Mirra Komarovsky

Mirra Komarovsky was the second woman elected to serve as the President of the American Sociological Association. Her Presidential Address entitled “Some Problems in Role Analysis,” was delivered at the Association’s Annual Meeting on August 27, 1973 in New York City. Following the meeting, her address was published in the December 1973 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 38 No 6, pp 649-662). Upon her death in 1999, the May/June 1999 issue of Footnotes carried a tribute to Komarovsky by her friends and colleagues.

 

 

Tribute to Mirra Komarovsky

Written by Jonathan Rieder, Barnard College, Columbia University. Published in Footnotes, May/June 1999
When Mirra Komarovsky died on January 30, Barnard lost more than a beloved colleague who could boast three quarters of a century connection with the college. We lost a totem of the institution itself, the emblem of its sacred values. 

Mirra was born in Russia in Baku, in 1905, into an upper-middle class Jewish family that prized the life of the mind, for women no less than men. In 1922, in the wake of anti-Semitism and Bolshevik efforts to exterminate the middle class, her family fled Azerbaijan for Wichita, of all places. After a brief stint in the heartland, she moved to New York. 

Mirra came to Barnard in 1923 and never really left. She studied with Boas, Ruth Benedict, and William Ogburn. When she was a senior, Ogburn asked her about her plans; she told him she wanted to teach college sociology. He countered, “Not a realistic plan: You are a woman, foreign born and Jewish. I would recommend some other occupation.” Undeterred, Mirra began teaching as an instructor at Barnard in the mid 1930s, received her PhD from Columbia in 1940, and was soon a full-time member of the Barnard faculty She flourished under the reign of Milicent MacIntosh, whom she credited as an exuberant champion of female intellect. Mirra chaired the department for 17 years, retiring in 1970, only to return as the director of the women’s studies department. She received the Emily Gregory Award for teaching excellence, the Barnard Distinguished Alumna Award, the Medal of Distinction. She really was a Barnard woman. 

In books like Blue-Collar Marriage, Dilemmas of Masculinity, and Women in College: Shaping New Feminine Identities, Mirra explored the dynamics of family and gender. The outlines of her thinking are evident in her 1946 article in the American Journal of Sociology~ “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles.” She showed that women’s ambivalence was a response to institutional contradictions that stifled women’s sense of self; that progressive attitudes without institutional rearrangement would not guarantee sexual equality; that women’s playing dumb was a way to cope with paradox—higher education compromised their success with male students; that functionalist accounts of family life missed the role of conflict between the sexes. 

Writing in Harpers in the early 1950s, she decried the neo-anti-feminism of the times. The president of Mills college had suggested that “learning how to prepare Basque paella would be as fulfilling for women as a course in post-Kantian philosophy.” Mirra fired back with Women in the Modern World, a polemical brief for sexual equality. 
Eventually, Mirra would earn recognition in the sociology profession: presidencies of the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society, the Distinguished Career Award of the ASA, the Common Wealth Award and much more would come her way. 

A remarkable continuity, of interest and spirit, marked Mirra’s life. In recent years, when you were allowed to visit— when she felt good enough and looked good enough to entertain—you would witness the same old-world grandness, the twinkling eyes, the precision of phrasing, her beauty, the gentle irony, and always, her virtually life-long immersion in the sociological enterprise. 

In 1991, Mirra received poor evaluations for her gender class. She was 86 years old. She ticked off the criticisms: “Poorly organized, difficult to understand lectures, and the like. It was all the more disheartening because it came as a surprise.” Typically, ever the good empiricist, she set about researching the cause; in 1992, she received the best evaluations in years. “I need to prove the following calumny wrong,” she declared: “A sociologist says things everyone knows in a language nobody understands.” 

Around the same time, Mirra was writing about new developments in gender theory; I think it was a piece for the Annual Review of Sociology. Trying to get the hang of all the fashionable work on “discourse” and gender, she asked me what I thought: I said that discourse sounded fancier than Mirra’s preferred word—”role”—which sounded square, and a bit clunky, but was perfectly serviceable: it had the virtue of saying plainly what she meant so that everyone knew what she was saying. She just smiled since she knew all this. 

Mirra’s empiricism was not philosophically shallow; unflashy did not mean inelegant, and surely not unstylish. Her sociological work was based on the elegance of understatement, of clarity, of the rejection of narcissism: Her interest remained in the object of her curiosity. 

It is no cliche to say that Mirra was ahead of her time; I close with a few selections from fifty years ago that evoke her spirit and her substance. 

“If men believed for a moment that the rearing of children is as difficult and important as building bridges, they would demand more of a hand in it.” 

“I now state even more explicitly that equality for women in the public spheres will not be realized as long as we maintain traditional role segregation within the family, with no alternative options.” 

“Women in the Modern World did not re-ignite the women’s movement the way, a decade later, Friedan’s Feminine Mystique deservedly did. The time was not ripe but much more importantly, my book was written intones of sweet reasonableness; it was friendly to men. It did not, as a revolutionary tract must, summon the reader’s rage. In fact, its rueful satire of our society was so subtle, at least for Friedan, that she used a paragraph of mine as illustration of the prevailing counsel of adjustment to the status quo.”

“I support the values of family, but not only in rhetoric and not for women only. We could not convince women that child-rearing was a most valued social task unless men believed it too; unless our whole society became oriented toward values that cherish strength and compassion, nurturance and creativity.”