Barbara A. Yates

          Barbara Ann Yates was born on October 14^th, 1933 in Schoharie County, New York, the only child of John Yates and Marion Haines Yates. Barbara’s family had deep roots in the area, with her maternal ancestors arriving in the region as Protestant dissenters from Catholic-dominated south Germany via the Low Countries in 1714. The Haines family members who settled in Schoharie County were yeoman farmers who received several hundred acres of farmland in the area. The farmhouse and land belonging to Barbara’s direct maternal ancestor had been passed down father-to-son until 1944, when it was sold by her mother and aunts. However, the land had not been farmed by any Haines family member since Barbara’s maternal grandfather rented the land out to tenant farmers so that he could pursue a non-agricultural career, the first member of the family to do so. 

            The Haines grandfather’s trajectory is important as it bears striking similarities to that of Barbara herself. Her grandfather wanted to be an army officer but as a “politically-unconnected farm boy” he was unable to secure a senatorial endorsement required to enroll in officer training at West Point. So, instead he went to Albany State College where he studied in the pre-med track and finished medical training at Up-State Medical Center before starting a country practice in the county seat of Schoharie.[1] Like Barbara, her maternal grandfather craved travel and adventure and, so, he enlisted in Schoharie County Volunteers where he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Army, and served as an army physician in Philippines during the Spanish-American War (April-August, 1898). Army life and international travel must have suited him, as he went on to re-enlist as a Major and worked on malaria mitigation projects in the then-under-construction Panama Canal. International travel and government service are overlapping features of Barbara’s life and those of her maternal grandfather. Indeed, Barbara herself identified these connections in a fragment of an autobiography where she explains the lengthy treatment of her maternal grandfather’s career because it reflected that her “early family socialization was intimately related to the East coast WASP colonial tradition of duty, honor and service to the country.” While Barbara was not a medical doctor and she would eventually leave federal service for academia, it is hard not to read overlaps between her career trajectory and interests and those of her maternal grandfather.

            We know slightly less about Barbara’s paternal family history as the autobiographical fragments she left have scarce information. However, she does state that the Yates family’s ancestral home was the village of Fonda, also in upstate New York and close to where the Haines side of the family had their land. John Yates was born and raised in Fonda along with his parents and siblings, and Barbara writes that she spent the first seven years of her life living directly across the Mohawk River from Fonda proper. Barbara writes that her parents always maintained that there was a distant familial relationship between the Yates family and the more famous Fonda family that includes Hollywood stars Henry, Peter, and Jane Fonda. Indeed, she writes that later in life her mother informed her that, had she been born male, she would have been named Peter Fonda Yates in recognition of this supposed relation. Whether this blood relation actually existed, and why the connection would only be highlighted in name had she been male, are left unclear in Barbara’s recollections. 

             Barbara writes that memories of her early years are rather sparse and while she can remember some isolated episodes from the period, she cannot recall routine family life or details like what her favorite childhood foods were. The haziness of these memories is likely the result of recollections many decades after the fact, but also possibly due to the emotional specificities of Barbara’s family life and relationships. Reading her autobiographical fragments and speaking with people who knew her, it is clear that Barbara Yates was not an overly emotional person. The more reserved demeanor is perhaps rooted in Barbara’s relationship with her parents and, indeed, the relationship between her mother and father both of which she describes as relatively emotionless. For example, Barbara describes the correspondence between her parents from 1915, which she found later in life, as being filled with casual chatter and life updates that “were in no sense love letters and expressed no intimate feelings.” Indeed, Barbara speculates that her parents’ marriage was due more to convenience than affection, writing “My guess is that John, my future father, was a comfortable friend of long acquaintance and that the marriage was based, not on love, but upon my mother’s fantasies of being the wife of a well-off small town businessman with the proper lineage (pedigree).”[2]

