Barbara Joans, Anthropologist Who Studied Biker Culture, Dies at 89

Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, grew to become one thing of a Margaret Mead in black leather-based, steering her Harley-Davidson deep right into a biker tradition and producing the 2001 guide, “Bike Lust: Harleys, Ladies, and American Society,” died on March 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.

The reason for her dying, in an assisted residing facility, was cardiopulmonary failure, her son Howard Schwartz mentioned.

Ms. Joans, Brooklyn-born, plucky and outspoken, started her profession as an teacher on the New College for Social Analysis in Greenwich Village, with a concentrate on ladies’s points, producing papers on subjects just like the anthropological features of menopause.

Beginning within the Nineteen Sixties, she was additionally a feminist crusader, serving to ladies organize unlawful abortions within the days earlier than Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she participated in a daylong occupation of The Girls’ Dwelling Journal’s editorial places of work 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 “Ladies and Insanity” (1972) and a longtime buddy of Ms. Joans’s, mentioned in a telephone interview. “Sure, she was an instructional and a pleasant Jewish woman from Brooklyn. However she was a little bit little bit of a avenue hombre.”

In her 50s, that designation grew to become extra literal when Ms. Joans, then a professor of anthropology at Merritt School in Oakland, Calif., purchased her first motorbike, and unwittingly opened a brand new discipline 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 other forms 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 retailers, biker bars and at Harley festivals.

By the 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 fans have been making their presence felt, accounting for 10 to 12 % of the motorcycling inhabitants, she mentioned in a 2003 CNN interview. “Ladies, who was excluded from any place besides that of back-seat Betty,” she wrote, “now journey the roads alone or journey in all-women driving golf equipment.”

In her guide, Ms. Joans delineated the bands of each female and male bikers she encountered in her analysis. Ladies had their very own subcategories, together with “the woman biker” and “the lady biker.”

The girl biker, Ms. Joans informed CNN, “rides splendidly, however she is not going to wrench,” she mentioned. “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 girl biker, she mentioned, “is form of her reverse.” “The girl biker will form 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, ladies riders typically launched into odysseys, solo rides, generally 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 lady 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 baby of Rubin Levinsohn, who owned a clothes retailer in Decrease Manhattan, and Eleanor (Davidson) Levinsohn, a junior highschool instructor.

After graduating from Midwood Excessive College in 1952, she enrolled in Brooklyn School, the place she obtained 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 identify Joans.

In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Harmon, in addition to her two sons, moved to Santa Cruz, Calif. They married the following 12 months as Ms. Joans took a educating publish at San Jose State College. It was Mr. Harmon, a pc programmer and longtime motorbike fanatic, who acquired her into driving with the Fog Hogs.

Along with her son Howard, Ms. Joans is survived by one other son, David Schwartz, 4 grandchildren and one great-grandson. Mr. Harmon died in 2021.

Whereas Harleys grew to become a ardour, she didn’t begin out on one. At 56, Ms. Joans purchased her first motorbike, a light-weight Honda Insurgent 250.

“After which at 60 years outdated, she switched to a Harley Low Rider,” Ms. Chesler mentioned, referring to Ms. Joans’ hulking Beast. “I mentioned, ‘Have you ever misplaced your thoughts? That’s 650 kilos. How are you going to select it up when it falls down?’ And he or she mentioned, ‘You simply do.’”