Alice S. Rossi (September 24, 1922 – November 3, 2009) was a pioneering feminist and sociologist.
Alice S. Rossi (September 24, 1922 – November 3, 2009) was a pioneering feminist and sociologist.
Alice Emma Schaerr was born on September 24, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York.
Rossi’s scholarship focused on the status of women at work, in the family, and their sexual life. Her writings helped to construct the foundations of the feminist movement. Her further on advocacy of abortion and reproductive rights caused her to gain a lot of national attention. One of her main academic pursuits was the psychoanalysis of people’s lifecourse from youth to age, particularly in the achievement of women.
One of her most influential feminist articles was “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal.” First presented in 1963 at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it was published the next-door year in the academy’s journal Daedalus. In the article, Professor Rossi argued that for most women motherhood had become a full-time occupation, a acknowledge of affairs that harm not unaccompanied women but in addition to the larger society in which they lived. For the well-being of both the women and the culture, she wrote, parity of the sexes is essential. This article’s notice coincided taking into account the statement the same year of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which dealt with same issues. Familiar today, Professor Rossi’s commotion was considered subversive at the time. As a result, she was called a monster, an unnatural woman and an unfit mother, as she recalled in interviews afterward. Her article can be found in the anthology “Life Cycle and Achievement in America” (Harper & Row, 1969), edited by Rose Laub Coser.
In 1966, Rossi, along later than a work that included Betty Friedan, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW).
In forward-thinking work, also controversial, Professor Rossi argued that the cultural divide between men and women was not the product of socialization alone, as the prevailing view held, but was partly rooted in inborn biological differences amid the sexes.
Professor Rossi held appointments at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College back finally joining the University of Massachusetts faculty, where she was appointed the Harriet Martineau professor of Sociology. She remained there from 1974 until her retirement in 1991, at which reduction she became an emerita professor. She afterward was the 74th president of the American Sociological Association.