Bio: (1905-1999) Russian-American sociologist. Mirra Komarovsky received her Ph.D. from Columbia University with a thesis on Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), which was later published as a book. In this study, she explored the impact that widespread unemployment in the United States, during the Great Depression, had on family relationships. The research was done on a sample of 59 unemployed skilled manual workers and their families. Unemployment had a negative effect on a man's personality, authority, and marital satisfaction. The relationship with adolescent children is most affected by unemployment, followed by the relationship with the wife. In the continuation of her scientific work,

Komarovsky focused on the study of gender and gender relations. She wanted to determine the functional significance of gender roles, as well as the contradictions that arise from those roles. She focused on the difficulties in taking on and performing the gender role, as well as on the conflicts that gender roles cause. The main changes in gender roles that took place in the 1940s were an increase in the share of men that were doing household chores, as well as women's emancipation, primarily in the spheres of education and employment. Komarovsky studied how these new gender roles conflict with earlier views of gender roles. Taking over William Ogburn's theoretical approach to “cultural lag”, she argued that the conflict over gender roles is due to the different rates at which norms, attitudes, and institutional arrangements change in different environments and social groups. Komarovsky was the second woman to become president of the American Sociological Association.

Main works

The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940);

Women in the Modern World (1953);

Blue Collar Marriage (1962);

Dilemmas of Masculinity: A Study of College Youth (1976);

Women in College: Shaping New Feminine Identities (1985).