H. Stuart Hughes - Later Career

Later Career

Early in 1963, Hughes and Suzanne filed for divorce. In the fall of 1963, Hughes agreed to become co-chairman of the SANE organization, alongside renowned pediatrician and fellow activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. In March 1964, Hughes married his second wife, Judy, whom he initially had met as one of his graduate school students. As SANE expanded its anti-nuclear activities to include anti-Vietnam War activism, Hughes was branded by the State Department's Passport Office as a potential subversive. He also found himself in an increasingly isolated position on the Harvard faculty, opposed to both the Vietnam War and also many of the actions that began to be taken in opposition to it. Hughes, however, served as the sole chairman of SANE from 1967 to 1970 after Spock resigned his co-chairmanship.

Hughes also became associated with male support for feminism. In part, this seems to have been prompted by his perception of academic discrimination against his wife after she had earned her own doctorate. It was this discrimination that, in large measure, seems to have led to the Hughes' departure from Harvard for the University of California at San Diego; unlike his first departure from Harvard, it could not now be linked to any failure to have been sufficiently published. They moved to San Diego in 1975; Hughes taught at UCSD until taking emeritus status in 1989 and died in the suburb of La Jolla (actual site of the UCSD campus), following a protracted illness, in 1999.