Personal Life and Education
Ostrom was born Elinor Claire Awan in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Leah (born Hopkins) and Adrian Awan. Her father was Jewish, while her mother was Protestant. She attended a Protestant church and often spent weekends staying with her aunt, one of her father's sisters, who kept a kosher home. Her parents were poor, especially when her father left her mother.
Ostrom graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1951 and then received a B.A. (with honors) in political science at UCLA, in 1954. She was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a PhD in 1965, both from UCLA Department of Political Science.
She married political scientist Vincent Ostrom in 1963.
Read more about this topic: Elinor Ostrom
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or education:
“The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today’s social change is to begin to perceive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.”
—Margaret Adams (b. 1916)
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)