Lola Van Wagenen

Lola Van Wagenen (born December 19, 1938) is an American historian and activist. In 1970, she co-founded Consumer Action Now (CAN), a non-profit educational organization, and in 1995 co-founded Clio Visualizing History, Inc. to promote history education. (In 2003, Clio changed its corporate structure becoming a not-for-profit organization providing educational films and online history exhibits and resources.) Biography Van Wagenen was born in Provo, Utah. She was raised in a Mormon family, but as an adult has explored other sources of religious and philosophical thought. She met her first husband, actor Robert Redford, in Los Angeles in 1957. They were married in Las Vegas on August 9, 1958. The couple had four children, one of whom died in infancy. They separated in the early 1980s, and as late as 1991, The Salt Lake Tribune stated "it is unclear whether the divorce has been finalized". Van Wagenen received her bachelor's degree at Vermont College in 1982 and her master's degree in Public History at New York University (NYU) in 1984. Ten years later she completed her Ph.D. in American History at NYU. Her doctoral dissertation was published as a book, Sister-Wives and Suffragists: Polygamy and the Politics of Woman Suffrage 1870–1896, in 2003. In October 2012 she received the Distinguished Alumni/Alumnae Achievement Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at NYU.