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Mary Fainsod Katzenstein

American political scientist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ88979422 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein is an American political scientist. She is the Stephen and Evalyn Milman Professor of American Studies, Emerita at Cornell University. She specializes in prison reform in the United States, the history of American feminist activism, and the politics of India.

Career

By 2015, the year of her retirement to emerita status, Katzenstein had published seven books and 39 articles. Katzenstein was the sole author of the 1979 book Ethnicity & Equality the Shiv Sena Party. The book studies the conditions under which nativist ideas can be organized into coherent political movements, using the case of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena Party in 1960s India.

In 1998, Katzenstein published the book Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and the Military. In Faithful and Fearless, Katzenstein demonstrates how the feminist protests of the 1960s in the United States, which began outside of official political institutions, had by the 1990s transformed into a movement that largely took place inside the mainstream of American political institutions. Faithful and Fearless won the 1999 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association, which honors the best book published on the topic of women and politics each year.

From 2001 to 2002, Katzenstein was the recipient of a Russell Sage Foundation grant to study how federal government policy in the US has impacted the growth of prisons.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Mary Fainsod Katzenstein” as american political scientist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mary, Fainsod and Katzenstein.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2015, 1979, 1998, 1999—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1945-02-12. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Mary, Fainsod and Katzenstein providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Mary Fainsod Katzenstein”, the useful work is to connect “american political scientist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q88979422. VIAF identifies the subject as 109318018. The Library of Congress control number is n79014058. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015, 1979, 1998 and 1999.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mary Fainsod Katzenstein” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.