Mirra Komarovsky | |
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 Mirra Komarovsky, from the 1926 yearbook of Barnard College | |
| Born | (1905-02-05)February 5, 1905 |
| Died | January 30, 1999(1999-01-30) (aged 93) New York City, U.S. |
| Nationality | Russian /American |
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Mirra Komarovsky (February 5, 1905 – January 30, 1999), was an American pioneer in thesociology of gender.[2]
Born to Mendel and Anna Komarovsky (née Steinberg)[1] in a privilegedJewish family in theRussian Empire, her family fled the country after the 1917Russian Revolution. Komarovsky's parents wereZionists and landowning Jews inAkkerman, Russia, until tsarist police drove them from their home. They moved initially toBaku (in what is nowAzerbaijan) and then toWichita, Kansas after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Mirra was 16. In Baku, Komarovsky lived a solidly middle-class lifestyle; she washomeschooled by private tutors and learned Russian, English, Hebrew, and French, as well as playing the piano.
Once in the United States, she graduated from Wichita High School within a year and in 1922,[3] she was admitted toBarnard College as part of the class of 1926. One of her professors, sociologistWilliam Ogburn, advised her not to pursue higher education, largely because of the prescribedgender roles and anti-semitism[4] at the time. Nonetheless, she earned her master's degree fromColumbia University and proceeded to earn her Ph.D.[1][5]
Komarovsky's dissertation topic, which she stumbled upon in 1935 through a research position with mathematicianPaul Lazarsfeld at the New YorkInstitute for Social Research, was “The Unemployed Man and His Family." She earned her Ph.D. inSociology in 1940 fromColumbia University because of this work. Later published as a book,The Unemployed Man was an intensive study of fifty-nine families in the qualitative sociological method.
Komarovsky built her legacy on researching the social and cultural attitudes of families. Much of her work focused on the idea of “cultural lag,” in which the cultural attitudes surrounding women generally lag behind technological and social advances. Throughout the rest of her career, she continued to study the role of women and the outlooks of society towards those roles. She became one of the first social scientists to look critically at gender and the role of women in society.[5]
Professor Komarovsky retired in 1970 after 32 years on the faculty ofBarnard College. But she returned to Barnard in 1978 and became the chairwoman of itswomen's studies program until 1992[3][6]
In 1973 and 1974, she became the second woman afterDorothy Swaine Thomas[3] to be president of theAmerican Sociological Association. Her research during the 1980s tracked many of the changes taking place in the consciousness of young women and their life choices in response to the feminist movement.[7]
In 1940, she married Marcus A. Heyman.[1] She died at New York City on January 30, 1999.[8]
