Sex Roles (2017) 76:529–543 DOI 10.1007/s11199-016-0674-2

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The Personal, Political, and Professional Life of Sandra Bem Carla R. Golden 1 & Maureen C. McHugh 2

Published online: 7 September 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract The contributions of Sandra Bem, a pioneer in feminist psychology, are reviewed in the context of her life. From childhood and her early years as a second wave feminist activist in Pittsburgh, Bem challenged established gender conventions including dress codes, segregated employment ads, workplace discrimination, and marital roles. We follow the trajectory of Bem’s education and academic career, highlighting her three main contributions to feminist psychology: (a) psychological androgyny and the BSRI, (b) gender schema theory, and (c) the reproduction of sexual inequality via the lenses of gender. We also review her late life developments, such as her retraining in clinical psychology and her decision to end her own life after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Placing Bem’s activist and academic work in the context of her personal struggle against gender expectations, we include her own voice to illustrate how she integrated the personal, political, and professional from the beginning of her life until her last days. We show that over the last four decades, Sandra Bem’s contributions to theory and research transformed the study of the psychology of women in the United States and had an international reach—adding immensely to our understanding of gender roles, stereotypes, nonconscious gender ideologies, psychological androgyny, gender schemas, and gender-aschematic parenting, as well as how androcentrism,

* Carla R. Golden [email protected]

1

Department of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Ithaca College, 953 Danby Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

2

Department of Psychology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705, USA

gender polarization, and biological essentialism work systemically and psychologically to reproduce gender inequality. Keywords Androgyny . Gender schema . Egalitarian marriage . Feminist psychology . Biological essentialism . Androcentrism . Gender polarization . Gender roles . Nonconscious ideology

BLike many feminist scholars, I live my life with little separation between the personal, the professional, and the political. My theory and my practice are thus inextricably intertwined.^ (Bem 1998, p. ix) BI also position myself as a visionary imagining a gender-less utopia and inviting others to imagine it with me.^ (Bem 1994b, p. 100) Feminist psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem, Emerita Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, died in 2014, leaving a legacy of scholarship that challenged us to reconceptualize the relation between sex and gender and to examine how nonconscious gender ideology impacts our lives. This special issue of Sex Roles is devoted to highlighting some of the research generated by her thinking and writing. Our goal is to provide a broad overview and some context for understanding her life and work. We aim to introduce Sandra Bem as someone who exemplified Bthe personal is political^ and who allowed that insight to shape her feminism and her scholarship. In so doing, she helped to transform our understanding of the world, as well as our place within it. Sandra Bem was recognized as a pioneer in feminist psychology in the United States (Golden and McHugh 2015;

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Liben and Bigler 2016; McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015). From the beginning of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she challenged established notions of sex and gender, and she rejected the claim that there was any necessary relation between them apart from reproduction. Her contributions to theory and research transformed the early years of feminist psychology in the United States and had an international reach, significantly impacting our evolving understanding of gender roles, stereotypes, nonconscious gender ideologies, psychological androgyny, gender schemas, and gender-aschematic parenting, as well as how androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism work systemically and psychologically to reproduce gender inequality. We note that what Bem consistently referred to in her work as Bsexual^ inequality (i.e., the unequal position of the sexes) is more often referred to today as Bgender^ inequality. At the time she was writing, feminists were less likely to make the distinctions we make today between sex and gender (Frieze and Chrisler 2011). Bem’s body of work significantly shaped research within the psychology of women in the United States and, as evident in the articles assembled in this special issue, remains relevant 40 years later (Keener and Mehta 2016). Our focus in this article will be on Bem’s influence in the United States because she was addressing gender roles in her own cultural context. But we note that her work had considerable international scope, as evidenced by a citation search conducted using the Web of Science database in May 2016. Bem’s 1974 article, BThe measurement of psychological androgyny^ published in the Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology, has 3788 citations, and a close look at the first 379 articles in which it is cited indicates not only the international reach of Bem’s work, but also how contemporary the citations are. The first 10 % cover the time period from January 2012 through May 2014, and they were from journals based in or edited from the following countries (in alphabetic order): Britain, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Israel, Mexico, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. Further, there were citations from many European Journals (ranging from those focused on developmental psychology, organizational psychology, physiology, public health, and information systems to name just a few). Because our focus in this article is on the U.S. context, the research we cite herein is conducted with U.S. samples except where otherwise noted. Sandra Bem’s publications won her enduring recognition and several important awards, starting with the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award in 1976 (American Psychological Association 1977). She also won Distinguished Publication Awards from the Association for Women (AWP) in Psychology in 1977, and again in 1994, as well as the Young Scholar Award from the American Association of University Women in 1980. These awards are all cited in Bem’s last updated CV from 2004 (D. Bem,

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personal communication, June 18, 2014). Most recently, Sandra received a Distinguished Career Award from the Association for Women in Psychology, conferred posthumously at its 2015 National Conference in San Francisco (Golden 2015). Beyond the awards, Bem’s research and theories affected a whole generation of second wave U.S. feminists, including the present authors. Her impact was not only on how we understood and researched gender, but also how we chose to live personally and politically as feminists. Her influence was wider still because it had deep resonance beyond academia. She was a feminist activist in Pittsburgh whose research was used in arguments against sex discrimination that reached as far as the U.S. Supreme Court (Stockford 2004). In addition to publishing in the most prestigious psychology journals, Sandy lectured widely in the late 1960s and 70s, and she wrote accessible articles (e.g., Bem 1975b) for audiences outside academia (Golden 2014). To those who knew her personally (as did the first author), she was far from the stereotype of an Ivy League professor. Known to be incredibly smart, open, and blunt, she was without self-importance or pretension. She was unconventional in many respects, not the least of which was her gender non-conformity (Golden 2014), and she noted it with pride: BWhat I am—and have been for as long as I can remember—is someone whose sexuality and gender have never seemed to mesh with the available gender categories …^ (Bem 1993c, p. vii). In the last roughly 15 years of her life, Sandy’s personal and career trajectory took a different turn. After publishing The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (Bem 1993c), her most ambitious scholarly work, she moved away from academic publishing. She wrote An Unconventional Family (Bem 1998), a very personal account of her marriage to Daryl Bem and how they chose to raise their children. Shortly after that, she took a leave from Cornell to pursue a PsyD degree in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, and she subsequently opened a private psychotherapy practice in Ithaca, NY (McConnellGinet et al. 2015). Upon learning that the cognitive difficulties she started to have in the late 2000s were likely to develop into Alzheimer’s disease, she set in motion a plan to take her own life (Marantz Henig 2015). In what follows, we review Sandra Bem’s contributions to feminist psychology in the context of her life, starting with the early years, which laid the foundation for her research and theoretical interests. We also highlight Bem’s egalitarian marriage, Pittsburgh-based activism, the move from Stanford to Cornell University, her clinical retraining in her early 50s, and her courageous decision to plan her own death. Interspersed with this chronological trajectory, we weave in her three main areas of scholarly work—psychological androgyny, gender schema theory, and the lenses of gender as they relate to the reproduction of gender inequality. Throughout, we attempt to

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show how Bem’s scholarly interests were grounded in personal insights and how she connected her own frustration with gender roles and expectations to social constructions of gender. Rather than fit into available cultural categories, she instead offered cogent critiques of them. We quote liberally from Bem’s writing to illustrate what was important to her; to show how she integrated the personal, political, and professional; and to bring her unique voice to the forefront.

