Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, turned one thing of a Margaret Mead in black leather-based, steering her Harley-Davidson deep right into a biker tradition and producing the 2001 e-book “Bike Lust: Harleys, Girls, and American Society,” died on March 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.
The reason for dying, in an assisted dwelling facility, was cardiopulmonary failure, her son Howard Schwartz stated.
Ms. Joans, Brooklyn-born, plucky and outspoken, started her profession as an teacher on the New Faculty for Social Analysis in Greenwich Village, with a give attention to girls’s points, producing papers on matters just like the anthropological points of menopause.
Beginning within the Sixties, she was additionally a feminist crusader, serving to girls organize unlawful abortions within the days earlier than Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she participated in a daylong occupation of The Women’ House Journal’s editorial workplaces in New York to demand the chance to place out a “liberated” model of the journal.
“She was a little bit of a wild lady, a real nonconformist,” Phyllis Chesler, writer of “Girls and Insanity” (1972) and a longtime pal of Ms. Joans’s, stated in a telephone interview. “Sure, she was an instructional and a pleasant Jewish lady from Brooklyn. However she was a bit little bit of a road hombre.”
In her 50s, that designation turned extra literal when Ms. Joans, then a professor of anthropology at Merritt Faculty in Oakland, Calif., purchased her first motorbike and unwittingly opened a brand new area of examine for herself.
“To the Harley rider, there are two sorts of bikes,” she wrote within the introduction to “Bike Lust.” “There are Harleys, and there are all different kinds of bikes.”
Setting out on her brawny Harley-Davidson Low Rider, which she nicknamed the Beast, Ms. Joans researched the subculture, with its many splinters and subgroups, on weekend rides with a San Francisco-based motorbike membership, the Fog Hogs, in addition to in motorbike outlets, biker bars and at Harley festivals.
By the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, Harley tradition, lengthy related to roughnecks just like the Hells Angels, was going mainstream as a brand new wave of center class professionals adopted chrome-encrusted “hogs” as a ticket to journey.
Throughout these years, feminine fanatics have been making their presence felt, accounting for 10 to 12 p.c of the motorcycling inhabitants, she stated in a 2003 CNN interview. “Girls, who was once excluded from any place besides that of back-seat Betty,” she wrote, “now trip the roads alone or journey in all-women driving golf equipment.”
In her e-book, Ms. Joans delineated the bands of each female and male bikers she encountered in her analysis. Girls had their very own subcategories, together with “the girl biker” and “the girl biker.”
The girl biker, Ms. Joans advised CNN, “rides splendidly, however she is not going to wrench,” she stated. “She’s going to carry a hair dryer and make-up and condoms in her saddlebag. However she is not going to go close to a set of instruments.”
The lady biker, she stated, “is type of her reverse.” “The lady biker will type of disdain any male assist, and can say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. It’s my bike. I can tear it down and construct it up once more.’”
Whereas male riders tended to journey in packs, girls riders typically launched into odysseys, solo rides, typically overlaying a number of states. “Between the birthings and the dyings, the weddings and the ceremonies, comes the odyssey,” she wrote.
“The journey, this odyssey, is the testing floor for the girl biker,” she added. “We go off by ourselves as a result of we should.”
Barbara Joan Levinsohn was born on Feb. 28, 1935, in Brooklyn, the one youngster of Rubin Levinsohn, who owned a clothes retailer in Decrease Manhattan, and Eleanor (Davidson) Levinsohn, a junior highschool instructor.
After graduating from Midwood Excessive Faculty in 1952, she enrolled in Brooklyn Faculty, the place she acquired a bachelor’s diploma in philosophy in 1956, adopted by a grasp’s diploma in sociology and anthropology from New York College in 1965 and a doctorate in anthropology from the Metropolis College of New York in 1974.
By 1956 she had married her first husband, Irwin Schwartz, however they divorced in 1970. She subsequently adopted the final title Joans.
In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Harmon, in addition to her two sons, moved to Santa Cruz. They married the following 12 months as Ms. Joans took a instructing submit at San Jose State College. It was Mr. Harmon, a pc programmer and longtime motorbike fanatic, who bought her into driving with the Fog Hogs.
Along with her son Howard, she is survived by one other son, David Schwartz, 4 grandchildren and one great-grandson. Mr. Harmon died in 2021.
Whereas Harleys turned a ardour, Ms. Joans didn’t begin out on one. Her first motorbike was a light-weight Honda Insurgent 250, which she purchased when she was 56.
“After which at 60 years previous, she switched to a Harley Low Rider,” Ms. Chesler stated, referring to Ms. Joans’ hulking Beast. “I stated, ‘Have you ever misplaced your thoughts? That’s 650 kilos. How are you going to choose it up when it falls down?’ And he or she stated, ‘You simply do.’”
