Jessie Shirley Bernard (1903 – 1996) was a sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive. Jessie Shirley Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. Jessie Shirley Bernard garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award. Her book American Community Behavior is heavily based on Raphael Lemkin's work and is considered one of the earliest sociological studies of genocide. Bernard studied with Pitirim Sorokin, founder of the sociology department at Harvard.
To sum up her contribution to sociology in her own
words: "I am concerned, as any fair-minded person must be, with the effects of
sex, sex typing and sexism on the position of women in our profession and in our society; but I am
also concerned, as any dedicated sociologist must be, with its effects on our
discipline as well. Important as are the costs to women of the male bias in
sociology, on which a considerable literature exists, I am concerned here not
with them but rather with the costs of this bias to the discipline itself. I am
not, therefore asking what sociology can do for women - for example, by filling
in the gaps in our knowledge about them, itself a significant contribution - but
rather what women (and sympathetic male colleagues) can do for sociology."
Jessie Shirley Bernard's research published in The Paradox of the Happy
Marriage (1971) and The Future of Marriage (1972) illustrated that marriage was
good for men, but not for women. She argued that men and women live in different
worlds and perceive of marriage differently. She attributed this to the gendered
nature of social structures in society. Jessie Shirley Bernard later published
The Female World (1981) and The Female World from a Global Perspective (1987).
In "The Female World" (1981) she argued that although men and women move in
geographically similar places, households, political and economic arenas, they
actually live in different single-sex worlds. In "The Female World from a Global
Perspective" (1987) she mapped differences among women in terms of life
expectancy, nutrition, wealth, literacy, work and politics as well as how
racism, classism, and imperialism divide their worlds.
At Penn State University, Jessie Shirley Bernard managed
to establish her own academic independence and became a Full Professor of
sociology. She remained here for the larger part of her academic career. During
her time as professor she became a founding member of the Society for the Study
of Social Problems and helped legitimize feminist studies.
Following the
events of World War II, in particular the Nazi Holocaust, Bernard started to
move away from the positivistic approach dominant in social science and became
increasingly supportive of the social contextuality of all knowledge. This time
also marked her movement toward a feminist position in sociology as seen in the
qualitative research and critical analysis prevalent in her later work.
Jessie Shirley Bernard's life saw her as president of the Eastern Sociological
Association, president and founding member of the Society for the Study of
Social Problems, founding board member of the Center for Women Policy Studies as
well as member of the boards of Urban Institute Women's Program and the Women's
Equity Action League. During this time she was also a visiting professor at
Princeton University. Bernard lectured at professional meetings and universities
around the world and met women from all over the world in international women's
meetings. In 1977, Bernard became an associate of the Women's Institute for
Freedom of the Press.