Her parents, Gustav Icken and Erna Keune, had grown up a few miles from each other in Germany, but they did not meet until they came to the United States as young adults.
She taught at Rutgers University from 1967 to 1980, chairing the anthropology department and directing the Latin American studies program.
[3] During her presidency, she received a Ford Foundation grant to establish an exchange program between scholars from the United States and Cuba.
[7] Before publishing her second book, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean (1995), Safa had long conducted research on Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap.
This book described the effects of such industrial employment initiatives for women in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.