Mirra Komarovsky (February 5, 1905 – January 30, 1999), a pioneer in the sociology of gender, was born in Akkerman, Russia, the first of two daughters of Emmanuel Borisavich and Anna (Steinberg) Komarovsky.  Landowning Jews and ardent Zionists, the Komarovskys were driven from their home by the Czar’s police when Mirra was a child.  They eventually settled in Baku, on the Caspian Sea, where Emmanuel, known as Mendel, became a banker.  Educated for the most part by tutors, Mirra grew up speaking Russian, Hebrew, French, and English, reading widely, and practicing the piano several hours a day.  This privileged world collapsed around her in the years following the Russian Revolution.  In 1921, amidst growing anti-Semitism, dwindling food rations, and  

Mirra Komarovsky,
Barnard Archives (c. 1950)

Ambitious for his elder daughter and convinced that Kansas held little opportunity for her, Mendel Komarovsky persuaded his wife to move to Brooklyn.  Mendel supported the family as an accountant, translator, and writer, while Mirra began what was to be a lifelong association with Barnard College.  Majoring in economics and sociology, she studied with anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, psychologist Henry Hollingworth, and sociologist William Ogburn.  Komarovsky always praised Barnard for its high intellectual standards, but she never forgot Ogburn’s discouraging words when she told him she wanted to teach sociology. "Not a realistic plan, " he responded. "You are a woman, foreign born, and Jewish.  I would recommend some other occupation." (Komarovsky, 1982).  He nonetheless recommended her for a one-year graduate fellowship, which, following her election to Phi Beta Kappa and graduation in 1926, she used at Columbia.  She earned a Masters of Arts degree in 1927 under his direction.

When Ogburn left for the University of Chicago at the end of the year, Komarovsky faced an uncertain future.  For two years she taught at Skidmore College, until a university fellowship made it possible to return to Columbia to complete course work for her Ph.D.(1929-30).  To support herself while she looked for a dissertation topic, she took a series of research jobs. She worked for Dorothy S. Thomas, another Ogburn protégé, at the Yale Institute of Human Relations (1930-1) and as a research associate (1931-1933) for George Lundberg, with whom she co-authored Leisure, A Suburban Study (1934).  Not until she joined New York’s Institute for Social Research in 1935, however, did she find a methodology and subject that suited her.  Working with Paul Lazarsfeld, a mathematician and pioneer in survey research who had just emigrated from Vienna she wrote The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), an intensive study of fifty-nine families, modeled on work Lazarsfeld had just completed in Europe.  Columbia awarded Komarovsky a Ph.D. for her work in 1940.

In The Unemployed Man, as in all her subsequent work, Komarovsky built on Ogburn’s theory of "cultural lag," according to which cultural attitudes lag behind technological change.  The depression offered a case in point. The economic crisis hit blue-collar occupations harder than service jobs; as a consequence, working-class men often found it harder to find work than did their wives.  And yet, traditional views of masculinity prevented many men from sharing bread-winning responsibilities: "I’d rather turn on the gas than let my wife work!" one man told her (Unemployed Man, 76).

By 1940, Komarovsky was an experienced sociologist, but reaching her full potential took the inspiration of two people: Marcus Heyman, a businessman, whom she married in 1940, and Millicent McIntosh, who succeeded Virginia Gildersleeve as dean of Barnard in 1947. Komarovsky had been married once before, from 1933 to 1935, to Leo Horney, a dentist, but Horney had wanted a housewife who would cater to him, not a woman bent on a career, and the marriage had ended in divorce. Heyman, by contrast, encouraged Komarovsky’s ambition until his death in 1970. Neither marriage produced any children.  Millicent McIntosh, for her part, quickly identified Komarovsky as a key resource in her effort to retain Barnard’s reputation for intellectual achievement in a period of postwar anti-feminism.  Komarovsky had returned to Barnard as a part-time lecturer in 1935, had won promotion to instructor in 1938, and had been conducting research on Barnard students and the "role conflicts" the female students faced ever since.  As of 1947, however, she had advanced only to the rank of assistant professor. The new dean promoted her to associate professor in 1948 and full professor in 1954.

