(An Unconventional Family is an autobiography that discuss...)
An Unconventional Family is an autobiography that discusses how Bem and her husband, Daryl, tried to pattern their marriage on her gender philosophies.
Sandra Bem was an American author, lecturer, and psychology professor. She was an Emerita Professor of Psychology at Cornell and director of Cornell's Women's Studies Program.
Background
Sandra Bem was born as Sandra Ruth Lipsitz on June 22, 1944, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a working-class Jewish family. Her father Peter was a mail clerk, and her mother Lillian was a secretary. Sandra's early life was characterized by frequent fights between her parents and her mother's violent and emotional outbursts. Based on these experiences, Dr. Bem believed that she developed the need to always be in control of her emotions and to assume responsibility for herself and others.
Education
Bem attended Pittsburgh's Hillel Academy, Taylor Allderdice High School, and Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, now known as Carnegie–Mellon University. She received her bachelor's degree in psychology in 1965. She then entered the University of Michigan and obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1968.
Shortly after her graduation, Sandra applied for a full-time tenure track job opened up at Carnegie Tech. She immensely enjoyed teaching and advising, but she wasn't sure if she wanted to be a research scientist. During the time she taught at Carnegie Tech it became Carnegie-Mellon University. Around this time, she realized that she could focus her research on testing her feminist beliefs. According to current psychological thought, psychological health consisted of men adopting "male" psychological traits and women adopting "female" psychological traits. Dr. Bem believed that possessing a combination of these traits would be healthier and wanted to test this theory. She became excited about research and started reading everything that she could find on gender and psychology.
As Sandra started exploring the idea of doing feminist research, the Sandra and Daryl, her husband, received a proposal to be visiting faculty for a year at Stanford. Stanford was, at that time, one of the top three psychology programs in the country. Once at Stanford, Sandra realized that she had entered a high stakes academic community and that the only way to get tenure at Stanford would be to become a psychologist who was recognized as leading her field. This, and her own increasing desire to do research that appealed to her political and personal ideologies convinced her to undertake research on what she called "psychological androgyny" rather than playing it safe by furthering existing research tracks.
During their later years at Carnegie-Mellon and early years at Stanford, Sandra and Daryl started collecting data about sexually based job discrimination. The data that the Bems collected on job discrimination was used in a lawsuit against the Pittsburgh Press for segregating its Help Wanted section into "Male Help Wanted" and "Female Help Wanted" sections. They also published two related studies on the effects of gender-specific job advertisements in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1973 as "Does sex-biased job advertising 'aid and abet' sex discrimination?". The results of this study (which found that sex biased advertisements do result in less hiring interest in opposite-sexed participants), along with the testimony of Daryl and Sandra, was successfully used in a lawsuit that found AT&T guilty of sex and race discrimination and required changes in its job advertising and hiring practices.
In 1971, Sandra Lipsitz Bem created a test to measure psychological gender and psychological androgyny, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). Despite her creation of a new psychological measurement, and her further publications regarding its efficacy and application, Dr. Bem was denied tenure at Stanford. Although the faculty vote was unanimously in her favor, it was overturned by the dean and her denial of tenure was upheld by the provost and the president on appeal.
Sandra was offered the Directorship of Women's Studies at Cornell and both she and Daryl were offered tenured associate professor positions, per her request. Sandra and Daryl began working at Cornell in August, 1978. During her time as Director of Women's Studies, she recruited and supported several talented feminist professors who successfully obtained tenure, and she oversaw the harmonious incorporation of lesbian, bisexual and gay studies into the Women's Studies program.
In 1981, Dr. Sandra Lipsitz Bem became a full professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at Cornell, until she retired in 2010. During her years at Cornell, she also refined her ideas about sex-role acquisition into her gender schema theory and conducted research supporting its validity. In 1993, she published The Lenses of Gender. The Lenses of Gender represents the culmination of her lifetime of research and ideas about gender polarization and disparity in Western culture. It contains information from the disciplines of theology, biology and philosophy.
Dr. Bem's work has continued to evolve and provide significant contributions. In 1997, she began doctoral studies in Clinical Psychology. She completed her practicum and internship requirements, and became a licensed clinical psychologist in 2000. Her training in clinical psychology lead to the introspection and self-awareness behind her writing of An Unconventional Family. An Unconventional Family, published in 1998, does more than detail her emotional life and her experiences as a gender nonconformist. It also evaluates the "experiment" that she undertook with Daryl Bem to have an equal partnership and raise their children to be unrestricted by gender.