The Early Years and Bem’s Education

B… since earliest childhood, my own particular blend of temperament and behavior has seemed to fall outside the categories of male and female, masculine and feminine; indeed being female has never seemed a salient feature of my self concept. Like being human, it is a fact, but a taken-for-granted background fact rather than a nucleus around which I have constructed my identity. (Being a feminist, on the other hand, is such a nucleus.)^ (Bem 1993c, pp. vii-viii) Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in a working class Jewish family, Sandra Lipsitz lived in government subsidized housing until she was 8 years-old. Her mother Lillian was employed as a secretary and her father Peter as a postal worker (George 2012; Golden and McHugh 2015). She had one sibling, a sister named Bev, and two very beloved grandparents: Esther Sobel Lehman (whom she called BBoby^), her mother’s mother, and Jenny Weisberg Lipsitz (BGrandma^), her father’s mother. Sandy’s rebellion against conventional gender roles began in childhood. From ages 3–11 years-old, she was enrolled in Hillel Academy (2016), an Orthodox Jewish Day School, with the continuing mission to instill in its students a love of learning, confidence, and the ability to think critically. Sandy was an outstanding student beyond her A+ grades. As one of only 3 girls enrolled at Hillel, she chose to dress like her male classmates by wearing pants to school each day in violation of the school’s dress code. In a confrontation turned negotiation with school administrators, Sandy agreed to wear a dress on the High Holy Days, but only over her pants (Bem 1998)! This incident foreshadows Sandy’s attitude toward gender compliance and her propensity to challenge gender dress and behavior codes throughout her life. In fact, she made a habit of questioning all gender-related expectations because they simply made no sense to her (D. Bem, personal communication, August 25, 2014). Sandy excelled as a student, earning scholarships to study at each stage of her education. As a child, her aspirations were to obtain a job where she had her own desk and some

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autonomy in contrast to the working class jobs of her parents. As a student at Pittsburgh’s Taylor Allderdice High School, Sandy again distinguished herself. For college, she chose to study at Margaret Morison College, a unit of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) because it adjoined her neighborhood and living at home made it affordable. As Sandra detailed in her more personal writing (Bem 1998), her family was dysfunctional and she was not very happy living at home. At one point she transferred to Indiana University, but family matters brought her back to Carnegie Tech before completing even a single semester there. She subsequently found a way to move away from home to an apartment to complete her undergraduate studies. In her senior year of college Sandra Lipsitz met Daryl Bem, an assistant professor of psychology at Carnegie Tech. They became romantically involved and were married 4 months later on the day before she graduated from college at age 20. Nothing about their relationship was traditional for that time period. After letting Daryl know of her objections to traditional family roles and marriage, they wrote a marriage contract together that pledged an egalitarian union. They were married in a non-religious ceremony, which met with considerable resistance from her family. A letter she wrote to her disapproving parents in 1965 reflects a certainty and confidence that foreshadows another controversial decision she made at the end of her life: I have never before, during the course of my adult life, felt the need to justify my actions to anyone but myself, and I do not feel that need now. I am an intelligent, educated young woman, well aware of my strengths as well as my weaknesses. I have a great deal of confidence in my ability to choose among all possible alternatives that one which is most appropriate for me in any given situation at any given time, and so I do not now feel a need to consult any or all of you about any facet of my present decision. (Bem 1998, p. 11) Aside from meeting Daryl, Sandy’s memoir notes one other significant experience as an undergraduate. A professor who was impressed with her work suggested she should go to medical school because he believed she would make an excellent psychiatrist. She was so excited by this advice that she remembers calling her mother (Bem 1998). In retrospect, Sandy realized that Bhis suggestion shifted my vision of myself not so much around gender as around class, and thereby also began to shift my vision of a possible future^ (p. 138). Although she eventually decided against medical school, this professor’s support, along with Daryl’s, allowed a working class girl to envision a professional career for herself. Sandy’s decision to study for her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan is another indication of her resistance to

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adopting a traditional approach to marriage and career. Others assumed she would matriculate at a local university because Daryl was at Carnegie Tech. However, both Sandy and Daryl considered it important for her to study at a topnotch institution—the University of Michigan. Despite it being such a highly regarded school, Bem (1998, p. 138) says she Bhad only one truly valuable experience^ there. In her first year, her experimental psychology advisor suggested she work on a study he had already designed having to do with verbal self-control in humans. This study did not particularly interest her and she apparently told him so. He gave her a week to propose a study of her own that she thought would be more compelling. After consulting with Daryl, Sandy came up with a study that her advisor approved and which resulted in her first sole-authored publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (Bem 1967). Describing her graduate years as Bnot very helpful intellectually,^ Bem (1998, pp. 138–139) notes taking required courses covering ten areas of psychology and choosing to concentrate in developmental psychology because it had Bso few additional requirements.^ This course allowed her to return to Pittsburgh after only 16 months in residence in Ann Arbor. In 1968, 3 years after graduating from college, Sandra Bem, at the age of 23, received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. After graduate school, Sandra moved back to Pittsburgh and got a job teaching at Carnegie Tech where Daryl was now a tenured member of the psychology faculty. There existed no anti-nepotism rule that would have prohibited such a hire; Sandy and Daryl joked that it probably Bnever occurred to Andrew Carnegie that a woman might apply^ (Bem 1998, p. 140).

Pittsburgh Activism and National Impact The Bems were active within the feminist community in Pittsburgh. Most notably, they worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW) to challenge gendersegregated job advertisements in a lawsuit against the Pittsburgh Press in 1969. The Bems provided expert testimony by reporting results of their research showing that women were unlikely to apply for jobs listed under the heading BMale Help Wanted^ (Bem and Bem 1973). The case was eventually heard by the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled against the Pittsburgh Press in 1973. This significant victory contributed to gender desegregation of the workplace, leading to the eventual elimination of separate classified ads for women and men in newspapers across the United States and, more generally, to changes in the way U.S. employers constructed employment positions (Butler and Bonnet 2007; Kerman 1974; Ove 2014).

