In Memoriam: Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem, 1944-2014

Sandra Bem, professor emerita of psychology at Cornell University, died on May 20 at her home in Ithaca, New York. She was 69 years old and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Bem was a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and went on to earn a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. She taught at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford before joining the faculty at Cornell in 1978. In addition to teaching psychology, Professor Bem was the director of the university’s Women’s Studies Program, which has now been renamed the program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Professor Bem was the author of the The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Equality (Yale University Press,1993) and An Unconventional Family (Yale University Press, 2001). She retired from teaching in 2010.