“At a time when we had few women faculty at Stanford, and few feminist voices,” Yalom recalled in this article, “it was really essential to bring in the visiting and affiliate scholars to contribute. As director of the Clayman Institute in the 1980s, she helped launch the visiting and affiliated scholars programs when the gender and feminist field was still relatively new.
Yalom was a popular speaker on the lecture circuit and thought leader in her field. She researched and wrote about how marriage, once considered a religious duty in medieval Europe, evolved into a sense of personal fulfillment in contemporary America the ideas, images and perceptions of the female breast in religion, psychology, politics, society and the arts a love-obsessed French culture represented in its great works of literature and how attitudes on friendship – both female and male – changed from the Bible and the Romans to the Enlightenment to the women’s rights movements of the 1960s. Her book, How the French Invented Love (2012), was short-listed for the Phi Beta Kappa Gauss literary award and for the American Library in Paris book award, in 2013. She excelled in re-inventing this dynamic for her fellow women scholars on campus and beyond, as well as in her Palo Alto home.īridging cultures and continents, Yalom studied the history of women as partners in marriage and examined such provocative topics as the history of the female breast and the role women played in the French Revolution and its aftermath.Ī gifted writer and innovative thinker, Yalom published books that were translated into 20 languages: Blood Sisters (1993), A History of the Breast (1997), A History of the Wife (2001), Inside the American Couple (2002), Birth of the Chess Queen (2004), The American Resting Place (2008), The Social Sex (2015) and The Amorous Heart (2018). One of America’s leading cultural historians, Yalom admired the 18th-century French salon culture where women played a leading role in organizing events of intellectual discourse. Yalom was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, where she served as director from 1984 to 1985. Marilyn Yalom (Image credit: Clayman Institute for Gender Research)
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