Naomi Weisstein 1939-2015

from The Examiner

I learned this weekend of the death of Naomi Weisstein a brilliant theorist of 1970s women's liberation, psychologist, and musician. Weisstein is perhaps less well known than other figures in the Politics of Women's Culture that I've eulogized on this blog because she was chronically ill for the last three decades, but in the 1960s she was among the most recognizable voices in the New Left.  Her comics, music and writings spread socialist feminism widely.

Weisstein earned a Ph.D. in 1964 from Harvard in psychology and participated in both SDS and CORE (her autobiography from 2000 is available online).   She is probably most associated with her oft-reprinted and much anthologized "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female," (1969) however she was also a pivotal organizer in the socialist feminist circles of Chicago, teaching one of the first university courses on women in 1966 at the University of Chicago, participating in the influential 1967 Westside Group and then co-founding the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, where among other projects, she co-founded the Chicago Women's Liberation Band (1970).

When challenged about the appropriateness of dedicating energy to the frivolous pursuit of music, Weisstein, the daughter of a concert pianist, fired off an impassioned defense that demolished the idea of culture as mere superstructure.  As she explained in a 2000 memoir,

“Structure is the tip of the patriarchal iceberg. Subjugation and submission gets inside our heads, and it takes direct confrontation with culture to extirpate them.”

Weisstein was not only a talented musician, but also a sharp humorist.  She did feminist stand up and drew cartoons.  The one below accompanied discussion of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement.

or this one, in which she took on relationships between women and men in the New Left

Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement

Weisstein was Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology/Neuroscience, State Univ. of NY at Buffalo.  She was married to the historian Jesse Lemisch.