            The emotional distance between her parents may have also characterized Barbara’s relationship with them, as nowhere in her memoir fragments does she write about emotional content or relationships with either parent. Despite having a seemingly distant relationship with her parents, Yates clearly maintained a connection to her extended family roots and ancestral home throughout her life. Her papers include a clipping advertising a publication called The New World Book of Yates, which purports to contain information on the Yates Family in the Western Hemisphere since 1619.[3] In a 1959 letter to a friend, written while living in Indonesia and working for USIS, Yates writes that she intends to buy back her family farm using her savings and money she recently inherited. Yates does not indicate a fondness for nor desire to work the land, but states to her friend that it would be a shame to lose hold of a property that had been in her family for 250 years. This plan never materialized, as Barbara Yates settled in San Diego after retiring from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and she spent the remaining years of her life there. However, the fact that she researched her family history and sought to include these details in her memoir indicate that she maintained an interest in her roots and desired to expand on her knowledge of her family’s history. 

Barbara Yates began her graduate education at the University of California at Berkeley, moving directly from the completion of her BA program in 1955 to an MA program, which she began in that same year. As in her BA program, Yates’ MA was in Economics, with a geographical and thematic focus on development in Southeast Asia. She completed the MA program in 1956 with a thesis titled “Industrial Planning and Policy in Indonesia.” Her Thesis Committee consisted of Professors John B. Condliffe, Choh-Ming Li, and Robert A. Scalapino. 

The topic of her MA thesis, and field research that she conducted to support it, likely invigorated a nascent interest in Southeast Asia and issues of development, infrastructure, and agriculture. She conducted field research in Indonesia between September and December 1956, funding this work in part through a Ford Foundation grant she received in 1955. She would return to Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia during her stint in federal service as a Cultural Affairs Officer for the United States Information Agency (details of which will be described in the next blog on Dr. Yates’ federal services).

The border between Yates’ career in the foreign service and the continuation of her advanced degree programs is more porous than one might expect. For example, after her final posting with USIA in Zaire, Yates pursued coursework in French at the University of Paris – Sorbonne in Fall 1962. Her pursuit of French language skills indicates that her experience in Zaire was significantly impactful on Yates’ intellectual development as the language would be most directly useful for pursuing research in that country. While she had French language abilities and skills prior to this posting, she had previously indicated more interest in pursuing research in Southeast Asia and developing her rudimentary skills in Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia (the languages of those two countries). That Yates’ doctoral research and the bulk of her writings concerned education policy in Central Africa, and Zaire especially, seems to prove this assumption. 

Yates would become a prolific author of academic publications, and this process began even prior to her doctoral studies. For example, Yates used her experiences in both the MA program at UC Berkeley and in the foreign service to draft her first publications. “The Art of Batik in Indonesia”, published in 1961. This was likely the result of both her MA field research and posting to Jakarta with USIA. As a Cultural Affairs Officer, Yates would likely have been involved with projects relating to arts, education, and culture and this publication falls within these themes. 

Her next two pre-PhD publications similarly reflect the connection between her foreign service and academic work. As stated above, Yates’ last posting with USIA was in Zaire. This post clearly pushed her toward the topics on which she would focus in her PhD program and later career, and this is reflected in two publications, also appearing in 1961. The first, “Railways and Waterways in Africa,” reflects an enduring interest in transportation infrastructure that we first saw in the post about Yates’ foreign service. In her correspondence from that earlier period, she writes extensively on her observations of infrastructure, transportation, and agriculture. These themes continued to animate her later scholarly output, beginning with this piece. 

The third publication from 1961, “A Precious Legacy: University Development in West Central Africa,” is most directly related to Yates’ interests in education in Africa. This would be the topic of her doctoral work in Comparative Education that she began at Columbia University in 1962. Of note is that Yates began her PhD program in the Spring semester rather than the traditional Fall semester starting point. It is unclear exactly why she began in Spring, but she may have obtained permission to begin late due to remaining commitments with USIA. However, she also briefly attended French courses at the University of Paris – Sorbonne in the Fall of 1962, indicating that this course of study may have necessitated a delayed start to the doctoral program. 