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The Bems further confronted workplace discrimination by serving as expert witnesses in the U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s hearings regarding discrimination against women at American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T; Stockford 2004), then a telephone monopoly. Their research demonstrated that the way a job was advertised affected the numbers of women versus men who said they would be interested in applying for it. By creating ‘gender-biased,^ Bgender neutral,^ and Bgender-reversed^ advertisements for jobs typically associated with women and men (i.e., operator and lineman), the Bems were able to show differential impact depending on how the ad was written (Bem and Bem 1973). Although the lawyers for AT&T ridiculed the ads the Bems used in their research (e.g., for linewomen: BWe’re looking for outdoor women! Do you like fresh air and exercise? If sitting behind a desk isn’t for you, stay slim and trim as a linewoman working in the great outdoors for Pacific Telephone!^), they eventually employed such ads in their own national advertising (Bem 1998, p. 76). In a publicly announced settlement, AT&T agreed to modify its recruiting and hiring practices. William Brown III, Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, acknowledged the crucial role of the Bems’ research when he personally wrote to them: BSince AT&T’s principal justification for its sexsegregation of jobs was lack of interest by females, your experiment provided the spearhead of our argument on that issue^ (Bem 1998, p. 77). Sandra Bem was a visible and vocal force in second wave feminist activism in Pittsburgh in the late 1960s, as witnessed by the second author who lived and worked in the area. Bem spoke out frequently and published her ideas about resisting gender roles in both public and private spheres (Golden 2014). Sandra and Daryl were widely recognized for their egalitarian marriage, which was featured in the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine in 1970 in an article titled BA marriage of equals^ (Bem 1998, p. 75; Marantz Henig 2015, p. 40). They were highly sought after as lecturers on this topic because having an equal marriage was such a radical idea at the time (and in many ways still is). In Pittsburgh, the Bems gave community lectures on gender roles, egalitarian marriage, and how they shared housework. In recalling those years, Sandy wrote: From the start we were gender pioneers, inventing first an egalitarian marriage for ourselves and later a gender liberated, anti-homophobic, and sex positive way of rearing our children … As quickly as we invented these forms, we were called upon to speak about them in public. Our private lives were therefore transformed into the subject of public feminist discourse …^ (Bem 1998, pp. 69-70).

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Training the Woman to Know her Place: A Classic of Second Wave Feminism To elaborate on Sandy’s resistance to gendered divisions of domestic responsibilities, the Bems wrote an article entitled BTraining the woman to know her place: The power of a nonconscious ideology^ (Bem and Bem 1970). The second author recalls that this article was originally mimeographed in a local garage by KNOW (a publishing arm of Pittsburgh NOW), and then distributed in pamphlet style through women’s studies courses in the early 1970s. Later, it was widely anthologized in a range of feminist texts (e.g., Cox 1976) and is now regarded as a classic (Golden and McHugh 2015; McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015). The article was groundbreaking in using the word Bsexism^ when it was not widely known. Bem (1998, p. 80) contended that when she began lecturing on these issues in the 1970s, the word Bhad not yet been invented.^ In BTraining the woman to know her place,^ the Bems argued that internalized gender stereotypes were significantly related to the maintenance of gender differences and inequalities. The article presented ingenious thought exercises designed to reveal to readers their own nonconscious assumptions about housework and childrearing— namely that they are the responsibilities of the wife and that a husband’s career should always take priority. By challenging androcentric assumptions about the roles women and men were expected to follow within marriage, the article contested the ideas that gender differences were biological and that gender inequality was inevitable. We note a significant pattern here. Starting with her earliest writing, Bem articulated how the personal was political, and brought her keen insights to popular as well as academic discussions. Her understanding of gender grew out of her own rejection of its conventions, and then through her writing and speaking, she brought her views to a wider public. By articulating the power of gender roles and nonconscious ideologies, she challenged what many assumed was an inevitable link between sex and gender. The themes first put forth in BTraining the woman to know her place^ repeat throughout Bem’s scholarship (e.g., Bem 1993a), and they find their fullest expression more than 20 years later in The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (Bem 1993c). Widely distributed, BTraining the woman to know her place^ generated enthusiastic discussion in the second wave of U.S. feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It spoke to the potential of education and feminist theory to liberate women from traditional roles (Brown 1986). For us personally, this article was part of our early introduction to feminist psychology, and we both used it in the first psychology of women courses we taught (Golden at Smith College in 1977; McHugh at the University of Pittsbrugh in 1976).

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Early Career Years

BI consider myself an empirical scientist, and yet my interest in sex roles is and has always been frankly political. My hypotheses have derived from no formal theory, but rather from a strong set of intuitions about the debilitating effects of sex-role stereotyping, and my major purpose has always been a feminist one: to help free the human personality from the restricting prison of sex-role stereotyping and to develop a conception of mental health which is free from culturally imposed definitions of masculinity and femininity. But political passion does not persuade and, unless one is a novelist or poet, one’s intuitions are not typically compelling to others. Thus, because I am an empirical scientist, I have chosen to utilize the only legitimated medium of persuasion which is available to me: the medium of empirical data.^ (Bem 1976, p. 49) BBy the time I moved to Stanford, I had found my calling. It was feminism, and by God I was going to change the face of both psychology and society or die trying.^ (Bem 1998, p. 146) During her early years as a faculty member at Carnegie Tech (1968–1970) and prior to conducting research on helpwanted ads (Bem and Bem 1973), Sandy found herself wrestling with Bthe question of whether I really wanted to be a research psychologist^ (Bem 1998, p. 140). At the time, she enjoyed teaching but was not engaged in any specific research program. She discussed with Daryl whether perhaps she should be working at a nearby liberal arts college where she would not be expected to do research. She did not get very far in exploring that possibility because during her second year of teaching, she became Buncomfortable that Daryl and I had no empirical evidence, no data, to back up the claims we were making in our public lectures, about how much better it would be for both women and men if society would stop stereotyping … if everyone were free to be their own unique blending of temperament and behavior …^ (Bem 1998, p. 141, italics in original). The realization that she could collect the relevant data herself is what propelled her research on androgyny. Bem (1998, p. 142) describes this not merely as an epiphany but as a consuming passion: BFrom that moment on, my political, personal, and professional passions fed one another during every moment of the day …^ By Sandra’s own assessment, it was a mission for which she was ill-prepared because nothing in her 3 years of graduate school had prepared her to do such research, nor did she have the background knowledge she considered relevant. To remedy the situation, she immersed herself in the psychological literature on gender to learn as much as she could, and she

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characterized this period as her Bsolitary conversion to feminist scholarship^ (Bem 1998, p. 142).