Achievements
Sandra Bem was a feminist psychologist whose pioneering work in gender roles paved the way for equal employment opportunities for women across the country.
Sandra Bem was a recipient of many awards for her research. She received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Contribution to Psychology (1976), the Association for Women in Psychology's Distinguished Publication Award (1977), and the American Association of University Women's Young Scholar Award (1980), and, posthumously, the Distinguished Career Award (AWP, 2014).
Her work The Lenses of Gender won four book awards, including the Best Book in Psychology Award from the Association of American Publishers. In 1995, her years of work on gender and psychology led to her selection as an "Eminent Women In Psychology" by the Divisions of General Psychology and History of Psychology of the APA.
Dr. Sandra Bem's work regarding sex roles and sex typing focused on her concept of psychological androgyny. Healthy functioning in contemporary society, according to Bem (1976), required both psychological traits that were considered masculine and those that were considered feminine. The equal combination of these traits, psychological androgyny, should be predictive of the best psychological adjustment and flexibility.
From her early findings, Dr. Bem concluded that psychological androgyny provided the best flexibility of behavior and thought, allowing for the adoption of the combination of psychological traits and behaviors that best suited a situation. Therefore, psychological androgyny was the healthiest representation of psychological gender (or absence of psychological gender) that could be developed in people of any sex.
As her theories about gender and behavior evolved, Dr. Bem re-evaluated the concept of psychological androgyny. Instead of promising liberation from the cultural stereotypes for people of their sex, she came to see it as suggesting that individuals actually incorporate both sets of cultural stereotypes. She also felt that the concept of psychological androgyny reinforced the idea that gender roles were innate and obscured the true basis of gender liberation. Although Dr. Bem agreed that gender roles are learned, she believed that children are not only passively receiving the information about gender roles, but are then actively using that information to organize and comprehend the larger world.
Personality
At a very young age, Lipsitz remembers her mother warning her that housework was not a very desirable task. These cautionary words may have been one of her first introductions to the idea of an egalitarian household and lifestyle that would later shape both her career and personal life. When Lipsitz began to express and act on her beliefs in gender equality, she quickly discovered that the rest of the world was not yet as progressive as she was.
When she was in grade school she insisted on wearing pants. Her unrelenting refusal to wear a skirt almost led to her getting expelled from her Orthodox Jewish school.
Physical Characteristics:
Bem was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and, four years after diagnosis and after pursuing experimental treatments, she followed through with her plan to die by suicide at her home in Ithaca on May 20, 2014.
Connections
Sandra got acquainted to professor Daryl Bem during her senior year at Carnegie College For Women. Because of their teacher and student relationship, Daryl was very careful in pursuing a relationship with Sandra.
After several months of spending all their available time with each other, Sandra and Daryl began discussing marriage. In the type of marriage that Sandra and Daryl decided to begin, neither party would be solely responsible for the household chores or for raising the children. Housework would be kept to a minimum and done only when absolutely necessary. Consideration of the marriage partner's outside lives would also be egalitarian. Both partners careers and interests would be considered equally important.
Both Daryl and Sandra felt that their relationship with each other and with their children should be more important than their careers. However, they also both felt that their commitment to these relationships should be equal and should entail the same benefits and sacrifices for each partner.
On June 6, 1965, Daryl Bem and Sandra Lipsitz were married in a simple ceremony, modeled after a Quaker ceremony, in which each professed their love and commitment, and married themselves to each other. Although both families supported their concepts of egalitarianism, Sandra's family was strongly opposed to her non-Jewish wedding ceremony. After making several attempts to change her mind, her mother and several of her relatives decided not to attend. In addition to the lack of support for their type of marriage, and wedding ceremony, Sandra and Daryl encountered criticism about their decision to live apart after they wed.
Over the years, relatives from both sides of the family came for regular visits or for short stays. The importance of family connection only increased for Sandra with the birth of their first child, Emily, in 1974. Sandra's mother had an immediate and transforming connection to Emily. The close presence of Sandra's parents at this time of her life, and the connection that they had with Emily, and her second child, healed much of the pain of the past.
While the Bems eventually chose to live separately, they remained married until Sandra's death on May 20, 2014.
Father:
Peter Lipsitz
Peter Lipsitz worked as a mail clerk.
Mother:
Lillian Lipsitz
Lillian Lipsitz worked as a highly-regarded executive secretary.
Ex-husband:
Daryl Bem
Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change. He has also researched psi phenomena, group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation, and personality theory and assessment.
