In Memoriam |
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Tamara Kern Hareven Tamara Kern Hareven, Unidel Professor of Family Studies and History at the University of Delaware, died of kidney failure in Newark, Delaware, on 18 October, 2002. She was 65. A child of the Holocaust, Tamara was born in Rumania in 1937, the daughter of Saul and Mirjam Kern. Under the Nazi occupation, the Kerns were imprisoned in the Ukraine but survived; they then immigrated to Israel, where Tamara's father was a lawyer and her mother a mathematician. Tamara served in the Israeli army, graduated from Hebrew University in 1961, then moved to the United States, where she received an M.A. in Byzantine History from the University of Cincinnati in 1962 and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Ohio State University in 1965. The topic of her dissertation, Eleanor Roosevelt's social ideas, became the basis for her first book, Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (1968). In a brief intellectual autobiography that she composed for her essay collection Families, History, and Social Change: life-course and cross-cultural perspectives (Westview Press, 1999), Tamara traced her career-long interest in the history of the family to an invitation from Robert Bremner to become associate editor of a project documenting the history of childhood, the three-volume Children and Youth in America (Harvard University Press, 1970-74). That experience led her, during the 1970s, to edit several influential books on the new social history and on family history, including Anonymous Americans: Explorations in American Social History (Prentice-Hall, 1971), Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1780-1940 (New Viewpoints, 1977), and Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective (Academic Press, 1978). In 1975, she became founding editor of the Journal of Family History; in 1995, she and Andrejs Plakans launched a new journal, The History of the Family: An International Quarterly; she was co-editor until her death. Her own work was strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on techniques and insights from sociology, demography, and anthropology; it was also genuinely collaborative, as she labored with and learned from colleagues in history and the social sciences. The interdisciplinary approach informed her ten-year study of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and the two books it produced: Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (with Randolph Langenbach) (Pantheon Books, 1978) and Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (Cambridge University Press, 1982). Together, these books revealed her social scientist's interest in broad patterns of past family and work experience and her humanist's concern to recapture the texture of individual experience through oral history. In later years, her interest increasingly turned to comparative labor and family history, including studies of aging and the relationships between generations. The book that she completed just before her death, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto (University of California Press, 2002), was to be the first of two comparing life and work among handloom weavers in the United States, Japan, France, and Austria. She was also writing a book on "the children of Amoskeag," based on extensive oral history interviews with the children and grandchildren of the textile workers she had interviewed in the 1970s. Over the course of her career, Tamara Hareven wrote or edited twenty books and seventy articles, organized over a dozen conferences, and delivered countless papers at scholarly gatherings. That career took her from Dalhousie University (1965-69) to Clark University (1969-88), to the University of Delaware (1988-2002), as well as to visiting posts at Harvard, Doshisha University, the Sorbonne, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Along the way, she collected a number of grants, awards, and honors, but she was particularly proud of the honorary doctorate conferred upon her by Linköping University (Sweden) in 1998, in recognition of her international reputation and her contributions to the fields of family history, aging and generational relations, and life-course analysis. A photograph taken upon that occasion accompanied obituary notices in Swedish newspapers. She served the scholarly community in a variety of ways, especially through committee work for the Social Science Research Council and the National Council on Family Relations. In 1994-95, she was President of the Social Science History Association. Her influence on the fields of family studies and family history was substantial, both in the United States and internationally. A familiar figure at historical and interdisciplinary conferences, Tamara was physically diminutive, yet she loomed large both as a scholar and as a personality. Few who met her would forget the encounter. Anne M. Boylan |
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