Psychological Androgyny: A Critique of Existing Theories of Gender

BIt is hoped that the development of the BSRI [Bem Sex Role Inventory] will encourage investigators in the areas of sex differences and sex roles to question the traditional assumption that it is the sex-typed individual who typifies mental health and to begin focusing on the behavioral and societal consequences of more flexible sexrole self-concepts. In a society where rigid sex-role differentiation has already outlived its utility, perhaps the androgynous person will come to define a more human standard of psychological health.^ (Bem 1974, pp. 161-162) After 3 years at Carnegie Tech (1968–1971), Sandra and Daryl were successfully recruited to Stanford University. It was at Stanford that Sandra became fully immersed in gathering data that would support the detrimental and limiting effects of traditional gender roles (George 2012). In what has undoubtedly been her most widely recognized work—on psychological androgyny—Bem proposed that masculinity and femininity were not polar opposites nor were they inherently related to one’s sex (Bem 1974, 1975a; Bem and Lenney 1976). Taking a more context-dependent view of human behavior, she contended that masculine and feminine characteristics could co-exist together in the same person depending on situational factors. Someone could be aggressive in one context and understanding in another, or dominant in one situation and compassionate in another. To test her ideas, Bem (1974) created the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). In contrast to traditional assessments of masculinity and femininity in widespread use at the time, the BSRI measured masculinity and femininity independently, thus allowing for the possibility that a person could be both, or in Bem’s conception, androgynous. As noted by Brown (1986, p. 317), BThe Women’s Liberation Movement was very ready for Bem’s psychometric innovation … Women … were ready for the refreshing idea that one could perfectly well be both assertive and sensitive.^ At the time she was writing, Bem referred to the BSRI as a measure which allowed her to research sex-typing, but in conformity with this journal’s editorial policy (Frieze and Chrisler 2011), we will refer to it as gender-typing. Bem was not alone in challenging the way masculinity and femininity were conceptualized and measured. For example, in a major review, Constantinople (1973, p. 389) critiqued traditional

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assessments of masculinity-femininity, calling into question whether it was a Bsingle bipolar dimension ranging from extreme masculinity at one end to extreme femininity at the other^ and whether it could Badequately be measured by a single score.^ However, it appears that Bem was not aware of this critique because the Constantinople review does not appear within the references of her early articles on androgyny (Bem 1974, 1975a, 1977). At around the same time, Spence et al. (1974) developed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). Like the BSRI, it measured masculinity and femininity separately, and like the Constantinople (1973) review, it appears to have been unknown to Bem. In a review of androgyny research, Brown (1986, p. 333) describes the BSRI and the PAQ as having been developed Bin complete independence^ of each other and concludes that BEvidently the idea of the androgynous personality was in the zeitgeist of 1974.^ The BSRI comprised 60 pretested (and socially desirable) items on which people could rate themselves on a Likert scale. Twenty items were considered feminine (e.g., affectionate, sympathetic, gentle), 20 were considered masculine (e.g., independent, forceful, dominant), and 20 were considered neutral (e.g., conscientious, reliable, unpredictable; 10 of the neutral items were not socially desirable). In addition to this original version, Bem created a short-form BSRI consisting of 30 items (Bem 1979, 1981a). People taking the inventory receive a masculinity score and a separate femininity score; androgyny is measured by the ratio of masculine to feminine items. Scores close to zero represent a balance of masculine and feminine traits, and high negative or positive scores represent conventional gender expressions. More detailed considerations of how the BSRI was scored (in both its original and short form) can be found in Bem (1977, 1979, 1981a). Critical methodological and theoretical issues are explored in Hoffman and Borders (2001). For the purposes of the present review, we note that there are four possible outcomes for a person’s BSRI score: high masculinity, high femininity, high in both (androgyny), and low in both (undifferentiated). The undifferentiated category was not initially labeled as such by Bem, but rather by Spence et al. (1975) who developed the aforementioned PAQ. In their assessment of androgyny, Spence et al. (1975) distinguished between test takers whose masculinity and femininity scores did not differ because both were low (undifferentiated) and those whose scores did not differ because both were high (androgynous). Only those in the latter category were considered androgynous. By the mid 1970s, Bem (1977) was familiar with the work of Spence et al., and she reassessed her BSRI scoring procedures in light of their distinction between high-high and lowlow scorers. She concluded that such a differentiation Bdoes seem to be warranted^ (Bem 1977, p. 196), and in subsequent research only those with high levels of both masculinity and femininity were considered androgynous.

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To recap, scores on the BSRI could reflect conventional gender-typing (e.g., a female/woman who is highly feminine, or a male/man who is highly masculine), but there are other possibilities as well (e.g., females/women who are masculine, and males/men who are feminine). One of the advantages of measuring gender characteristics in this way is that it separates the sex of the person from their gender expression. A male could be typed as feminine, just as a female could be typed as masculine. And of course, individuals could score as androgynous, which is precisely what Bem’s early research (Bem 1975a, p. 643) demonstrated: Bthat there exists a distinct class of people who can appropriately be termed androgynous …^ In further research using the BSRI, Bem empirically examined both the flexibility of androgynous individuals and the rigidity of conventionally gender-typed men and women. She and her colleagues hypothesized that such individuals are likely to prefer gender-appropriate activities and that cross-gender behavior would be motivationally problematic for them. Their studies demonstrated that gender-typed individuals actively avoid and resist gender-inappropriate activities and are uncomfortable when performing cross-gender tasks (Bem and Lenney 1976; Bem et al. 1976). Bem (1975a, p. 643) also believed that androgynous people would be more mentally healthy and speculated that they Bwill someday come to define a new and more human standard of psychological health.^ In reflecting back on this body of work, Bem (1998, pp. 141–142) said her aim was to Bchallenge the traditional assumption of the mental health establishment that a mature, healthy identity necessarily requires women to be feminine and men to be masculine.^ At the time, and in keeping with the conventions of academic publishing, she acknowledged that this position was tentative (Bem and Lenney 1976). To say the BSRI has been widely referenced and frequently utilized in gender research would be an understatement. The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (JCCP) article in which it was first proposed (Bem 1974) has become a classic; as previously noted, the Web of Science (2016) database lists 3788 citations. Texts identifying key studies in the field of psychology cite the 1974 JCCP article; for example, Banyard and Grayson (1996) highlight it as one of 60 such studies, and Gross (2008) as one of 41 such studies. A review of studies published in the American Psychologist showed an upsurge of research on gender roles in the 1980s (Eagly et al. 2012), which we believe is likely related to Bem’s work on androgyny. There is a considerable body of research investigating the association of BSRI scores with indicators of mental health and many other aspects of behavior; a search of BBSRI^ in Google Scholar lists over 15,000 studies. Additionally, there are numerous cross-cultural applications of the BSRI to diverse populations, including in China (e.g., Hong and Rust 1989; Zhang et al. 2001); Greece (e.g., Yarnold et al. 1989); India (e.g., Sethi and Allen 1984;

