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

U.S.|Barbara Joans, Anthropologist Who Studied Biker Culture, Dies at 89 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/us/barbara-joans-dead.html U.S. World Business Arts Lifestyle Opinion Audio Games Cooking Wirecutter The Athletic You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. In her 60s, she hit the open […]

T Kauer T Kauer
Apr 18, 2024 - 07:35
Barbara Joans, Anthropologist Who Studied Biker Culture, Dies at 89

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U.S.|Barbara Joans, Anthropologist Who Studied Biker Culture, Dies at 89

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/us/barbara-joans-dead.html

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In her 60s, she hit the open road on a hulking Harley-Davidson and found a new area of academic research: bikers, and in particular, women bikers.

A black-and-white image of a woman wearing sunglasses, boots and a large jacket atop a large black and chrome motorcycle. Behind her, a large chain blocks a body of water.
Barbara Joans on her Harley-Davidson Low Rider motorcycle in the 1990s. She wrote about, researched and experienced motorcycle culture after buying her first bike in the her 50s.Credit…Kenneth Harmon

Alex Williams

Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, became something of a Margaret Mead in black leather, steering her Harley-Davidson deep into a biker culture and producing the 2001 book, “Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society,” died on March 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.

The cause of her death, in an assisted living facility, was cardiopulmonary failure, her son Howard Schwartz said.

Ms. Joans, Brooklyn-born, plucky and outspoken, began her career as an instructor at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, with a focus on women’s issues, producing papers on topics like the anthropological aspects of menopause.

Starting in the 1960s, she was also a feminist crusader, helping women arrange illegal abortions in the days before Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she participated in a daylong occupation of The Ladies’ Home Journal’s editorial offices in New York to demand the opportunity to put out a “liberated” version of the magazine.

“She was a bit of a wild woman, a genuine nonconformist,” Phyllis Chesler, author of “Women and Madness” (1972) and a longtime friend of Ms. Joans’s, said in a phone interview. “Yes, she was an academic and a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn. But she was a little bit of a street hombre.”

Image

Ms. Joans, born in Brooklyn, moved to Northern California in the 1970s after a divorce. Her motorcycle club, based in San Francisco, was called the Fog Hogs.Credit…Kenneth Harmon

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