Virginia E. Rutter is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Framingham State University (MA), where she continues to teach. She’s a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families; for 10 years she co-directed CCF's communications and media program and mentored numerous FSU interns. In 2017 she facilitated a 6-week campus-wide teach-in at Framingham State, including 44 faculty and 64 classes, that focused on SHOWING (wrkxfmly), a photography installation from Working Assumptions (Berkeley, CA). Students in her families classes continue to have opportunities to work with this project. The FSU teach-in built on a model she used for a campus-wide, Black Lives Matter teach-in the year before, organized with colleagues in Sociology. She has received both top teaching and top scholarship honors at FSU and was a statewide union leader focused on transparency in unions and universities and on equity for adjunct faculty. In the past she has been co-PI for the NIH-funded National Couples Survey and a graduate policy fellow at the National Academies of Sciences Committee for Women in Science and Engineering. Her PhD dissertation at the University of Washington was The Case for Divorce: Under what conditions is divorce beneficial and for whom? Her MA in 18th Century British Literature at Queen Mary / University of London focused on Mary Wollstonecraft. She was an English and Art History major at Williams College. Virginia is the lead author of The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, and lead editor of Families as They Really Are: the 3rd edition is out in 2024. In 2022, she retired from her full-time faculty position of 16 years at FSU and moved to Washington, DC, where her partner lives. Areas of specialization: Gender; sexuality; marriage; intimate relationships and families; family policy; mental health; survey research; public sociology.