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Upmanyu et al. 2000); Israel (e.g., Maloney et al. 1981); Japan (e.g., Mitsui 1989); Malaysia (e.g., Ward and Sethi 1986); Saudi Arabia (Al-Qataee 1984); Singapore (e.g., PeiHui and Ward 1994); and Zimbabwe (Wilson et al. 1990). There is little question that Bem’s research on psychological androgyny has had tremendous impact in the United States as well as internationally. Attention has been strong notwithstanding serious criticisms of the BSRI as a measure (Frable 1989; Gilbert 1985; Hoffman and Borders 2001) and despite the fact that research did not generally confirm the androgyny model of mental health which Bem had proposed. For example, comprehensive reviews of the literature from the 1980s found that when psychological well-being was measured by scales of general adjustment, or self-esteem, or depression, it was masculinity that was correlated with well-being, not androgyny or femininity (Whitley 1984, 1988). As we already noted, Sandy herself acknowledged that she was not well prepared to develop the BSRI and never anticipated that it would be so widely used. She was further dismayed that it was sometimes understood as a measure of a person’s inherent masculinity and femininity, which was antithetical to her thinking (Bem 1998). However, despite various critiques, psychologists and others interested in gender-typing and androgyny continue to use the BSRI. One can find fairly recent articles in the psychological literature addressing whether it is still a useful instrument (Fernandez and Coelleo 2010; Oswald 2004), and it is readily accessible on-line (Bem Sex Role Inventory 2016). One can easily take the test and get an immediate score. Forty years later, although new conceptions of gender have been proposed, newer measures of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny have not been widely adopted (Beere 1990; Smoak 2009). It has been argued that criticisms of the BSRI have ironically contributed to its becoming even more widely known and used (Hoffman and Borders 2001). Despite serious critiques of whether the inventory reflects current perceptions of masculinity and femininity (Hoffman and Borders 2001), or whether it is even a measure of masculinity and femininity at all (as opposed to a scale that measures instrumental and expressive characteristics) as Spence (1983) has suggested, both the scale and the concept of androgyny are very much in evidence. In fact, among our students who increasingly question or reject the gender binary, we have noticed their use of the word Bandrogynous^ as a positive self descriptor.

Trajectory from Stanford to Cornell: The Denial of Tenure Before moving on to Sandra Bem’s later work on gender schema theory, raising gender aschematic children, and her integrative theoretical work in Lenses of Gender, we return

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to her career trajectory and offer a brief overview of her transition from Stanford to Cornell University and her eventual pursuit of a clinical psychology license. In March of 1978, Bem was awarded the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology for her 1977 article BOn the Utility of Alternative Procedures for Assessing Psychological Androgyny^ published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The annual AWP conference was held in Pittsburgh that year, and Bem was the first ever keynote speaker. The second author recalls that she spoke to an audience of about 1000, many of whom were graduate students and early career psychologists who went on to study androgyny and gender roles. Despite the increasing visibility of Bem’s work on psychological androgyny and at least 7 journal publications related to it during the years she was at Stanford (1971–1978), Bem was denied tenure there. Her research was in the newly emerging area of feminist psychology, and there were few recognized experts in the field to evaluate her work. Further, feminist psychology was not just any new field but one that, as Sandra herself noted, Bdirectly challenges not only the marginalization of women, but the neutrality of allegedly objective knowledge and allegedly objective institutions—a field… that theorizes the interconnections of gender, knowledge and power^ (Bem 1998, p. 155). Although it was not so clear to her at the time, in retrospect Sandy came to believe that her tenure case Blooked a lot more like sex discrimination than it had seemed. ..^ (Bem 1998, p. 152). As she developed a more sophisticated understanding of what discrimination looks like in academia, she also explicitly questioned, who has the power to judge what the critical concepts and questions are and, even more important, what kinds of concepts and questions get excluded when almost all of them are white heterosexual men trained in a scientific tradition that still does not understand the many complicated ways in which science and politics are intertwined. (Bem 1998, p. 144) It was at the AWP conference in Pittsburgh that Sandy was first contacted by John Condry of the Psychology Department at Cornell University about her interest in serving as Director of Cornell’s Women’s Studies Program (Bem 1998). This led to negotiations that resulted in her being hired in that capacity in late spring of 1978 and simultaneously joining the Psychology Department as a tenured Associate Professor. A half-time line in Psychology was created for Daryl, who gave up his tenured position at Stanford to come east with Sandy. Within 3 years of arriving at Cornell, Sandy was promoted to Full Professor in 1981. She served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program until 1985, and she did a second stint as Director of the

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re-named Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program from 2000 to 2004 (McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015). For those who knew her at Cornell, Sandy was recognized as a strong administrator, even though this was not a preferred role (J. Brumberg, personal communication, August 18, 2014). Nonetheless, in her years as Director, she transformed Women’s Studies from what had been a struggling program into a serious academic effort with joint appointments of interdisciplinary scholars in areas as diverse as History, Anthropology, German Studies, and City Planning. Sandy was credited with Bseveral innovative hiring arrangements,^ including a joint appointment with a faculty member from Cornell’s Veterinary College (McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015 p. 18). It was while she was at Cornell that she did her work on gender schema theory and wrote The Lenses of Gender.

Gender Schema Theory

BThe feminist prescription is not that the individual be androgynous, but that society be gender aschematic.^ (Bem 1985, p. 222) BBy the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I had begun to see that the concept of androgyny inevitably focuses so much more attention on the individual being both masculine and feminine than on the culture’s having created the concepts of masculinity and femininity in the first place, that it can legitimately be said to reproduce precisely the gender polarization that it seeks to undercut. Accordingly, I moved on to the concept of gender schematicity because it enabled me to argue more forcefully that masculinity and femininity are merely the constructions of a cultural schema—or lens—that polarizes gender.^ (Bem 1993c, p. viii) While other researchers were still actively using the BSRI, Sandy consciously turned away from it, realizing that the scale itself was drawing attention to masculinity and femininity as inherent to men and women rather than as cultural constructs that reproduce the very gender polarization she was arguing against. By the 1980s, Sandy had moved on to gender schema theory, which offered a cognitive account of how individuals became gendered. Drawing from social, cognitive, and developmental psychologies, she proposed that gender schemas get incorporated into children’s self-concepts and then shape how they process information (Bem 1981b). This self-concept in turn affects the ease with which they assimilate gender stereotypes and regulate their own behavior to conform to them, all without conscious awareness of doing so. Bem argued there are individual differences in the degree to which

