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1935–2024
Credit:
Bill Shaw
Barbara Joans, 1935-2024
A graduate of Brooklyn College, Barbara Joans earned her doctorate in anthropology at the City University of New York in 1974. Her social activism was rooted in New York City. Noted as one of “the feminists who changed America 1963-1975,” in a book by that title, Barbara Joans was a part of the famed sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal, helped organized the first and second Congress to Unite Women, and staffed an underground railway to help women get abortions. After teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and Idaho State University in Pocatello, she settled in California, where she eventually became head of the Anthropology Department at Merritt College, a community college in Oakland. There she opened a one-of-its-kind museum that housed, among other things, Native American artifacts as well as an exhibit of local Black bikers. In her late fifties, Barbara Joans began riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which she chronicled in her first book, Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society. It was this book that led to her featured half-page obituary in the New York Times. The book, filled with off-color biker slang, explores the image and reality of women and men bikers in American culture. Barbara recognized the contradictions of a pioneer of the women’s movement becoming a part of biker culture and writing for a biker newspaper. She threw herself into it, proclaiming to all who would listen that biker women effectively resisted stultifying gender norms.
Barbara Joans was an accomplished classroom teacher, an inspired lecturer, and an iconoclastic role model. In 1997, Barbara Joans was co-winner of the first American Anthropological Association Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award. She valued each student and did her best to show them that they too belonged, that their experiences mattered, and that they too could gain the life-changing insights that come with the study of anthropology.
(Carolyn Martin Shaw)
