women and girls through our Long Island grant program.