Naomi Weisstein: A Feminist Analysis

Naomi Weisstein was born in New York City on October 16, 1939 to Mary (a psychoanalyst) and Samuel Weisstein (a lawyer). Graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at Wellesley College in 1961 with a B.A. She earned her Ph.D. in social psychology at Harvard University in 1964. At Harvard she won a Departmental Distinctions award. While at Harvard she met her future husband radical historian Jesse Lemisch. Between 1964-1965 she was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow with the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago. In 1966 she took a teaching position with Loyola University at Chicago. In 1973 she began teaching Cognitive Psychology and running her own data research lab at State University

This organization worked on multiple issues concerning gay rights and women’s liberation in health, education and employment. She founded the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band (CWLRB) in 1970. She also performed with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Weisstein was one of the first feminist stand-up comedians. Her most famous work is her groundbreaking article, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female.” The title of the article is a reference to what the Nazis believed the ideal embodiment of a woman, only concerns children, kitchen and church. This article was considered one of the earliest feminist critiques of how psychology had neglected, omitted, and made myths about women. It has been reprinted over 42 times in six different languages and been included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women’s Liberation Movement. Other notable works include, “Neural Symbolic Activity,” “An Object-Superiority Effect,” and “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Human Brain”. Weisstein lived through a long battle of Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS). In 1983 she became completely bedridden, however this did not stop Weisstein she continued her research work and afflation with the psychology community. Sadly on March 26, 2015 she died from ovarian cancer in New York with