Lillian B Rubin's Biography

I grew up on the streets of a teeming immigrant ghetto in the Bronx, a non-English-speaking child who was educated in the New York City school system. College was not an option for a girl of my class. Instead, I was expected to get a job and hand my pay over to my mother. Which I did until, like so many women of my generation, I escaped into marriage.

I devoted my early adult years to family-building. In 1963, at the age of 39, I entered the University of California at Berkeley as a freshman, and emerged eight years later with a Ph.D. in Sociology, post-doctoral training in Clinical Psychology, and my first published book. My interdisciplinary training and experience has given me a unique place among social scientists, and all my work has sought to explore and illuminate human experience in that intersection where sociology and psychology meet.

In the last three-and-a-half decades, I have published twelve books, all of them very well received and widely read and translated. My most recent work, 60 ON UP: The Truth About Aging in America (2007), "while written with wit and humor is also an unflinching look at the complex sociological, cultural, and psychological issues of aging in our time."

The others are, in reverse order of their appearance: The Man With the Beautiful Voice: And More Stories from the Other Side of the Couch (2003), "a series case histories that presents a riveting and moving journey through the human psyche." Tangled Lives: Daughters, Mothers and the Crucible of Aging (2000), "a fascinating and moving memoir of a woman=s triumph over a troubled history." The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph Over the Past (1996), "an inspiring series of case histories of people who have overcome very difficult pasts." Families on the Fault Line: America's Working Class Speaks About The Family, The Economy, Race, and Ethnicity (1994), "an insightful examination of the lives of American families in an era of social and cultural change." Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution? (1990), "a revealing look at the aftermath of the sexual revolution for both the generation that made it and those that followed." Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness (1986), "a riveting tale of the fear and rage that dominated urban America in the 1980s and how Bernie Goetz became its symbol." Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives (1985), "a pioneering book that exposes the ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions with which friendship is hedged in our society." Intimate Strangers: Men & Women Together (1983), "a groundbreaking analysis of the social source of the psychological differences that too often bedevil relations between men and women." Women of a Certain Age: The Midlife Search for (1979), "a compelling portrait of women who spent their early adult years as wives and mothers, only to awaken to a psychological and spiritual crisis at midlife." Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (1976), which "in its 30 –plus-year history has become a classic as the first work to cross disciplinary boundaries and illuminate working-class family life through the various lenses of society, culture, and psychology." Busing & Backlash: White Against White in an Urban School District (1972), "an illuminating tale of the complex social, political, and psychological forces that underlay the struggle for and against school busing for integration."