- Date Of Birth: February 18, 1924
- Date Of Death: June 10, 2018
- State: Massachusetts
CAMBRIDGE – Zella (Hurwitz) Luria, Psychologist who studied gender roles, passed away June 10, 2018 at her home in Cambridge.
She is survived by her by her son Daniel and daughter-in law Janet Loesche of Brighton, Michigan; by her grandchildren Nicholas and Anna Luria; by her brother Jerard Hurwitz of New York City; and by her nieces Deena and Jodie Hurwitz. She was preceded in death by her husband, Salvador Luria, a leading anti-war activist and molecular biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1969.
Zella was raised in the Bronx by her mother Dora (nee Garbarsky), a seamstress, and her father, Hyman Hurwitz, a house painter and union business agent. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1944 and went on to earn a PhD from Indiana University. At Indiana, she met and married her husband and gave birth to their son. In 1951, the couple relocated to Champaign-Urbana, where Zella taught and did research on child development in the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois. In 1958, they moved again, this time to the Boston area, and the following year Zella began a 40-year career on the faculty of Tufts University. There, she and her colleagues won a social development training grant that launched them on exciting lines of research in child and adolescent development. It was also there that she did her most important work on the social construction of gender roles. Her extensive primary research convinced her that differences in gender roles were driven primarily by the deeply entrenched biases of most men. Even though fathers typically did relatively little of the child-rearing work, they set far lower expectations for their daughters than for their sons right from the children’s birth. Zella was a popular, prize-winning teacher at Tufts, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when she was an important mentor to many younger feminists while also being active in the civil rights movement. From 1971-72 she was president of the New England Psychological Association. Co-author of the widely used textbook Human Sexuality (1979; 2nd edition 1987) and of more than 40 refereed journal articles, she also worked as a clinician on the multiple personality case on which the film The Three Faces of Eve was based. In her post-retirement years, she evaluated a number of political asylum seekers as a volunteer with the Physicians for Human Rights. In her final decade and a half of life, she faced significant health issues. She was fortunate to have been looked after by her good friend and geriatric care manager Howard Block and by many devoted caregivers who became dear friends, including Ruth Urtamo, Sarah Kaddu, Margaret Mulkerrin, Maureen Walsh, Asia Rowland, and especially Maureen O’Keeffe. She was also fortunate to have enjoyed a 50-year friendship with the psychologist and artist Brenda Steinberg, with whom she went out to lunch every Thursday up until her last few weeks of life.
