Rose Laub Coser remembered

...The zest especially will be remembered by everyone who worked with her in and around the feminist movement and on the editorial board of Dissent...

...For example, in her study of "the world of our mothers," she described how the value placed on the scholarly activities of Jewish men encouraged and permitted immigrant Jewish women to play public roles outside the home and in the marketplace, giving them language skills and knowledge they could pass on to their children, enhancing their mobility in the new society...

...Complexity could be straining or emancipating...

...Both, with Irving Howe, were founders of Dissent (and continued to be active members of the editorial board) and of the Democratic Socialists of America...

...Note: An award for work in the Sociology of Gender is being established in Rose Laub Coser's name...

...In the late 1940s, she had worked as a research assistant to the child psychoanalyst René Spitz, and from 1948 to 1950 she assisted David Riesman on the projects that were to become The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd...

...her aesthetic tastes...

...WINTER • 1995 • 109...

...As she wrote in our jointly edited book, Access to Power: Cross-National Studies of Women and Elites, both American women and Soviet women, who at that time each constituted about 50 percent of their country's work force, were recognized in their societies primarily in their family roles...

...The melding of the personal, political, and intellectual, a phenomenon found in many creative people, was typified by Rose Coser...

...Rose Coser was an intellectual who expanded and reconceptualized theoretical frameworks...

...Working with an organization that helped refugees settle in the United States, in 1941 Rose Laub met Lewis Coser, another German socialist refugee who had been imprisoned in a French concentration camp...

...Rose cooly replied that Rosa would probably have pitched in...

...the way she made marriage and motherhood into partnerships for growth and love...

...Until their retirement, the Cosers worked independently and together on a number of studies (on "greedy institutions" and legitimacy, for examWINTER • 1995 • 107 In Memoriam ple), and made their home a center of intellectual and collegial sociability (and, at times, of activist ferment on issues of social justice) through monthly soirees...

...She observed that even when women left the home to assume other tasks, they are nevertheless defined according to their domestic status...

...In it she sought to identify the qualities and activities of immigrant mothers and the social structures in which they lived that led to differential achievement among a generation of Jews and Italians in America...

...Stay Home Little Sheba: On Placement, Displacement, and Social Change" (1975) argued that public policies denying women access to institutionalized child care make for social and political subordination...

...But women, Coser argues, have historically been restricted from the acquisition of multiple and diverse roles, suffering more physical confinement than men as well as political and occupational restrictions...

...It could be acknowledged or denied by the holders of multiple roles or the people close to them, or by society through its institutionalized perspectives...

...Rose Coser's life could hardly be said to parallel that of her godmother Rosa Luxemburg, but there were elements of commitment and personal attachments that she shared with her...

...This brief memorial may remind her friends and colleagues of Rose Coser's eight books, scores of articles and book chapters, some of her formal accomplishments, and give some appreciation of her outstanding intellect...

...It makes, however, scant mention of her outstanding capacity for friendship...

...As a result, though most worked in the public sector, they experienced gross overload in meeting the obligations of daily life, and faced severe limits on occupational mobility...

...Indeed, the lesson of woman as social activist, intellectual, teacher, scholar, and wife, mother, host—that combination of statuses—interested Coser...

...She progressed from instructor to assistant professor at Wellesley College between 1951 and 1959 and then went to the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard University where she became a research associate...

...Rose Laub Coser studied philosophy in France and at the New School for Social Research before deciding to take a degree in sociology (as did Lewis Coser) at Columbia University, which she completed in 1957...

...She didn't focus only on the overload aspects of multiple statuses, but also noted how women, or men, benefited from complexity: many roles need not cause negative stress...

...Like many women in those years, Rose Coser did not follow a traditional career line...

...Once, watching her cook a mammoth and intricate meal, a masterpiece of taste and design, I jokingly asked her what Rosa Luxemburg would say if she had seen Rose Coser stuffing cherry tomatoes...

...Born in Berlin in 1916, she moved with them in 1924 to Antwerp, Belgium, where she lived and worked (as a printer, like her father) until the family emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution and the war looming in Europe...

...Mere structural accumulation, however, was 108 • DISSENT In Memoriam not the whole picture, as Coser pointed out...

...and her zest for fighting for good causes and for the good life, not only for herself, but for all people...

...Three years after she became an associate professor at Northeastern University, Rose Laub Coser and Lewis Coser joined the sociology faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, becoming one of the few academic couples in the country to serve in the same department...

...Rose Laub Coser died August 21, 1994 at her summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, ending seventy-eight years of intense and passionate commitment to her family, the institutions of which she was a part, sociological analysis, and the cause of social justice...

...While other theorists dismissed functional theory, role theory, and modernism, she pushed these paradigms forward (one might say she deconstructed them) so as to explain complex processes, particularly those focused on the maintenance of hierarchy and subordination in the professions, the family, and more universally in social life...

...Those who wish to contribute may send a check to The Eastern Sociological Society, Box U-68, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269...

...Married a year later, they formed an extraordinary intellectual and intimate partnership that is manifest in their collective work and celebrated in the acknowledgments to each other in their books and papers...

...Her work there resulted in a number of insightful (and delightful) papers including "Laughter Among Colleagues," a study of the social functions of humor in a mental hospital, "Evasiveness as a Response to Structural Ambivalence," and a book, Training in Ambiguity: Social Structure and Professional Socialization in a Mental Hospital...

...Although an activist when she thought it necessary (an ardent feminist, she instituted a class action suit at Stony Brook on behalf of women faculty and staff, and engaged in a sit-in at a male-only bar at the hotel hosting the 1972 American Sociological Association meetings in New Orleans), her calls to arms were not so much from the soapbox but from written works exploring the costs of ambiguity, the dynamics of subordination, the competition between institutional realms, the emancipating and inhibiting socialization practices of group culture...

...She noted how this narrow view, universally found, forced women to cluster at the bottom of every occupational and public hierarchy...

...not for her contributions to sociological theory...

...Facing down the challenges of severe health problems over the last few years, culminating in kidney failure, Rose Coser was at work when she died on a new book, World of Our Mothers...

...Antithetically, the restrictions on Italian women's participation in life outside the home limited the contacts and information they could bring to their children...

...She pushed theory forward, building and refining institutional analysis, providing conceptual tools for the dissection of social problems...

...During the many times I experienced Rose's hospitality, I was always amazed by her ability to pay attention to the smallest details of friendship and intellectual exchange and at the same time to explore the large picture...

...Her work on role theory, for example, building on the work of her mentor, Robert K. Merton, shows how in modern society—unlike the homogeneous communities nostalgically evoked by contemporary social critics—people may take on multiple statuses and the roles that are attached to them, thus creating a wide social repertoire...

...even when most substantive, it evoked the patterned behaviors and institutional frameworks of each issue...

...Her own parents, ardent socialists who were part of the group around Rosa Luxemburg, were important sources of Rose Coser's own striving and ideological commitment...

...Never content with one or two levels of social analysis, Rose Coser also showed how the cultural definitions of social groups have differential consequences for women...

...But her work was always theoretically driven...

...Rose Coser tends to be known primarily for her work in medical sociology, on the family, and on gender issues...

...A classic paper, written with Lewis Coser, shows how the "greedy institution" of the family has restricted women's participation in public life...

...In her last published book, In Defense of Modernity: Complexity of Social Roles and Individual Autonomy (1991), she wrote of modern society as a supportive environment for individualism against the constraints of traditionalism, superstition, and repression...

...Her penetrating analysis of the mechanisms of society showed which factors contribute to the enhancement of the human spirit, indeed, to the forces that produce intelligence itself, and which stultify and constrain free expression...