Susan Eaton's long fight with leukemia ended on December 30, 2003, about six months after submitting her article “Eldercare in the United States: Inadequate, Inequitable, but Not a Lost Cause” to Feminist Economics. With the encouragement of her friends and colleagues and the agreement of her husband, Marshall Ganz, the editorial team decided to include this article in the special issue on gender and aging, making only minor editorial revisions.
Susan's life and work deserve recognition here. Before becoming Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, she spent twelve years working for the Service Employees International Union as an international representative, organizer, negotiator, researcher, and eventually a senior manager.
Susan's activist concerns inspired her research showing the benefits of improved working conditions for caregivers, which enjoyed considerable scholarly recognition. In the summer of 2003 she received a Robert Woods Johnson Award to study the links between the quality of work and the quality of care in the nursing home industry. Her article “Beyond Unloving Care: Linking Nursing Home Quality and Working Conditions” was a co-winner of the 1996 Margaret Clark award of the Institute of Gerontology.
As David Ellwood, Dean of the Kennedy School, put it, “She demonstrated that nursing homes and hospitals could both do better by their workers and improve the quality of care simply with better management practices. Much of her work spoke to the dignity that both caregivers and patients seek and deserve. This generalizable lesson seems so terribly important in this increasingly marketized era.”
Her committed voice will be missed, but the spirit of her scholarship and activism will continue to inspire those working to improve the lives of children, women, and men.