Once she began, Yates’ time at Columbia followed the conventional path of American PhD programs in that she completed coursework for the first several years. The list of courses that Yates took reflect the range of her interests, with courses on fundamentals like Philosophies of Education and Studies in Comparative and International Education existing in tandem with more specialized courses like Studies in African Education and the Psychology of Social Change. Yates completed her required coursework in the Spring term of 1964, officially obtaining Doctoral Candidate status as of the Summer 1964 term. It was at this point that she traveled to Belgium and Zaire to conduct field research for her dissertation project. 

In addition to coursework and field research, Yates also held teaching positions during her time as a doctoral student at Columbia. Like many graduate students, she served as a Teaching Assistant, or Reader in Columbia’s parlance. During the 1962-1963 academic year she served as a course assistant for two courses taught by Professor George Bereday, one on Comparative Education and one on Education and Society. For the following 1963-1964 academic year she was course assistant to Professor C.T. Hu who also taught a course on Comparative Education. Yates had experience as a Teaching Assistant, having previously served as one for a course taught by Professor Choh Ming-Li at UC Berkeley during her MA in 1955. While her files do not indicate which course this was for, Professor Choh Ming-Li was a specialist in economic development with a regional specialization in China and East Asia, and so the course was likely related to these topics. 

Tenure as a Teaching Assistant was not her only experience in the classroom during her doctoral experience. Yates ended up teaching her own courses during her time as a graduate student, though not at Columbia. Rather, she served as a Lecturer for a course on Comparative Education for Newark State University’s Extension Division (Fall 1965) and for two courses at Brooklyn College’s Department of Education, one also on Comparative Education and the other called Social Foundations of Education (Summer 1963; Fall 1965). She continued to teach courses outside of her main academic institution of appointment even after beginning her tenure at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Between 1967 and 1984, for example, she supplemented her research and teaching at UIUC by teaching courses on education, development, and international relations at various colleges in northern Illinois. Speaking to her lifelong love of flying and adventurous spirit, she commuted to and from these teaching gigs by light aircraft rather than by car. 

Yates completed her dissertation, titled The Missions and Educational Development in Belgian Africa, 1876-1908, in 1967. Her dissertation committee consisted of David G. Scanlon (Chair), R. Freeman Butts, and Benjamin Rivlin. As the title indicates, the dissertation focused on her core interests of education and development that act as a connective sinew throughout her entire life. Based on earlier notes and outlines for the dissertation, her project shifted slightly over the course of her graduate student tenure. For example, earlier iterations of the project focused more on Belgian politics and how they affected educational policy in Africa in a longer time span, from 1878 to 1960. More significant among the changes, however, concern a shift of emphasis to include more focus on African responses to Belgian colonial policy. That is, rather than a top-down, European perspective that anchored earlier iterations of the project, the final dissertation incorporated more African agency and presence. 

Her doctoral research was funded in part by several grants and fellowships she obtained. She was awarded an American Association of University Women Traveling Fellowship for the 1964-1965 academic year to fund doctoral research in the colonial archives in Belgium. Earlier, she obtained a National Defense Education Act Fellowship to help fund her doctoral studies between 1962 and 1964. These would be the first of many awards, grants, and fellowships that Yates would obtain to fund her research throughout the rest of her career. 

1. ^

    What was then called Zaire is now the current Democratic Republic of the Congo. For the sake of brevity, and to reflect the nomenclature that Yates herself used at the time, Zaire will be used throughout this blog. 

2. ^

    “The Art of Batik in Indonesia.” School Arts, LX, No. 5 (Jan. 1961), pp. 7-10.

    

3. ^

    “Railways and Waterways in Africa.” Journal of Geography, LX, No. 3 (March 1961), pp. 120-135. 

    

4. ^

    “A Precious Legacy: University Development in West Central Africa.” Overseas: The Journal of Educational Exchange I, No. 2 (Oct. 1961), pp. 23-27.

