Lillian Rubin

Lillian Breslow Rubin (January 13, 1924 - June 17, 2014) was an American writer, professor, psychotherapist and sociologist. She was a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College and also worked as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley. Rubin was a feminist.

Biography Rubin was born in Philadelphia, and her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her father died when she was five. Another reason she started working was so that she could help contribute money for her brother to go to college. Rubin worked as a senior research associate at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley in 1977.

Rubin's husband, Hank, died in 2011 after living with dementia for a decade. She had several best sellers, including Just Friends (1985), Intimate Strangers (1983) and Women of a Certain Age (1979).

Rubin's 1976 book, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family describes the daily drudgery in the life of "the average worker." These workers were defined as "intact families with neither spouse having more than a high school education," with the husband working manual labor and having at least one child under 12 living at home. Rubin's study was based on her experience with 50 working class couples in the Bay Area. She conducted over 100 interviews with the husbands and wives separately. Rubin found that many women who had lived the first half of their lives as dependents on their husband's income often had difficulty transitioning and becoming more independent.

Rubin addressed couples in Intimate Strangers: What Goes Wrong in Relationships Today - And Why (1983) which found that men often considered their wives their best friends and needed them for emotional support. Rubin felt that it was important to examine not just the emotions and problems of women, but also to get into what men are thinking. She said, "I'm trying to do what hasn't been done before. I want to explain men, not as male chauvinist pigs or power-hungry people, but as comprehensible individuals." Rubin described many different types of friendships and how these could change over time as women's roles changed. She interviewed 300 men and women which she used to create the book. Her assessment of men's friendship is that it is more akin to bonding, but not as intimate as what women experience. Rubin found that people continued to support incorrect facts about the case even after having the truth brought forward. The Los Angeles Times called it "an important book on an American dilemma--the urban fear of crime and its devastating impact on race relations."

Her book, Erotic Wars (1991), explores through interviews with 375 adults, sexuality and sexual behavior in America. Rubin found that many sexual problems between heterosexual partners occurred because Americans still felt that sex was a very taboo subject. She also found that many Americans had unrealistic expectations about their sexual partners. Another finding that was she discovered that most Americans did not curtail sexual activity in response to the AIDS crisis, but rather used it as an excuse to slow down their sexual activity.

Her 2003 book, The Man With the Beautiful Voice, describes some of her experiences as a psychotherapist. In the book, she talks about how psychotherapy is practiced and how it can be reformed. She describes several of her own cases, both the success stories and her own failures.

Selected bibliography