Bernard, Jessie (1903–1996)

American sociologist. Born Jessie Ravitch in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1903; daughter of Rumanian-Jewish parents who were immigrant shopkeepers; died in Washington on October 6, 1996; attended the University of Minnesota; awarded Ph.D. from Washington University, 1935; married Luther Lee Bernard (died 1951); children: three.

At the advent of the feminist movement in 1963, Jessie Bernard was a 60-year-old widowed professor at Penn State, one year away from retirement. Over the next 16 years, she published a list of books that earned her a reputation as the foremost scholar of the women's movement. Academic Women (1964), a work exploring the marginal position of women in academic life, was derived from her own experiences. She followed that with The Sex Game (1968), The Future of Marriage (1972), The Future of Motherhood (1974), Women, Wives, Mothers (1975), and The Female World (1980). Bernard had lived a conventional life, marrying her childhood sweetheart Luther Lee Bernard, relocating from town to town while following his career. Though the couple co-authored Sociology and the Study of International Relations (1934) and Origins of American Sociology (1943), Jessie Bernard was in her 40s, her children grown, before she began earnestly seeking her own academic career, moving to Pennsylvania State University in 1949. In 1978, Bernard also wrote the autobiographical Self Portrait of a Family.