Dear Pauline: I hope you’re here enjoying our love for you and for your work.

I’ve often said that you were our Lenny Bruce—perhaps I should rephrase that: Lenny was probably one of your best students!

You were the friend who wore the funny, lady hats—with flowers and bows on them.

Pauline—you were our earliest and most radical feminist sociologist of the Second Wave. You were both witty, (“Portnoy’s Mother’s Complaint”, an “ovarian” work rather than a “seminal” work, “the Medea is the message,” ), and a very careful scholar of womens’ reality.

You trolled the dark side as you studied violence against women (incest, rape, domestic violence, etc.), and long before it became fashionable. One of your most important contributions was your study about how women avoid rape. Other than luck, the secret was employing multiple strategies all at once. Yelling, shouting. Fighting back. Running.

You also studied depression and anger in women. I know you personally understood both states of being. I know you lived your politics, took them personally. As you yourself wrote: “My personal and my sociological lives are joined at the hip, heart, and head, like Siamese twins. They cannot be separated. I turn my personal life into sociology and use sociological analysis to cope with my personal life.”

You were an anti-pornography theorist and activist. Remember: At my fiftieth birthday party, you went around counting the guests in terms of who was for or against pornography, came up to me with “data.” You said that there were almost an equal number of pro and anti feminists and you wanted to know what meant, I laughed, hugged you, and said: “Perhaps it means that I’m a leader?” But I don’t think you liked this.

You were feisty, funny, and deadly smart. Once, when you were more upset than usual, I asked you what could I do that would be helpful. You said that you were rarely recognized, or rewarded, that nothing was dedicated to you. And so I dedicated my 1988 book, Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M to you and you were really pleased about that.

You studied the pre-eminent Jane Collective in Chicago in an article titled “Seizing the Means of Reproduction.”

“Portnoy’s Mother’s Complaint” was not a witticism. It was an article that first appeared in Trans-action in 1970; it was titled “Portnoy’s Mother’s Complaint.” It was then picked up in Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness in 1971, which was titled: “Depression in Middle-Aged Women.” It was based on interviews with middle aged, mainly Jewish women and questioned how psychiatry, psycho-analysis, and sociology viewed such women. I also had a piece in this anthology, based on the paper I did NOT deliver in Miami in 1970—I called for reparations for women instead. Here it is titled: “Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship.

Pauline—you were also one of the first—if not the only—pro-mother advocate among us. You studied mothers. You were a mother. Unlike many feminists of your generation (you were about a decade older than me), you did not regret becoming a mother and, like that late, great Paula Caplan who came to this issue years later, you defended mothers, tried to explain the various binds patriarchy placed them in.

Here’s another of your witty titles: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice” in which you and Diana Scully analyzed gynecology textbooks. What you exposed was truly unbelievable. 93% of gynecologists were men—who told their female patients to fake orgasms and to be submissive.

You created, inspired, influenced us all—even though you yourself struggled with depression and with unjust, unfair, utterly cruel obstacles and setbacks in the academic world. As Paula Caplan said: A woman working in the groves of academe is like Lifting a Ton of Feathers.

I will never forget you and never stop loving you.