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children engage in gender schematic information processing based on the specific experiences and socialization to which they are exposed. Gender schema theory was an exploration of how the gender polarization so evident in the culture gets internalized by individuals without their realizing it. Once again we are back to nonconscious ideologies and to a common pattern in Sandy’s work: articulation of a theory that generates empirical work (in this case on gender schemas) accompanied by the goal of effecting social change. As the following quote makes clear, the impetus for her research and advocacy for social change was grounded in her own personal sense that gender categories did not fit her lived experience: … It is still my subjective sense of being outside the categories of my culture that has most profoundly contributed to my feminist politics, because it has enabled me to see how cultural categories construct and constrain social reality by providing the historically specific conceptual framework through which we perceive our social world. (Bem 1993c, p. viii). In the early 1980s, Bem’s work on gender schema theory found expression in psychology’s most prestigious journals and publications, including Psychological Review (Bem 1981b, 1981c), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Andersen and Bem 1981; Bem 1982; Frable and Bem 1985), and The Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Bem 1985). A major article on the implications of gender schema theory for child development was featured in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the preeminent journal of feminist scholarship at the time (Bem 1983). As a feminist, Sandy was interested in more than articulating theory; she was motivated to reveal and expose the constraining operation of gender schemas in order to point the way to change. In contrast to what was often hailed as the core insight of her work on androgyny—that we should all be free to explore the masculine and feminine within ourselves, Sandy used gender schema theory to argue that we should subvert the process by which gender schemas are internalized. By careful attention to child socialization, she argued we could work to create gender-aschematic children, and that is precisely what she attempted with her own children (Bem 1998). Not surprisingly, this shift in attention from androgyny to gender schema theory roughly coincided with the birth of her two children with Daryl, Jeremy and Emily. As the Bems were earlier committed to egalitarian marriage, they became committed to equally parenting and raising gender-aschematic children (i.e., children who did not adhere to culturally constructed gender ideology). The goal was to raise children who understood that the only meaningful differences between men and women were related to reproduction and not to every

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other aspect of human experience (Bem 1989). This was of course a huge challenge in a gender-polarized world, and in An Unconventional Family, Bem (1998) describes how she approached this task in frank and painstaking detail. The story of Jeremy, who one day wore a barrette to nursery school and was told by a classmate that he must be a girl because Bonly girls wear barrettes,^ is surely among the most well-told anecdotes about psychologists’ children (Bem 1998, p. 109). It illustrates Jeremy’s attempt to share his genderaschematic knowledge with a classmate who viewed the world through far more rigid gender schemas. Jeremy explained that wearing a barrette did not make him a girl because BI have a penis and testicles^ (Bem 1998, p. 109), but his classmate remained unconvinced. Jeremy literally pulled his pants down to show the boy that he was in fact a male. The boy’s rejoinder, BEverybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes,^ is a punch-line that generates many laughs but also makes a serious point: too many children do not learn that the sex of the body does not need to dictate what we wear and how we behave, that there is no necessary link between biological sex and gender expression (Bem 1989). Bem’s (1998, p. 69) description of how she and Daryl attempted to raise their children in a Bgender-liberated, antihomophobic, and sex-positive way^ is still cited and remembered somewhat nostalgically today. In Delusions of Gender, Australian psychologist Cordelia Fine (2010) explores the persistence of gender polarization and revisits gender-neutral parenting, citing data drawn from Canadian and U.S. samples as well as her own observations in the Australian context. She writes with both admiration and awe at Sandy’s determination to raise gender-aschematic children, and of the painstaking efforts she made to whiten out beards, draw in breasts, and change the names of storybook characters in order to expose her children to more gender-balanced characters. Fine (2010, p. 189) suggests that contemporary parents too easily resort to a Bbiology as fallback^ position when their children behave in stereotypic ways. She laments the fact that parents today do not take these issues nearly as seriously as the Bems did. The first author (Golden) used An Unconventional Family (Bem 1998) in a feminist psychology seminar shortly after it was published and can still recall the controversy it generated among her students who found it quite radical. Gender-neutral parenting remains so today, especially in this era where gender polarization is even more extreme and there is widespread adherence to the belief that women and men are fundamentally different (Barnett and Rivers 2011; Eliot 2009; JordanYoung 2010). In the current U.S. context, raising children to understand that genitals do not, and should not, organize who they are as people is still an unconventional idea. Thirty-four years after proposing gender schema theory, Bem’s work in this area has been found to have a broad international impact. In a review article analyzing journal articles

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that reference gender schema theory, Starr and Zurbriggen (2016) found that it Bcontinues to be cited frequently, with a broad reach beyond U.S. psychology.^ Characterizing gender schema theory as Ba major contribution to psychology,^ the authors highlight that its Bgenerative reach extended well beyond the boundaries of our field.^ Starr and Zurbriggen (2016) predict that gender schema theory will Bcontinue to have an impact for decades to come.^

The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality

BThis book, then, is broad ranging, reaching beyond my expertise as a psychologist. … a more specialized book could not have explained the institutional, ideological, and psychological mechanisms that keep the economic and political power of a society primarily in the hands of men. … I also get to write the book that, as a younger feminist struggling to make sense of the oppression of women and the oppression of sexual minorities, I would have most wanted to read.^ (Bem 1993c, p. ix) BThe Lenses of Gender is surely inadequate. What theory isn’t?^ (Bem 1994b, p. 97) Published in 1993, The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality was Sandy’s most ambitious and interdisciplinary work. It cohesively drew together her earlier writing and incorporated historical, biological, religious, literary, and legal perspectives to elaborate on her vision of a just world. Using the concept of distorting cultural lenses and identifying three of primary significance (androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism), she shows how they work together to systemically reproduce male dominance and power. The three lenses were certainly not unique to Bem; their prior description was articulated in much women’s studies scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985; Flax 1990; MacKinnon 1987). But a case can be made that Bem effectively used them to highlight how our incorporation of nonconscious cultural ideologies functions psychologically to maintain systems of gender inequality. Further, as we note below, these three lenses are as relevant today as they were in 1993. Androcentrism refers to Bthe privileging of male experience and the ‘otherizing’ of female experience^ or put slightly differently, that Bmales and male experience are treated as a neutral standard or norm … and females and female experience are treated as a sex-specific deviation from that allegedly universal standard (Bem 1993c, p. 41). Bem’s work on

