Komarovsky, Mirra (1905-1999)

Mirra Komarovsky was one of the first sociologists to engage in theory and research on the cultural and structural barriers to women's equality, and to write [Page 479]about problems men and women face because of their designated roles in American society. Komarovsky wrote a decade before Betty Friedan (1963) wrote The Feminine Mystique, the book that triggered the second wave of the woman's movement, and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex reached an American audience. Komarovsky's 1953 book, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas, and her articles, “The Functional Analysis of Sex Roles” (1950) and “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles” (1946), identified the structural and cultural factors that undermine women's aspirations and choices in professional and public life. Komarovsky criticized Freudian theory and showed how problems women faced were not psychological but social and to be addressed as social problems. She also was one of the first sociologists to address the problems faced by men as well as women in articles and a book, Dilemmas of Masculinity. She was concerned with class issues as well in her first book, The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), which illustrated the impact of job loss on men's authority and self-respect, and the problems of working-class husbands and wives in Blue-Collar Marriage (1964).

Although a staunch defender of women's rights and a social critic of the stereotyping they faced, Komarovsky was never an activist in the traditional sense. She did not participate in organizations, but she did consult with such policymakers as Eleanor Roosevelt. Komarovsky was active in making women's roles in society, and the analysis of attitudes toward them, a legitimate part of the university curriculum.

Born in 1905 in Baku, a city in the Caucasus, to upper-middle-class Jewish parents whose circumstances plunged when they immigrated to Wichita, Kansas, in 1922 after the Russian revolution, Komarovsky won a scholarship to Barnard College and entered at the age of 22, graduating at the age of 26. She obtained an MA one year later, under the supervision of William F. Ogburn, at Columbia University. Subsequently she became an instructor at Skidmore College and Yale University, where she was a research assistant to Dorothy Swaine Thomas (the first woman president of the American Sociological Association) and returned to Columbia, obtaining a PhD in 1940 under the supervision of Paul Lazarsfeld. She became an instructor at Barnard in 1934 and held that rank until 1945 while publishing two books and many articles. After Millicent Mclntosh assumed the presidency of Barnard in 1947 and recognized Komarovsky's scholarship, Komarovsky became an associate professor in 1948 and full professor in 1954. After her retirement in 1970 at the mandatory age of 65, she continued to teach at Barnard and engage in research and writing well into her 90s. Komarovsky was never appointed to the Graduate Sociology Department at Columbia University, which only hired its first woman professor in the late 1970s.

In 1947, Komarovsky married Marcus Heyman, who supported her career. Komarovsky's name and citations to her work are rarely seen in the literature on the sociology of gender or among the “theorists” cited among the classic works in the field. Yet her groundbreaking work on the sociology of sex roles and gender formed the basis of much of the work that is taken for granted today. She did achieve recognition for her contributions to sociology, however, by becoming the second president of the American Sociological Association in 1972.

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