Postscript

Heather McLaughlin, Kyle Green, and Christopher Uggen

When a scholar’s insights grow to become taken-for-granted knowledge about the social world, she has attained real success. We prepared this volume with the hope and expectation that others will enjoy reading and remembering Helen Hacker as much as we have. She made absolutely fundamental contributions to the way sociologists, other scholars, and the public understand social relations in gender, sexuality, family relations, and other fields.

Some of her writing from the 1950s and 1970s is so fresh that it would be at home in a journal of 2018. Other writing, of course, is more a product of its time. Such is the fate of sociologists who write for five decades and are likely to be read for at least five more. Helen would welcome critique and argument. As her family takes care to remind us, Aunt Helen’s motto was, “why be difficult, when you can be impossible!”

Helen Hacker