While at Cambridge, Kennedy produced three documentary films on the indigenous peoples of South America allowing her to later consult with both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and ITV in Great Britain.

[1] Like many other American universities responding to the influence of student demands in the late nineteen sixties, SUNY/Buffalo developed a division to house – perhaps ghettoize – alternative educational enterprises.

The collaboration between Kennedy, Robinson and DuBois, aided by two other faculty supporters of WSC – philosopher Carolyn Korsemeyer and educational sociologist Gail Paradise Kelly – resulted in the 1985 publication of Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe.

During the early years, Kennedy defended the Women's Studies Program against charges that it was discriminatory (against men) and that it was intellectually biased (in favor of the equality of the sexes).

Like many other early women's studies programs, WSC faced a major challenge, as the university closed down the alternative educational division in which it was housed.

There local community activists and interested young feminists from around the country were joined by international students, from France, the People's Republic of China and Chile.

[1] Elizabeth Kennedy's pioneering role in the development of modern lesbian history was the result of her search for a different and more responsible way to use her anthropological training, as well as with the changes in her personal life.

Her partner, Barbara "Bobbi" Prebis, was one of her major informants for her thirteen-year research project (initiated in 1978) into the social and cultural character of the largely working class lesbian community of Buffalo New York from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Based on this research, Kennedy, in collaboration with Madeline Davis, published in 1993 the pathbreaking community study Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.

Secondly, the authors' scrupulous method of in depth interviewing, of careful listening to their informants, and of probing analysis, produced an account of mid century lesbian sexuality that was striking and influential for its originality.

In her subsequent research, Kennedy undertook a study that looked at the conditions and possibilities that shaped upper class lesbian life in the context of a single individual, Julia Boyer Reinstein, in New York and South Dakota.

The most important theoretical contribution to emerge from this research to date has to do with Kennedy's bold evaluation of what Eve Sedgwick earlier called "the epistemology of the closet."