https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/us/barbara-joans-dead.html

Barbara Joans, Who Studied Biker Culture on the Open Road, Dies at 89

In her 60s, she set off on a hulking Harley-Davidson and found a new area
of anthropological research: bikers, and in particular, female bikers.

By Alex Williams
Published April 17, 2024
Updated April 19, 2024
Barbara Joans, an iconoclastic anthropologist and feminist who, in her
early 60s, became something of a Margaret Mead in black leather, steering
her Harley-Davidson deep into a biker culture and producing the 2001 book
“Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society,” died on March 6 in
Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 89.

The cause of death, in an assisted living facility, was cardiopulmonary
failure, her son Howard Schwartz said.

Ms. Joans, Brooklyn-born, plucky and outspoken, began her career as an
instructor at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village,
with a focus on women’s issues, producing papers on topics like the
anthropological aspects of menopause.

Starting in the 1960s, she was also a feminist crusader, helping women
arrange illegal abortions in the days before Roe v. Wade. In 1970, she
participated in a daylong occupation of The Ladies’ Home Journal’s
editorial offices in New York to demand the opportunity to put out a
“liberated” version of the magazine.

“She was a bit of a wild woman, a genuine nonconformist,” Phyllis Chesler,
author of “Women and Madness” (1972) and a longtime friend of Ms. Joans’s,
said in a phone interview. “Yes, she was an academic and a nice Jewish
girl from Brooklyn. But she was a little bit of a street hombre.”

In her 50s, that designation became more literal when Ms. Joans, then a
professor of anthropology at Merritt College in Oakland, Calif., bought
her first motorcycle and unwittingly opened a new field of study for
herself.

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

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 motorcycle
club, the Fog Hogs, as well as in motorcycle shops, biker bars and at
Harley festivals.

By the 1980s and ’90s, Harley culture, long associated with roughnecks
like the Hells Angels, was going mainstream as a new wave of middle class
professionals adopted chrome-encrusted “hogs” as a ticket to adventure.

During those years, female enthusiasts were making their presence felt,
accounting for 10 to 12 percent of the motorcycling population, she said
in a 2003 CNN interview. “Women, who used to be excluded from any position
except that of back-seat Betty,” she wrote, “now ride the roads alone or
travel in all-women riding clubs.”

In her book, Ms. Joans delineated the bands of both male and female bikers
she encountered in her research. Women had their own subcategories,
including “the lady biker” and “the woman biker.”

The lady biker, Ms. Joans told CNN, “rides wonderfully, but she will not
wrench,” she said. “She will carry a hair dryer and makeup and condoms in
her saddlebag. But she will not go near a set of tools.”

The woman biker, she said, “is kind of her opposite.” “The woman biker
will kind of disdain any male help, and will say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.
It’s my bike. I can tear it down and build it up again.’”

While male riders tended to travel in packs, women riders often embarked
on odysseys, solo rides, sometimes covering multiple states. “Between the
birthings and the dyings, the weddings and the ceremonies, comes the
odyssey,” she wrote.

“The trip, this odyssey, is the testing ground for the woman biker,” she
added. “We go off by ourselves because we must.”

Barbara Joan Levinsohn was born on Feb. 28, 1935, in Brooklyn, the only
child of Rubin Levinsohn, who owned a clothing store in Lower Manhattan,
and Eleanor (Davidson) Levinsohn, a junior high school teacher.

After graduating from Midwood High School in 1952, she enrolled in
Brooklyn College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in
1956, followed by a master’s degree in sociology and anthropology from New
York University in 1965 and a doctorate in anthropology from the City
University of New York in 1974.

By 1956 she had married her first husband, Irwin Schwartz, but they
divorced in 1970. She subsequently adopted the last name Joans.

In 1974, she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Harmon, as well as her two sons,
moved to Santa Cruz. They married the next year as Ms. Joans took a
teaching post at San Jose State University. It was Mr. Harmon, a computer
programmer and longtime motorcycle enthusiast, who got her into riding
with the Fog Hogs.

In addition to her son Howard, she is survived by another son, David
Schwartz, four grandchildren and one great-grandson. Mr. Harmon died in
2021.

While Harleys became a passion, Ms. Joans did not start out on one. Her
first motorcycle was a lightweight Honda Rebel 250, which she bought when
she was 56.

“And then at 60 years old, she switched to a Harley Low Rider,” Ms.
Chesler said, referring to Ms. Joans’ hulking Beast. “I said, ‘Have you
lost your mind? That’s 650 pounds. How are you going to pick it up when it
falls down?’ And she said, ‘You just do.’”

A correction was made on April 18, 2024: An earlier version of a picture
caption with this obituary incorrectly described the model of Harley
Davidson Ms. Joans was riding. It was not a Harley Davidson Low Rider.