Rose Hum Lee | The Story of Us

Rose Hum Lee was born in 1904 and raised in Butte, Montana. She earned her B.S. in social work from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1947. In 1956, she was named head of the sociology department at Roosevelt University in Chicago, thus making her the first generation Chinese American who became the first woman and the first Chinese American to head a United States university sociology department. Her dissertation—The Growth and Decline of Rocky Mountain Chinatowns—was published in 1978. Because her work was largely based on the experiences of her own family and childhood, her scholarship offers invaluable insights into the lives of Chinese women and families in Butte during the first four decades of the twentieth century.