Zella Luria

Zella Luria (; February 18, 1924 – June 10, 2018) was an American psychologist and feminist known for her work on the development of gender identity and sexuality across the life course. Her work helped to shift the field towards a cognitive approach that emphasized the social construction of gender and the active role of children in such construction. Her mother was a factory seamstress who did not read English, and received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Brooklyn College in 1944. In 1951, she received her PhD in experimental psychology with a minor in genetics from Indiana University. As a clinician, she helped to carry out a blind analysis of the multiple personality case on which the film The Three Faces of Eve was later based. Osgood and Luria were the first to use the semantic differential (SD) measurement technique in clinical personality research, comparing the semantic structures used by Eves' three personalities.

Because rules at the University of Illinois prevented more than one family member from holding professorships, Zella was unable to become a professor there. Salva Luria accepted a position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958, and Zella Luria joined Tufts University as an assistant professor of psychology.

In the course of her 40 year career at Tufts, Luria studied the formation of gender identities and sexuality in children, using methods from anthropology to document how parents treated and spoke about their children, how gender and sexuality were presented in media, and how children interacted with other children. In other studies she examined patterns of development in children, observing that groups of boys and girls showed different patterns of interaction, which changed over time, with oppositional gender strategies of "girls against the boys" appearing in young children. She also reported that girls were focusing on and critiquing themselves and others in terms of appearance, prettiness and ugliness as early as the fourth or fifth grade. Luria published over 40 refereed journal articles later reissued as Human Sexuality (2nd ed. 1987). She worked to improve gender balance on the Tufts faculty, She also worked with Physicians for Human Rights and the Center for Constitutional Rights, clinically assessing asylum seekers. and an elected Fellow in the APA's Division 35, the Society for the Psychology of Women. She was the chapter president for the American Association of University Professors, and served as president of the New England Psychological Association in 1971–1972.