Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in the early 60s, became something of a black-skinned Margaret Mead, riding her Harley-Davidson deep into a bike culture and creating the 2001 book “Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society,” died March 6 in Santa Cruz, California. He was 89 years old.
The cause of death, at an assisted living facility, was cardiopulmonary failure, her son Howard Schwartz said.
Born in Brooklyn, generous and outspoken, Ms. Jones began her career as an instructor at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, focusing on women’s issues, writing on topics such as the anthropological aspects of menopause.
Beginning in the 1960s, she was also a feminist crusader, helping women organize illegal abortions in the days before Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she participated in a one-day occupation of the offices of The Ladies’ Home Journal in New York to demand the opportunity to publish a “liberated” edition of the magazine.
“She was a bit of a wild woman, a real maverick,” Phyllis Chesler, author of “Women and Madness” (1972) and a longtime friend of Ms. Joans, said in a telephone interview. “Yes, he was an academic and a nice Jew from Brooklyn. But he was a bit of a roadie.”
In her 50s, that designation became more literal when Ms. Joans, then a professor of anthropology at Merritt College in Oakland, California, bought her first motorcycle and unwittingly opened a new field of study for herself.
“For the Harley rider, there are two kinds of bikes,” he wrote in the introduction to “Bike Lust.” “There are Harleys and there are all kinds of motorcycles.”
Starting with the Harley-Davidson Low Rider force, which she named the Beast, Ms. Jones explored the subculture, with its many divisions and subgroups, on weekend rides with a San Francisco-based motorcycle club, the Fog Hogs, as well as at motorcycle shops, bike bars and Harley festivals.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Harley culture, long associated with roughnecks like the Hells Angels, was going mainstream as a new wave of middle-class professionals adopted chrome-plated “pigs” as their ticket to adventure.
In those years, female enthusiasts made their presence felt, representing 10 to 12 percent of the motorcycling population, she said in a CNN interview 2003. “Women, barred from any position but Betty’s in the back seat,” she wrote, “now ride the roads alone or travel to all-female riding clubs.”
In her book, Ms Joans outlined the male and female biker gangs she encountered in her research. Women had their own sub-categories, including “the lady cyclist” and “the female cyclist”.
Ms. Jones told CNN, “He’s doing great, but he won’t hit a wrench,” she said. “She’ll carry a hair dryer and make-up and condoms in her bag. But it won’t come close to a set of tools.”
The female cyclist, he said, “is the opposite of that.” “The female biker will kind of scorn any help from the man and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. It’s my bike. I can tear it down and rebuild it.”
While male riders tended to travel in packs, female riders often embarked on odysseys, solo rides, sometimes covering multiple states. “Between births and deaths, marriages and ceremonies, comes the odyssey,” he wrote.
“The journey, this odyssey, is the testing ground for the female cyclist,” she added. “We’re leaving alone because we have to.”
Barbara Joan Levinsohn was born on February 28, 1935, in Brooklyn, the only child of Rubin Levinsohn, who owned a clothing store in Lower Manhattan, and Eleanor (Davidson) Levinsohn, a high school teacher.
After graduating from Midwood High School in 1952, he enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1956, followed by a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology from New York University in 1965 and a doctorate in anthropology from City University. of New York in 1974.
By 1956 she had married her first husband, Irwin Schwartz, but they divorced in 1970. She then adopted the surname Joans.
In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Harmon, as well as her two sons, moved to Santa Cruz. They married the following year as Ms. Jones took a teaching position at San Jose State University. It was Mr. Harmon, a computer programmer and longtime motorcycle enthusiast, who led her to ride with the Fog Hogs.
In addition to her son Howard, she is survived by another son, David Schwartz, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Mr. Harmon died in 2021.
While Harleys became a passion, Ms. Joans didn’t start out with one. Her first motorcycle was a lightweight Honda Rebel 250, which she bought at 56.
“And then in her 60s, she switched to a Harley Low Rider,” Ms. Chesler said, referring to Ms. Joans’ big monster. “I said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ It is 650 pounds. How will you pick it up when it falls down?’ And she said, ‘You just do.'”