Bart, sociologist who mapped women’s challenges, dies at 91
Pauline Bart, a second-wave feminist sociologist who wrote with rigor and dark wit about depression among 1950s-era housewives, gender inequities in health care and violence against women, died, Oct. 8, at a hospice facility in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was 91.
Her daughter, Melinda Schlesinger, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
“She was one of the earliest, maybe the earliest, feminist sociologist,” said Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist law professor who pioneered the legal claim that sexual harassment is sexual discrimination. “Pauline took the insights of the women’s liberation movement and turned them into knowledge. She took the insights from consciousness raising and made them into scholarship.”
Bart documented the ways in which society’s gender biases had harmed women. One of her studies, published in 1973, looked at the language and directives of gynecology textbooks.
Pointing out that almost all gynecologists at the time were male — 93.4%, Time magazine reported in 1972 — she showed how medical books that were theoretically geared toward women’s reproductive health focused instead on the happiness of their male partners.
She cited textbooks that noted how “women’s sexual pleasure was secondary or even absent” and that suggested women submit to their husbands in all ways — “the bride should be advised to allow her husband’s sex drive to set their pace” — and learn to fake their orgasms. “Innocent simulation” is how one book phrased it. One textbook compared the gynecologist to a god.
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice” was the wry title of Bart’s study, which she often said was an “ovarian, rather than a seminal, work.”
“Pauline could have been Lenny Bruce,” said Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist and co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network.
Instead, Bart turned to sociology. It was a deeply personal choice driven by her own experiences and challenges. “I turn my personal life into sociology,” she said, “and use sociological analysis to cope with my personal life.”
An illegal abortion, performed by a male doctor, had been so painful that she vomited. Its fallout — when she sought treatment, the hospital demanded she divulge the doctor’s name before helping her — propelled her years later to study the Jane Collective, an underground abortion service run by women who had successful (which is to say safe) outcomes.
Her mother’s depression — and perhaps her own, as a divorced mother of two young children struggling to earn advanced degrees and find work — led her to interview women who had been hospitalized for depression.