WHEN SEX BECAME GENDER: MIRRA KOMAROVSKY'S FEMINISM OF THE 1950s

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This essay focuses on Mirra Komarovsky's early interest in sex rolesa concept that came to be termed "gender" in the 1970s. Contrasting conventional accounts of a feminist dry spell after World War II, Komarovsky's theories provide evidence of the constrained yet continuing feminist project that endured throughout the 1950s. Komarovsky's theoretical perspectives enable us to understand the continuities connecting the postwar era with the second wave and beyond. These continuities rejuvenate our understanding of feminist theory's long tradition and suggest that our current conceptualization and categorization system of assigning waves to particular eras limits, m certain ways, feminism's …