Lois Banner

Lois Wendland Banner (born 1939) is an American author and emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern California. She is one of the earliest academics to focus on women's history in the United States. Her work includes biographies of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo as well as the textbook Women in Modern America: A Brief History.

She was born Lois Wendland on July 26, 1939, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Harry J. and Melba Wendland.

In 1992 Banner published In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality about which Publishers Weekly noted: “This is a masterwork of scholarship and a milestone in our understanding of how Western civilization has demeaned the older woman. … Like an archeologist, the author sifts through myth, literature and history--her Rosetta stone, the film Sunset Boulevard. … Banner turns to African American women for positive middle-aged and elder role models in a study that helps set the historical record straight.”

Banner later wrote about the intellectual history of the United States and anthropology's place in that story with her 2003 book Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle: "By focusing on the interplay of Benedict, Mead, their husbands, friends, lovers, and protégés, [Banner] takes readers well beyond the two women’s published work and shows the genesis of their thoughts on human plasticity, diversity, potential, configurations, and patterns, all pearls on a string of shared ideas."

In Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox she focused on the iconic American actress with an unusual angle: “Banner is less interested in definitively collapsing the poles than in teasing out the contradictions and underlying motives of a complex character. She takes us through Marilyn’s nomadic childhood to her breakthrough in Hollywood and her storybook marriage to Joe DiMaggio, to her escape to Miller and acting classes in New York, to her brief and ultimately tragic return to Hollywood," wrote Zoë Slutzky of the New York Times.

In his book of Monroe, author Larry Jordan criticized Lois Banner for suggesting that Monroe may have committed suicide due to being unable to control alleged lesbian impulses. Literary scholar Sarah Churchwell has observed that most biographers treat Monroe’s supposed bisexuality as an open question, while some attempt to use it to advance ideological arguments. Monroe's former publicist Pat Newcomb stated that Monroe had no anxiety regarding homosexuality. Jordan has also disputed theories that Monroe was a communist and criticized Banner for implying that Monroe supported Fidel Castro, arguing that in 1960 Castro had not yet declared himself a communist and still had some support in the United States.

She also published a book on spiritual communes in the 1970s and their connection to Christian religions and Islam, in Finding Fran (Columbia University Press, 1989). Her many awards include the Bode-Pearson Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Studies Association, of which she was the first female President.

At 84 years old, Banner made racist public comments at the 2023 Berkshire conference that resulted in condemnation from the audience and on social media. During a speech, Banner, an 84 year old white woman, wished she was black, claiming it would have made her career easier.

Selected publications Books Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo, Rutgers University Press, 2023: . Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, Bloomsbury USA, 2012: . MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe, Abrams, 2011. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle, Alfred Knopf, 2003. In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality, Alfred Knopf, 1992. Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women, Columbia University Press, 1998. American Beauty, Alfred Knopf, 1983. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Women's Rights. Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1979. Women in Modern America: A Brief History, 1974.

Articles "The Mystery Woman of Hollywood: Greta Garbo, Feminism, and Stardom," Feminist Media Studies, forthcoming. "Biography as History," American Historical Review, June, 2009. “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema Studies, Summer, 2008. "Mannish Women, Passive Men, and Constitutional Types: Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies as a Response to Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, March 2003. "The Bo-Cu Plant: Gender in the Life and Writings of Ruth Benedict," in Janiewski and Banner, Reading Benedict, Reading Mead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). "The Irony of Memory: Finding a Los(t) Angeles," Pacific Historical Review, Spring, 1994. "Autobiography and Biography: Intermixing the Genres," Auto/Biography Studies, Fall, 1993. "The Meaning of Menopause: Aging and Its Twentieth Century Contexts," Working Papers, Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Fall 1989.

Recognition Berlin Prize Fellow, American Academy in Berlin, 2020 Bode-Pearson Lifetime Achievement Award, American Studies Association, 2006-2007 Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring, 2005-06 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement, American Studies Association, 2005 Fellow, History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University Canberra, Australia, May-August, 2004 Fulbright Chair, University of Uppsala Fulbright Experts Grant, New Zealand, August, 2004 Outstanding teaching award, General Education, 2002-03 USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, 1996 USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, 1990 USC Associates Award For Creativity In Research And Scholarship, 1989 Rockefeller Fellowship Recipient, Humanities Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation, 1978-79 Fellow, Radcliffe Institute, 1974-75

Academic Experience U.S. Fulbright Commission, Distinguished Chair, University Of Uppsala, Spring, 2017 Professor, University of Southern California (History and Gender Studies), 1983-2014 Adjunct Professor, Josai International University, Tokyo, 1996-99 Director, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, University of Southern California: "The New Gender Scholarship" Summer, 1992 Director, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, George Washington University, "Men, Women, and Popular Culture" Summer, 1984 William Robertson Coe Professor, Stanford University, Summer, 1983 Jane Watson Irwin Professor, Hamilton College, Spring, 1983 Visiting Associate Professor, U.C.L.A., Summer, 1982 Visiting Associate Professor, George Washington University, 1981-83 Visiting Senior Lecturer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1980-81 National Endowment for the Humanities Professor, University of Scranton, 1979-80 Princeton University, Lecturer, 1977-78 Douglass College, Rutgers University, Lecturer and Assistant Professor, 1967-1977