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androcentrism is an elaboration of her early work on training women to know their place, and it reiterates that bias exists not only in our cultural discourses and social institutions but also in our minds. We may use different language to describe this form of bias today, such as Binternalized oppression^ (Brown 2003, p. 32) or Bwhite supremacist capitalist patriarchy^ (hooks 2000, p. 4) to note the intersectional aspects of androcentrism in cultural context. But despite 40 years of feminist activism, the basic male-centeredness that Bem highlighted in Lenses is still very present (Bates 2016; Rhode 2014). Gender polarization refers to Bthe ubiquitous organization of social life around the distinction between male and female^ (Bem 1993c, p. 80). Bem’s point here was not simply that females and males were seen as different but that this alleged difference was imposed on Bvirtually every aspect of human experience^ (p. 80). This had the effect of linking a person’s sex to things not necessarily related to it—from dress and social roles to how people expressed emotion or sexual desire. Although gender expectations have in many ways changed, gender polarization (the view that women and men are opposites and that almost everything from toys to colors to emotions and films can be characterized as masculine or feminine) is still very much part of our contemporary discourse (Fine 2010; Rivers and Barnett 2011). Biological essentialism refers to the belief that differences between men and women are the Bnatural and inevitable consequence of the intrinsic biological natures of women and men^ (Bem 1993c, p. 2). Bem claimed to be Ban agnostic^ (p. 37) on whether such differences exist; she was most interested in how male-female difference is transformed into disadvantage and how the belief in intrinsic differences serves to legitimize the other two cultural lenses. If women and men have different natures, then androcentrism and gender polarization might simply reflect an inevitable rather than a socially constructed reality. References to essential biological differences, often presented via Bthe seductive allure of neuroscience^ (Fine 2010, p. 168) are still actively brought forth today to explain the persistence of gender inequality. Fine (2010, p. xxvii) coined the term Bneurosexism^ to describe the widespread tendency for women’s status in society to be attributed to brain-based differences rather than to implicit attitudes and unequal treatment. Fausto-Sterling (2012, p. 20) aptly reflected this state of affairs when she asserted: BThe idea of brain sex has acquired a cultural valence and resonance that goes far beyond the scientific evidence that supports it. It is, in short, a meme.^ Lenses documents how pervasively the distorting lenses of androcentrism, gender polarization, and biological essentialism are reflected in historical and contemporary discourses of Western culture, as well as how they insidiously affect our psyches. As we have already noted, the critical contribution to feminist psychology was in showing how gender inequality is reproduced psychologically as well as systemically. We

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highlight two additional contributions to feminist psychology. One is the Benculturated-lens theory^ of gender development (Bem 1993c, p. 138) presented in a chapter devoted entirely to the construction of gender identity. In it, Bem illustrates how the process of internalization works in children, such that most develop into gender conformists, while many fewer become Bgender subversives^ (p. 133). A second significant contribution of Lenses to feminist psychology is that it extends Bem’s earlier analysis of gender to sexuality, showing how the cultural lenses impact our understandings and expressions of sexuality. Just as her earlier work challenged any natural link between a person’s sex and gender, Lenses challenges the assumed link between sex and sexuality. By showing how heterosexism and compulsory heterosexuality serve to reproduce normative sexualities in women and men, Bem (1993c, p. 175, italics in the original) contended that Bour concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality may be historically and culturally created fictions.^ Bem sought to make visible the gendered lenses through which we view the world, often without conscious knowledge of doing so. She encouraged us to Blook at the culture’s gender lenses rather than through them^ (Bem 1993c, p. 2, italics in the original). By summarizing her argument from Lenses in an essay specifically written for a widely used feminist psychology reader (Chrisler et al. 1996), we believe Bem succeeded in making these distorting lenses more visible to a wider audience. Her essay, BTransforming the debate on sexual inequality: From biological difference to institutionalized androcentrism,^ (Bem 1996) constitutes the opening chapter in all four editions of the text (Chrisler et al. 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008). Her key insight (that these biases were not simply out there but inside our heads as well) has contributed to countless psychology students’ understanding that gender inequality is not the result of a few powerful sexists who control the media but is implicit and engrained in most people’s constructions of gender. Lenses of Gender was actively debated within psychology and feminist circles. A lively exchange can be found in the Volume 5, 1994, issue of Psychological Inquiry in which four U.S. feminist psychologists wrote critical reviews of the book. Sandy offered responses that bring her voice to life and make for provocative reading. The critiques covered a broad range, including one asserting that Lenses was not sufficiently empirical (Eagly 1994), to which Bem responded that Bmy book is not, and never pretends to be, an empirical project^ (Bem 1994, p. 98). Other issues raised were that she drew too heavily on her own studies, which were often not replicated (Deaux 1994), to which Bem (1994, p. 98) retorted: Of course I emphasize my own empirical research; … after all, [it] has been addressed to precisely those theoretical concepts that I am most interested in. Of course I

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ignore the failures (by Deaux and others) to replicate one of my studies … Could it really be true that this failure to replicate a laboratory study on the Bem SexRole Inventory has any bearing at all on the hypothesis that cultural lenses play a role in the social reproduction of male power by leading individuals to construct an identity consistent with those lenses? I don’t think so. In response to Mary Gergen’s (1994) critique that Lenses had not incorporated a postmodern perspective, Sandra (Bem 1994, p. 100) countered, I find it delicious that, whereas Deaux and Eagly both fault me for attending too little to empirical data, Gergen faults me for attending to empirical data at all. Isn’t there a saying somewhere that if you’re attacked from both sides, you must be doing something right? Only Shields (1994) gave the book a largely positive review, crediting Lenses as demonstrating the sophistication of what feminist psychology has to offer and highlighting its explicit concern with inequality and social change. Praising the book’s Binterdisciplinary foundation,^ Shields (1994, p. 93) uses the visual phenomenon of Bblindsight^ to explain how it is that feminist psychology, which she describes as Bnothing short of dazzling,^ has had Ba surprisingly muted impact^ on mainstream psychology. She concludes that Bem’s (1993c) book ought to be part of that mainstream. Elswhere, Bem (1993a) addresses the question of mainstream psychology’s relation to feminist psychology and its (lack of) attention to social context. Despite the critiques, Lenses received many general book awards and a second Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology in 1994 (Golden and McHugh 2015; Bem 2004). Bem’s (1995b, p. 53) own reflections are worth noting: I was not only able to build a theory that tried to explain how both sexism and heterosexism are reproduced in generation after generation, I was able to get a grasp on something like the Bwhole^ of what I had been teaching and theorizing both at work and at home for twenty some years. And I loved that. In her invited award address at the annual AWP conference in Indianapolis, Sandy articulated strategies for dismantling androcentrism and for envisioning a genderless utopia. This talk was later developed into a paper for the Journal of Sex Research; it was among the last two journal articles on gender that she published (Bem 1995a; Bem 2004). Drawing on Butler (1990); Douglas (1966), and Fausto-Sterling (1993); Bem (1995a, p. 329) called for the proliferation of sex, gender, and sexuality

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categories, as a way to move beyond the gender polarization she had objected to throughout her career: At the center of all my previous work on gender and sexuality has been the goal of shrinking both the relevance and the reach of the male/female dichotomy by trying, insofar as possible, to make it as minimal a presence in human social and psychological life as, say, eye color or foot size. Here, however, I argue that a more effective way to undo the privileged status of the twoand-only-two categories of sex /gender / desire that are currently treated in Western culture as normal and natural may be to explode or proliferate such categories (i.e., to turn the volume up) rather than try to eliminate them (i.e., to turn the volume down). In the conclusion of the article, Bem (1995a, p. 334) notes the Bmultitudinous possibilities^ she imagined were already visible, as represented not just by lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, but also by: f-to-m and m-to-f transgendered people, lipstick lesbians, butches, baby butches, stone butches, femmes, butchy femmes, bulldaggers, leather dykes, softball dykes, rugby dykes, dykes on bikes, klesbians, hasbiens, dominatrices, fag hags, drag queens, bears, bottoms, tops, masters, slaves, leather men, vanilla boys, clones, daddies, friends of Dorothy, and so on and so forth ad (perhaps) infinitum.

