Carol L. McAllister was an anthropologist, social researcher and feminist who worked with the University of Pittsburgh and devoted herself to improving life for women, children and the disadvantaged.
A resident of Friendship, she died Saturday of complications from breast cancer at UPMC Shadyside. She was 60.
Ms. McAllister was a former director of the University of Pittsburgh Women’s Studies Program and was active with the Thomas Merton Center, the Women’s Resource Center for Greater Pittsburgh and the Social Justice Action Team of the First United Methodist Church, Pittsburgh.
At the Thomas Merton Center she rolled up her sleeves for peace projects and campaigns for women’s issues.
“With her strong academic background, and good connections, she was a strong feminist,” said Molly Rush, a former head of the Merton Center who worked with Ms. McAllister.
But the professor’s passion was her work with Early Head Start, a component of Head Start which helps low-income mothers and families prepare sooner for the health and education of their children.
After graduate studies in Malaysia, she found that poor children in the United States were often treated more hostilely than in the Third World.
In 1993, working with Family Foundations, she went into Terrace Village, Clairton and other impoverished communities to study what was needed to make life better for the children.
“We found that earlier [intervention] is better,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few years ago in an interview. “We try to enroll women during pregnancy so that they have support from the very beginning.”
An amateur photographer, she once gave the children in these communities disposable cameras and told them to chronicle their lives. Her work and their photos were published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2005. Her studies of Early Head Start were nationally recognized as innovative in shaping programming to help young mothers.
In 2003, working with Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, she organized a conference with speakers from Rwanda, Israel and Canada that focused on the roles that women can play in conflict resolution and rebuilding war-torn communities.
It was her hope, she said, that the participants learn about the issues of gender and of culture and make a commitment to take action.
An only child, she was born in the small industrial town of Port Jervis, N.Y. Her father was a carpenter who died when she was 12. Her mother worked as a seamstress and her harsh treatment in a sweatshop deeply influenced Ms. McAllister’s work to seek a better quality of life for women and the working class.
Ms. McAllister graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1969. She then headed to the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a master’s degree and, in 1987, a doctorate in anthropology.
Her studies carried her to Malaysia, where she examined the matrilineal society among Islamic women.
She was an anthropology/sociology teacher at Carlow College for about 15 years before moving onto the Graduate School of Public Health at Pitt.
When first coming to town, Ms. McAllister lived in Uptown, a racially mixed neighborhood where she began a day-care center with her former husband.
To relax, she played tennis, ran, camped, canoed and once sang for the Community of Reconciliation.
She is survived by her son, Jonah McAllister-Erickson of Friendship; her mother, Harriett of Port Jervis; her ex-husband, Robert Erickson of Nicaragua; and her former common-law husband, Paul LeBlanc of Friendship.
A memorial service will be held Saturday at 1 p.m. at the First Methodist Church of Pittsburgh, 5401 Centre Ave., Shadyside. Burial is being planned for Port Jervis.