As a young girl growing up in the quiet village of Maresfield in Sussex, England, Carole Pateman followed a rather atypical path to her current position as one of the world's leading political theorists.

Atypical, because furthering her education was never one of her goals. Pateman left school at 16 to work a series of clerical jobs.

"No one in my family had ever attended university," said Pateman, a political science professor who was chosen the Spring 2001 Faculty Research Lecturer. "In fact, I didn't even know what university was until later!"

She soon realized that she was never going to move out of low-grade clerical work until she went back to school. In 1963, Pateman applied to and was accepted at Ruskin College, an independent adult education school for working-class students.

After two years at Ruskin, Pateman sat for the Oxford University Post-Graduate Diploma in Political Science and Economics, the only woman to take the exam that year. She won a place at Lady Margaret Hall - then a women's college - in Oxford, and received her B.A. in 1967 and her D.Phil. in 1972.

"It was a bit of culture shock, going from a small college to Oxford," Pateman recalled with a laugh. "Ruskin was a very masculine, working-class envi ronment."

After serving as a research fellow and visiting professor at Stanford and Princeton, Pateman was invited to be the inaugural holder of the Kirsten Hesselgren Professorship, a chair for visiting women professors attached to what was then the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. She also spent several years teaching at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Pateman came to UCLA in January 1990. She teaches undergraduate courses in democratic theory and women in politics, and a seminar on gender and political theory. At the graduate level, her courses focus on contemporary political theory and the history of feminists' political thought from 1700 to 1940, one of only a few such courses in the country.

The soft-spoken scholar said she deems it a "great honor" to be chosen a Faculty Research Lecturer. Her talk, "The Equivalent of the Right to Land, Life and Liberty? Democracy and the Idea of a Basic Income," will focus on the idea of democratic theory. "Democratic theory deals with the meaning of democracy itself - questions about citizenship rights, equality, freedom and justice, and how they should be interpreted and implemented," she explained.

Her parents, both dead, would have been very proud of their daughter's achievements.

"My mother left school so early, she didn't really know anything about university," Pateman said. "I think it was somewhat of a mystery to her exactly what I did, but she was very proud of the books I wrote."

Pateman's lecture is set for April 18 at 3 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall. Her work is featured in an exhibit in the lobby of Young Research Library through this month.