An attractive, dark-haired woman, of medium height, Komarovsky intimidated some students with her intense intellectuality and Russian accent, but she inspired many more with her innovative research.  At a time when Talcott Parsons dominated American sociology with his functionalist faith in social equilibrium, Komarovsky emphasized dysfunction, conflict, and change.  In 1953 she published Women in the Modern World, a book that anticipated by ten years Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Challenging Parsons’s belief in the naturalness of conventional gender roles, she pointed to the conflict her female students experienced as they "played dumb" to catch husbands and then as fulltime mothers wondered "what is wrong with me that home and family are not enough?"(77, 127).  Komarovsky urged that all students be prepared for careers, that good nursery schools be made universally available, and that men accept their fair share of domestic work – goals she was still advocating three decades later in Women in College (1985).

Though most of Komarovsky’s research centered on white, middle-class, educated women, she also examined class differences and masculinity.  In Blue-Collar Marriage (1964) she found that white, working-class, Protestant couples suffered a particularly severe form of cultural lag because they accepted the belief that women and men should live in separate social spheres at a time when increased mobility was destroying the kinship networks that had formerly provided emotional support in those worlds. As a result husbands and wives felt increasingly isolated.  Dilemmas of Masculinity (1976) looked at how the cultural revolution of the 1960s affected the men at Columbia College.  Komarovsky found that her subjects had come to accept the prospect of a working wife, but only so long as her job did not interfere with her role as a wife and mother.

Komarovsky never taught on Columbia’s graduate faculty, but she came to play a more prominent role in sociology than many who did. In 1973, in recognition of her pioneering challenge to the functionalist approach in sociology, the American Sociological Association elected her president, an honor previously accorded only one other woman: Dorothy S. Thomas. In 1970 Komarovsky retired from Barnard, but the college named her professor emeritus, and she continued to teach part-time until 1992, including chairing the newly created Women’s Studies program in 1978-9. Through the years, a steady stream of honorary degrees and professional awards, including the distinguished career award from the American Sociological Association in 1991, celebrated her contributions. She died at the age of 93 in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

[Though Mirra Komarovsky spent her career studying the intimate details of others’ lives, she was an intensely private person who avoided discussing her own life and destroyed her personal papers. The Barnard College archives has copies of her major publications, some materials related to her research and teaching, a few letters, an essay by Mendel Komarovsky on the 1905 Akkerman pogrom, copies of passports, a few newspaper clippings, several interviews conducted with friends and family, memorial tributes, and a few pictures. Sources disagree on many dates, especially on Komarovsky’s date of birth and birthplace. I have relied on her family’s 1921 passport, her death certificate, and an interview with her sister, Dolly Cheser. Komarovsky kept a diary in Russian from June through October 1918, which has been translated into English and gives a vivid picture of her precocious intellect. Komarovsky’s major works include Leisure, A Suburban Study with George Lundberg and Mary Alice McInery (1934), The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), "Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles," The American Journal of Sociology, vol 52, no. 3 (November 1946): 184-89, "Functional Analysis of Sex Roles," American Sociological Review, vol 15, no. 4 (August 1950): 508-16, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Dilemmas (1953), Blue Collar Marriage (1964), Dilemmas of Masculinity: A Study of College Youth (1976), and Women in College: Shaping New Feminine Identities (1985), and "Some Persistent Issues of Sociological Polemics," Sociological Forum, vol. 2, no. 3 (1987): 556-63. For details about Komarovsky’s life and career see the entry on her in Current Biography (1953); her article, "Women Then and Now: A Journal of Detachment and Engagement," Barnard Alumnae Magazine (Winter 1982): 7-10; Shulamit Reinharz, "Finding a Sociological Voice: The Work of Mirra Komarovsky," Sociological Inquiry, vol 59, no 4 (November 1989): 375-95, and "Remembering "Barnard’s Best,’" Barnard Alumnae Magazine (Spring 1999): 28-9. Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, February 1, 1999 and in the Washington Post, February 2, 1999.

Rosalind Rosenberg