Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Jessie Bernard: The Making of a Feminist

1992; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/368404

1748-5959

Lois Scharf, Robert C. Bannister,

Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice

Jessie Bernard, now eighty-seven, is a prominent and unusually visible American sociologist. In this biography, Robert C. Bannister explores the personal and professional life of this representative of the generation of American women who came of age in the years between the world wars.In revealing detail, Bannister describes Bernard's troubled odyssey from a rigorously positivist sociology to a feminism that appeared to repudiate much of her earlier faith in reason and science. While gaining success and recognition as a sociologist, Bernard struggled privately with her Jewish heritage, the demands of a philandering, cantankerous husband twice her age, the conflicting pressures of family and career, and the tribulations of single parenthood. During most of her life these battles provided the backdrop against which she played out her quest for individual and professional identity. Her sociological style was intimately related to personal trauma; only as Bernard moved beyond negative self-perceptions and a coldly quantitative sociology in the 1940s and 1950s did feminism become an emotional and intellectual possibility for her.After embracing the new wave of feminism in the late 1960s, Bernard contributed numerous writings to the cause, including The Female World (1981) and The Female World from a Global Perspective (1987). The quintessential liberal, she was nonetheless attracted by the radical feminist analysis of the early 1970s. In her writings, she thus played out the final act in a lifelong struggle between reason and emotion, objectivity and value, profession and private life. While presenting the story of Bernard's life, Bannister also touches on larger themes, including the fate of feminism, the impact of professionalization on women, the place of gender in shaping the style and agenda of social scientists, and the ways in which the feminine mystique of the 1940s and 1950s was critiqued in the 1960s.