    

Barbara A. Yates is best known for her academic and scholarly work, including her role as the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity (CSGGE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Yet Yates had an entire career prior to pursuing a PhD and her subsequent academic work and output. As one can read in the preceding blocks, Yates’ experience during her undergraduate (1951-1955) and MA training (1955-1956) at the University of California Berkeley likely played a significant role in influencing her future research interests and scholarly output. This academic training also, however, inspired a career in federal service overseas prior to her joining the PhD program in Comparative Education at Columbia University in 1967. Yates’ experience in the foreign service abroad similarly influenced her intellectual and career trajectories, and her personal relationships during this time also provides insight into her thinking and worldview that transcend the personal, political, and intellectual. It is this stint in the foreign service to which we now turn. 

Yates was employed with the United States Information Agency (USIA) from 1957 to 1962. The USIA was founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on August 1, 1953 “to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the U.S. national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions and their counterparts abroad.” The USIA was very much a tool in the United States government’s Cold War arsenal, and its operations were designed to offset negative publicity emanating from the Soviet Union and other states within the Communist Bloc. There is no evidence at this time that Yates was a Cold Warrior or inspired to join the foreign service for political or ideological reasons. Rather, her applying for federal employment was likely the result of a love of travel and desire to see the world than it was a love of government work per se. Indeed, in correspondence from this period of her life she writes “I wanted to see many parts of the world, to meet many different sorts of people, to experience many different cultures, and most of all, to live life fully with all its adventures and inherent risks.”

In her 1957 application for federal employment, for example, she lists a preference for an assignment overseas, with a specific preference for Southeast Asia or India. The preference for Southeast Asia was likely motivated, at least in part, by her linguistic skills. Her 1957 application for the foreign service indicates that Yates had a fair grasp of Malay and Indonesian languages, likely a result of her MA training at UC-Berkeley. She also lists on this form that she has a fair grasp of French. However, her correspondence from this period indicates that her French language skills bordered on fluency and, thus, assignment in former French colonies in Southeast Asia aligned with her linguistic skills and her nascent interests in development, infrastructure, and the role of gender relations within these fields. The linguistic factor for her desired assignments is supported by her correspondence in this period, where she expressed an interest in assignments in French-speaking North Africa and/or the Middle East.

Yates arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital city of the Kingdom of Cambodia, in November 1957 to begin her work with USIA. She was assigned to be a Cultural Affairs Officer (CAO) within the Cultural Affairs Office of the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh. Broadly speaking, the duties of a CAO involved promoting American culture, values, and policies in foreign postings; working to create and manage cultural, educational, and artistic exchange programs for American and foreign subjects; creating and managing programs for disseminating information on American culture for foreign audiences; and building institutional relationships with analogous officials in foreign governments. Despite her position officially covering this type of work, Yates writes that much of her time in Cambodia saw her assigned to work on press and publications projects for USIA and the Embassy. She indicates a dislike of this kind of work, both due to the particulars of the projects themselves as well as this work being a misapplication of her skills and job description as a cultural affairs officer. There are, however, two other reasons why Yates may have developed a dislike for her work in Cambodia.

It was during her assignment in Cambodia that Yates was first introduced to one of her lifelong loves: flying. Yates obtained her private flying license in 1958 from the Cambodian Ministry of Public Works and Telecommunications after having taken lessons from members of the French Air Force based in Phnom Penh. Yates maintains that her license was only the third private pilots’ license ever issued by the Ministry, making her a foundational part of Cambodia’s aviation history. From her recollections, it seems that Yates was first introduced to flying via a colleague at USIA, who was already a trained pilot and who she joined on a whim. This would, however, become one of the formative experiences in Yates’ life, as it inaugurated a lifelong love of flying, a hobby she pursued during her time at the University of Illinois and even into retirement.

Image

Private Pilot’s license issued to Yates in August 1958 by the Cambodian Ministry of Public Works and Telecommunications. The preceding page in the license lists it as number “030.” This could indicate that Yates is misremembering the order of her license, or that the Cambodian system enumerated “3” in this way. 

