She was very close to her sister, Elsie MacGill, who became an aeronautical engineer and served on the first Canadian national commission on the status of women.
"[5] Lewis Coser cites Arlene Kaplan Daniels as saying that beginning with that time—13 years to finish her own dissertation -- "Her career was fashioned around his.
"[6] Back in Chicago from 1938, she took five years away from work to raise her daughters, and then took on the assistant editorship of the American Journal of Sociology.
She was an editor of that journal from 1944 to 1961, and was known for her ability to ruthlessly cut out unneeded words and jargon, as well as improving others' written arguments.
[12] In 1967, the American Sociological Association invited her to lead in putting together a series of seven volumes of sociological readings for secondary schools, the 1970 Reading in Sociology Series volumes on Cities and City Life, Delinquents and Criminals, Life in Families, Racial and Ethnic Relations, Social Organizations, Population Growth and the Complex Society, and Crowd and Mass Behavior.