Remembering Sandra Bem
Sandra Lipsitz Bem died over a year ago, but she is still remembered frequently as an important figure in the history of psychology and second-wave feminism. Because of a unique opportunity I had to meet and interview her in the late 1970s, she has also been an influential figure in my own personal and professional history.
In the late seventies, while pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I took a Women’s Studies course in the Department of Psychology. Among the topics we discussed were “sex roles” (now usually called “gender roles,” “the pattern of behaviour, personality traits and attitudes defining masculinity or femininity in a certain culture,” http://psychologydictionary.org/gender-role/ , and “androgyny,” (“the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics,” http://www.academicroom.com/topics/what-is-androgyny).
At the top of the list of psychologists studying these concepts at the time was Sandra Bem. She developed a test called the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) to measure a person’s degree of androgyny, which she defined as exhibiting a high level of both stereotypically masculine and feminine behavioral traits. (She called a low level of both traits “undifferentiated.”)
Her research fascinated me, because I had questioned and rebelled against traditional gender roles for a long time. When I found out that the professor who taught my psychology class was acquainted with Bem and that the latter was planning to visit the Boulder campus, I decided to take advantage of the situation and ask if I could interview Bem. She agreed to the interview, and I sat down with her and asked her about her work on androgyny, sex roles, and the BSRI.
She was cordial and happy to talk about her research, but near the end of the interview, she stated that she was no longer much interested in the study of androgyny but had moved on to the concept of “gender salience,” which she defined as how significant the gender of someone is to us in our interactions and relationships with that person. For example, if the fact that someone is male or female, masculine or feminine, is important to you in forming sexual or non-sexual relationships, then gender is a very salient characteristic to you. Gender salience can also be used to describe how central gender is to you in defining your own identity.
I wrote a paper for the class based on my interview with Bem, and she went on to much more research on the learning of gender roles and stereotyping in our culture. She introduced her “gender schema theory” in 1981 and wrote a book about it called The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality, (Yale University Press, 1993). In this book, Bem states, “In 1977, to convey more forcefully that masculinity and femininity are cultural lenses that polarize reality, I shifted the focus of my own research from the concept of androgyny to the concept of gender schematic information processing, or gender schematicity.” (The Lenses of Gender, page 125). By this she meant the learning and internalizing of polarized roles for males and females in the culture.
At the time, her views on gender depolarization were ground-breaking and influenced many feminists’ views on marriage and child rearing, including her own. In 1998, she published a book, An Unconventional Family (Yale University Press), about her and her husband’s attempt to create an egalitarian family, in which no roles, except purely biological reproductive ones, would be defined by gender. On June 6, 1965, she married psychologist Daryl Bem, but only after both had agreed to a relationship in which both would make career sacrifices for the other, and she would never have to defer to him just because she was woman. Even though Sandra was Jewish, they declined to have a Jewish wedding, but instead chose a Quaker ceremony in which the bride and groom stood in front of the congregation and “married themselves.” They had two children, both reared according to their parents’ feminist, egalitarian philosophy, and they stayed together until 1994, when they separated but never divorced.
Then in 2010, Sandra Bem was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and she decided that she would end her own life before she was incapable of taking the initiative to do so. On May 20, 2014, with Daryl by her side, Sandra took pentobarbital and went to sleep for the last time. If you want to read a bittersweet story in The New York Times about those last few years and the last day of her life, here is the link:
I hadn’t been following Bem’s life or career for a long time, so I didn’t know at the time of her death that she had died. Now, however, reading more about her, I have discovered much about her with which I can identify and which may have contributed to my interest in her:
She was born on June 22, 1944, just shy of three years before my birth. She was a small Jewish woman, like me, who married a man who was not Jewish. She was a feminist who was interested in nonconformity to conventional gender roles. In the 1960s, she married a man who was totally supportive of her egalitarian notions and also willing to participate equally in the rearing of children, in addition to not imposing gender role stereotypes on children. Gender was not of great importance to her in her sexual, romantic, and other attractions to people.
She wrote in An Unconventional Family, “Like many feminist scholars, I live my life with little separation between the personal, the professional, and the political.” (page ix). That is also true for me, which is why the slogan, “the personal is political,” from second-wave feminism, informs much of my writing. When I write about social and political issues, my own story provides the foundation and informs my conclusions.
One disagreement I have with Bem’s discussion of gender role learning in The Lenses of Gender is based on my interactions with transgender people and what I have learned from them about gender identity. Looking through her own lens of the social construction of gender, Bem is rather dismissive of transgender identity. She asserts that the “transsexuals” convince themselves that they are “normal” males and females trapped in the body of the wrong sex, and “then they seek to change their physical sex through a series of mutilating surgical procedures.” (page 171). Further, she claims that the reason that “transsexuals” hold onto the erroneous “nonbiological” notion of what constitutes male and female in this culture “is that it provides them with a viable way to construct an identity that is consistent with the cultural definition of male and female.” (Page 171).
My first problem with this assessment is that it ignores biological components of gender identity, ambiguous genitalia at birth and mistakes made by physicians in gender assignment, genetic variations, the difference between gender identity and gender roles, and the actual experience of transgender people, which cisgender people (who identify as the gender/sex they were assigned at birth), such as Bem and I, despite not being entirely happy with the cultural sex/gender roles that have gone along with it, cannot entirely understand.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150213112317.htm
http://www.crossdreamers.com/2012/08/causes-of-transgender-conditions.html
http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html
In addition, Bem’s statements in this book reinforce the assertions of the some anti-transgender feminists, such as Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond, that transgender people (especially trans women) are delusional, inauthentic, or even dangerous to women.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/02/trans-inclusive-feminist-movement/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2
I don’t think Bem would have supported the vitriol spewed by this small but vocal group of radical feminists, and I believe that, were she still alive and well, she may have changed her views on transgender people in the light of current biological and psychological evidence. We’ll never know for sure, but I think that the legacy and contributions of Sandra Bem to our understanding of gender and culture will continue to be seen in a mostly positive light. They appear that way to me.