Yates was reassigned from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Jakarta, Indonesia in the Fall of 1958. She continued to serve as an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer, the same position she held in Cambodia. However, Yates writes that in addition to her official duties, in Jakarta her position “covers up a myriad of sundry tasks from directing the main Information Center in Djakarta to setting up new Library reading rooms in several provincial towns.” This was Yates’ second time living in Indonesia. She previously lived in the country between September and December, 1956. During this period, she served as the general assistant to Professor Frank L. Kidner, the main Coordinator of the Indonesia Project undertaken by the University of California – Berkeley’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research. In this role she assisted in the setting up of a field office in Indonesia, supervising six Indonesian employees of the project, maintained budget and other records and files, and liaised between the Project and contacts within the Indonesian business and government sectors. Writing to a friend and former colleague John McFarlane, she states she thinks she may end up staying in Indonesia after serving her tour of duty, something that John apparently did at the time of writing. She says that while her time in Jakarta was difficult, she was “very fond of the Indonesians and their qualities and in many ways, it will be like returning home to serve in Indonesia.”

Yates went on leave from USIA in 1959, using the opportunity to take a lengthy tour of Africa, which you can read about in the next blog.This trip had an important impact on Yates’ career trajectory, likely influencing her last assignment with USIA in Zaire, present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. Yates arrived in Zaire at a critical juncture in the territory’s history as it transitioned from Belgian colonial control to independence. The transition was characterized by widespread chaos due to the Belgian government’s lack of preparation for the handover, and Yates chronicled the chaotic scenes at the embassy in Kinshasa where she was stationed. She writes that refugees were constantly trying to access the embassy seeking protection from political violence, and she notes that at one point she and her colleagues burned the embassy’s papers in case they got taken over by one of the warring factions. Indeed, she describes an episode where a Congolese soldier banged on the embassy door with his machine gun while Yates was stationed by the entrance. Nervously answering the door, Yates discovered that the soldier simply wanted assistance fixing his broken machinegun and assumed that all Americans had the technical know-how to accomplish this task. More importantly for our purposes, it was in Zaire that Yates developed an increased interest in education, as much of her work in this post dealt with educational issues and exchanges with Congolese educators. 

Her connections to education in Zaire were not the only factors influencing her career transition. Rather, there are indications that her earlier experience in the foreign service also influenced her to pursue her studies in higher education that culminated in er entering the PhD program in Comparative Education at Columbia University. We see this in statements where Yates is clearly frustrated with her work at USIA, which she described later in life as “paper pushing” and lacking in intellectual fulfillment. Indeed, in a letter to a close friend while stationed in Cambodia Yates writes that 

“A large part of my life and my character are built around the sharing of intellectual ideas…My ability to think clearly and the delight in the discussion of (and with some the sharing of) common ideas and values is a basic part of me. Without this stimulation I would only be half living. The other part of me, that part that loves life and adventure, you know much more about ---but that is only half.”

Yates has thus been dissatisfied with her work at USIA for some time. While she clearly enjoyed the travel, adventure, and meeting news people and experiencing new cultures, the kind of work she performed in the foreign service was not intellectually stimulating in the way she wanted it to be. Yates’ decision to pursue a PhD was clearly a means of living both halves of her ideal life, combining her love of travel and desire for intellectual stimulation and exchange. Given her scholarly output, student mentorship, and administrative work over the following decades, it seems she was successful in uniting both halves and living the full life she had imagined early in her career. 

1. ^

   The CSGGE was originally founded in 1980 as the Office of Women in International Development (WID). In 2000, WID became a formal Program and changed its name to the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program. In 2023, the Program obtained permanent center status, and in February 2025 changed its name once again to its current title and iteration. 

2. ^

   Joseph Duffey, Director. https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp-rpt96/appendix/usia.html. Duffey was the final Director of USIA, appointed in 1993 and serving until the Agency was absorbed into the Department of State in 1999. 

3. ^

   Yates consistently uses this spelling for the Indonesian capital in her correspondence, which was standard during the colonial period but was more popularly spelled without the D – a change that was made official in orthographic reforms initiated by the Indonesian government in 1965. 

4. ^

   The application indicates Yates had held this position since May, 1956 but the first several months of this assignment was based in Berkeley. 

5. ^

   Letter to John, November 8, 1957.