Barbara Joans, Who Studied Biker Tradition on the Open Street, Dies at 89

Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her early 60s, grew to become one thing of a Margaret Mead in black leather-based, steering her Harley-Davidson deep right into a biker tradition and producing the 2001 e-book “Bike Lust: Harleys, Ladies, and American Society,” died on March 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.

The reason for demise, in an assisted residing facility, was cardiopulmonary failure, her son Howard Schwartz mentioned.

Ms. Joans, Brooklyn-born, plucky and outspoken, started her profession as an teacher on the New College for Social Analysis in Greenwich Village, with a give attention to ladies’s points, producing papers on matters just like the anthropological features of menopause.

Beginning within the Nineteen Sixties, she was additionally a feminist crusader, serving to ladies organize unlawful abortions within the days earlier than Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she participated in a daylong occupation of The Girls’ House Journal’s editorial workplaces in New York to demand the chance to place out a “liberated” model of the journal.

“She was a little bit of a wild girl, a real nonconformist,” Phyllis Chesler, writer of “Ladies and Insanity” (1972) and a longtime buddy of Ms. Joans’s, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “Sure, she was an instructional and a pleasant Jewish woman from Brooklyn. However she was a bit of little bit of a road hombre.”

In her 50s, that designation grew to become extra literal when Ms. Joans, then a professor of anthropology at Merritt Faculty in Oakland, Calif., purchased her first bike and unwittingly opened a brand new subject of examine for herself.

“To the Harley rider, there are two sorts of bikes,” she wrote within the introduction to “Bike Lust.” “There are Harleys, and there are all different kinds of bikes.”

Setting out on her brawny Harley-Davidson Low Rider, which she nicknamed the Beast, Ms. Joans researched the subculture, with its many splinters and subgroups, on weekend rides with a San Francisco-based bike membership, the Fog Hogs, in addition to in bike retailers, biker bars and at Harley festivals.

By the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, Harley tradition, lengthy related to roughnecks just like the Hells Angels, was going mainstream as a brand new wave of center class professionals adopted chrome-encrusted “hogs” as a ticket to journey.

Throughout these years, feminine fans had been making their presence felt, accounting for 10 to 12 p.c of the motorcycling inhabitants, she mentioned in a 2003 CNN interview. “Ladies, who was excluded from any place besides that of back-seat Betty,” she wrote, “now journey the roads alone or journey in all-women using golf equipment.”

In her e-book, Ms. Joans delineated the bands of each female and male bikers she encountered in her analysis. Ladies had their very own subcategories, together with “the girl biker” and “the girl biker.”

The woman biker, Ms. Joans informed CNN, “rides splendidly, however she is not going to wrench,” she mentioned. “She’s going to carry a hair dryer and make-up and condoms in her saddlebag. However she is not going to go close to a set of instruments.”

The girl biker, she mentioned, “is form of her reverse.” “The girl biker will form of disdain any male assist, and can say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. It’s my bike. I can tear it down and construct it up once more.’”

Whereas male riders tended to journey in packs, ladies riders usually launched into odysseys, solo rides, generally masking a number of states. “Between the birthings and the dyings, the weddings and the ceremonies, comes the odyssey,” she wrote.

“The journey, this odyssey, is the testing floor for the girl biker,” she added. “We go off by ourselves as a result of we should.”

Barbara Joan Levinsohn was born on Feb. 28, 1935, in Brooklyn, the one little one of Rubin Levinsohn, who owned a clothes retailer in Decrease Manhattan, and Eleanor (Davidson) Levinsohn, a junior highschool instructor.

After graduating from Midwood Excessive College in 1952, she enrolled in Brooklyn Faculty, the place she obtained a bachelor’s diploma in philosophy in 1956, adopted by a grasp’s diploma in sociology and anthropology from New York College in 1965 and a doctorate in anthropology from the Metropolis College of New York in 1974.

By 1956 she had married her first husband, Irwin Schwartz, however they divorced in 1970. She subsequently adopted the final identify Joans.

In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Harmon, in addition to her two sons, moved to Santa Cruz. They married the following yr as Ms. Joans took a instructing publish at San Jose State College. It was Mr. Harmon, a pc programmer and longtime bike fanatic, who obtained her into using with the Fog Hogs.

Along with her son Howard, she is survived by one other son, David Schwartz, 4 grandchildren and one great-grandson. Mr. Harmon died in 2021.

Whereas Harleys grew to become a ardour, Ms. Joans didn’t begin out on one. Her first bike was a light-weight Honda Insurgent 250, which she purchased when she was 56.

“After which at 60 years previous, she switched to a Harley Low Rider,” Ms. Chesler mentioned, referring to Ms. Joans’ hulking Beast. “I mentioned, ‘Have you ever misplaced your thoughts? That’s 650 kilos. How are you going to select it up when it falls down?’ And she or he mentioned, ‘You simply do.’”