Clinical Training and Practice A few years after the publication of Lenses, Sandy’s career trajectory took a distinctive turn. In 1997, when she was in her early 50s, she reduced her teaching to half-time and enrolled in the PsyD program at Rutgers University. During her 2 years in the program, she completed practica at two different sites in New Jersey, as well as an APA-approved internship at the Cambridge Health Alliance (associated with Harvard Medical School). She withdrew from the Rutgers program after completing all requirements but the dissertation. Given that she already had a Ph.D. in psychology and the requisite clinical training hours, she easily earned a New York State psychologist license (Bem 2004) which enabled her to open a private practice in Ithaca, NY in 2000. Between 2004 and 2010, she initiated a phased retirement plan with Cornell, teaching part-time and doing clinical work part-time (McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015). At the memorial service held for Sandy in Ithaca, NY on August 25, 2014 (attended by the first author), there were two very moving testimonials: one from her clinical supervisor at

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Rutgers, Nancy McWilliams, and another from a highly regarded Ithaca psychotherapist and close friend, Karen Gilovich. Both of them spoke of how deeply Sandy cared about her clients and how successfully she applied her keen intelligence and observational powers to her clinical work. By their accounts, Sandy found this work profoundly meaningful. In a reversal of the way she had always moved from the personal to the political and professional, here Sandra found her way from the professional and political back to the deeply personal (McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015).

The Personal Is Political: Identity and Feminist Politics

BI see myself, however, as a perpetual misfit (albeit a defiant one) who is both unwilling and unable to fold herself comfortably (or for very long) into almost any set of socially constructed categories.^ (Bem 1994b, p. 100) Finally, we want to mention something important to Sandy and her contribution to feminist psychology that does not count as a definable piece of scholarship, but that is very much a part of who she was. It is so central to all of her work (and exemplifies how the personal was political and professional) that we believe it deserves special mention. Sandy was a proud nonconformist, and as the previous quotation illustrates, she was quick to point out that she did not fit neatly into available gender and sexual identity categories (Bem 1993b). Though she was married to Daryl, she was very clear that she was not and had never been a heterosexual. She was attracted to some women and was intimately involved with one after she and Daryl amicably decided to live apart, but she did not identify as a lesbian or bisexual either. This is a position she first detailed in an article in the international journal Feminism and Psychology (Bem 1992; Bem 1993b), repeats in the first pages of Lenses (Bem 1993c), and reiterates in the prologue to An Unconventional Family (Bem 1998). It was clearly an important piece of her story and her work, something she persistently put front and center. In her own words: I was recently asked to write a brief essay for Feminism and Psychology on Bhow my heterosexuality has contributed to my feminist politics.^ That essay turned out to be rather different from what the editors expected because although I have lived monogamously with a man I love for over twenty-seven years, I am not now and never have been a Bheterosexual.^ But neither have I ever been a Blesbian^ or Bbisexual.^ What I am—and have been for as long as I can remember—is someone

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whose sexuality and gender have never seemed to mesh with the available cultural categories, and that—rather than my presumed heterosexuality—is what has most profoundly informed … my feminist politics. (Bem 1993c, p.vii)

Closing Notes Our review of Sandy’s life would not be complete without addressing the way she approached her death. In 2009, after several years of experiencing what she called Bcognitive oddities^ (Marantz Henig 2015, p. 38), Sandy received a diagnosis of amnesic mild cognitive impairment, which her physician informed her typically develops into full-blown Alzheimer’s within 10 years. On the day she received this diagnosis, she vowed to end her life before the disease made her unrecognizable to her loved ones. With clear-headed courage and the diligent assistance of Daryl (from whom she had been separated for 15 years, but to whom she was still formally married and remained very close), Sandy was able to carry out a plan to end her life. She died peacefully at her home in Ithaca, NY on May 20, 2014—several days after members of the family, including her sister Bev, and some close friends gathered to share memories and last goodbyes. This is all movingly described in a New York Times Magazine article (Marantz Henig 2015), as well as an NPR interview with Daryl and their daughter Emily (Spiegel 2014). In death as in life, Sandy followed her own unorthodox path, which is to say she exited this life on her own terms, just as she had lived it. We see a parallel between Sandy’s work and death in terms of its ability to move lay people and professionals alike. As we have illustrated in our article, Bem’s scholarly writing generated much discussion among lay people about gender roles and inequalities while simultaneously spurring further research among psychologists. Similarly, her choice of how to die generated many lay conversations while focusing professional attention on compassionate care and end of life options (McConnell-Ginet et al. 2015). In closing, we pay tribute to Sandra’s considerable contribution to feminist psychology and to the ways she linked the personal to the political to the professional from the beginning of her career until the last days of her life. Sandra was a courageous pioneer who was unconventional in every respect—as a gender nonconformist, a married woman who insisted on an egalitarian marriage, a sexual person who refused to define her identity in terms of the sex of the people to whom she was attracted, a parent who sought to raise genderaschematic children, a psychologist who placed power and inequality at the center of her thinking, an Ivy League professor who wrote with clarity and reached beyond academic audiences, and, at the end, a person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s

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disease who made the bold decision to take her own life before she became unrecognizable. BWhat I want^ she said, Bis to die on my own timetable and in my own nonviolent way^ (Marantz Henig 2015, p. 39). She did so 4 years after her initial diagnosis and according to a well-designed plan. As she had done in every phase of her life—from wearing pants to Hillel Academy to how she got married, raised her children, pursued her scholarship outside the conventions of academic psychology, lived her politics, and chose to die, she followed her own unconventional path. Compliance with Ethical Standards The manuscript being submitted is a review biographical article. There were no sources of funding, no conflicts of interest, and no research was conducted using humans or animals. The authors can unequivocally state that we have conducted ourselves in the writing of this review with the highest of ethical and professional standards.

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