(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)June 20, 2016

(MAHWAH, NJ) –Dr. Ellen Ross, Emerita Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, discussed “Food and Shelter for Seven Million: The Women of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) 1945-1947” on February 25 under the auspices of The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Professor Ross examined the encounters the women of UNRRA had with the occupying armies and with the displaced persons (this was a new word at the time) who became the agency’s responsibility within days of the war’s end. Like their male colleagues, they were faced with a massive human catastrophe: millions of workers whom the Germans had enslaved during the war were liberated and on their own, the death toll of the concentration camps was registered as small groups of Jewish survivors returned, and larger numbers of Jews drifted into the U.S. and British zones to escape from the virulent anti-Semitism in their countries of origin.

UNRRA, the international government-funded organization that the Allies formed to repair the human and physical destruction of the Second World War, hired nearly as many women as men for its staff of ten thousand. The largest female contingent was American, the second-largest British. The salary was the highest most of the women had ever earned and their mandate was daunting. As the officials designated to have continuous and intimate contact with displaced people, they all had a great deal to say about the situation and needs of refugees–a topic of great concern to us today as well.

Prior to her retirement from Ramapo College in December 2014, Professor Ross co-chaired the Women’s Studies Program and taught courses in Women’s Studies and in British and European history. She holds B.A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Chicago and an M.A. from Columbia University. She has held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for College Teachers, a Leverhulme Visiting professorship at London Metropolitan University, and a fellowship at the National Humanities Center.

Her previous research has focused on London women’s history: Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (1993); and (as editor and author) the anthology Slum Journeys: Lady Explorers “In Darkest London” (2007). Other research deals with missions and missionaries in central London in the late nineteenth century and has been published in Journal of Victorian Culture (August 2010); 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 13 (2011) (an on-line refereed journal, Queen Mary University); and Church History (December 2014). Her current research is on the transformation of female philanthropy in the inter-war period: Girls Club Leader to “Mother of Millions:” From Social Work to Global Humanitarianism in Britain, 1914-1950.

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