Rose foliage coser

Rose Laub Coser (born May 4, 1916 in Berlin as Rose Laub ; † August 21, 1994 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts ) was an American sociologist of German origin.

Life

Berlin and Antwerp

Rose Laub was one of two daughters of Elias (Ilja) Laub and his wife Lisa (née Lachovsky). Her older sister died as a child in a car accident. The parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the father initially worked in a south German cigarette factory, later opened a printing company in Berlin, which was then also joined by a small publishing house, E. Laubsche Verlagbuchhandlung , which specialized in socialist publications.

Both parents belonged to the left wing of the SPD and during the First World War became members of the Spartakusbund , whose legal and illegal fonts were produced in Ilja Laub's print shop, which is why he was once briefly imprisoned. When the Spartakusbund dissolved into the KPD on January 1, 1919 , Ilya and Lisa Laub became founding members of this party. The KPD publications were also printed by Laub, the publishing bookstore flourished.

After the Kapp Putsch in Munich, Laub decided that Germany was not the right country to let his daughters grow up there. He made contact with family members and acquaintances in Belgium , sold his printing and publishing house and in 1923 moved with his wife and two daughters to Antwerp , where there was a large Jewish community. In Antwerp he opened a new printing company specializing in the production of Yiddish fonts. He joined the General Jewish Workers' Union , which had a branch in Antwerp. The Laub'sche house in Antwerp became a meeting place and refuge for socialist refugees from Germany after 1933.

Rose Laub attended elementary school. and a humanistic girls' high school in Antwerp. After graduating from high school, she began an apprenticeship as a printer in her father's company, but had to break it off because the printers' union refused to accept a woman. Then she worked in the office of her father's printing company. She had been active in Belgium's socialist youth movement since high school, where she saw herself on the side of the Flemish- speaking members who fought for equality with the French-speaking majority of the population.

When the National Socialists consolidated their power in Germany in the second half of the 1930s and the signs were pointing to war, the Laub family applied for an emigration visa to the USA. In 1939 she was able to enter the country, her parents went to Los Angeles , where relatives lived, and Rose Laub went to New York .

Starting a family and studying in the USA

Initially, Rose Laub made a living in New York on paperwork for companies and private individuals, she lived in furnished rooms. When her economic situation became precarious, she went to Los Angeles and lived with her parents. In Los Angeles she found work as an assistant to the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel . However, she returned to New York, where she found a job with the Emergency Rescue Committee , which had been set up to help refugees from Germany. As part of her work for the aid organization, she met the emigrant Lewis A. Coser in the summer of 1941 , whom she married on August 25, 1943.

Rose Laub Coser began her studies in the French-speaking department of the New School , where she was enrolled in philosophy, and took courses with Alexandre Koyré and Claude Lévi-Strauss . However, she soon moved to Columbia University , where she enrolled in sociology. Her academic teachers were Robert Lynd and Robert MacIver , Seymour M. Lipset and Paul Lazarsfeld, and Robert K. Merton , who became of outstanding importance for her later scientific work. She wrote her master’s thesis on German social democracy . She financed her studies, among other things, by working as an assistant to the psychoanalyst René A. Spitz .

The couple then went to Chicago for two years, where Rose was a research assistant with David Riesman and Lewis also worked for Riesman. After two years they returned to New York to attend the courses required for a doctorate at Columbia University and to prepare their dissertations .

In 1951 the couple left New York. Rose Laub Coser accepted a teaching position at Wellesley College , a private college for women, and began working on her dissertation, which was based on participatory observation and interviews with patients at a Boston hospital. On the basis of this work, she was awarded a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957. PhD. The dissertation went to the book trade in 1962 under the title Life in the ward .

Positions as a university professor

After receiving her doctorate, Rose Laub Coser was promoted to assistant professor at Wellesley College, but did not get a lifetime position. so left college. She moved to a position as an assistant professor (later as an associate professor ) for sociology at the department of Harvard Medical School . There she was responsible for research in a hospital. In addition to her medical sociological research, she taught sociological theory at Boston University from 1962 to 1965 . She was also visiting professor at Berkeley University of California and Sir George Williams University in Montreal . After completing her medical sociological research, which is documented in the book Training in Ambiguity , Rose Laub Coser switched to a professorship at Northeastern University . Together with her husband, she finally went to the State University of New York in Stony Brook , Long Island in 1968 . Both retired there in 1986 .

As retirees, they both returned to Boston and continued to look after sociology students at Boston University as adjunct professors for years .

Significance for sociology

Laub Coser's main area of work was initially medical sociology , following a structural-functionalist approach. Using the example of psychiatric clinics, she showed how the ideas that prevail in a society about the nature and causes of psychiatric illness influence the function and operation of the clinics.

The second (longer) phase of her scientific work focused on the application and refinement of the concept of role . In contrast to the sociological mainstream, she took the view that roles do not fundamentally limit individuality , but - in a further development of Simmel's concept of the "crossing of social circles" - that complex role sets make individual autonomy possible in the first place. The social type “ community ” was described by her as “greedy” because it demands conformity from each individual and hinders the development of individuality.

In her contributions to the sociology of families , she used the example of the role of women to shed light on the connection between socio-structural conditions and gender-specific role interpretations.

Offices and honors

Rose Laub Coser was vice president of the American Sociological Association and president of the Eastern Sociological Society and president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems . The Rose Laub Coser Award is presented annually by the Eastern Sociological Society for an extraordinary sociological dissertation.

Fonts (selection)

Life in the ward , Michigan State University Press, 1962
The Family. Its Structures and Functions , 1974, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0312281052
Training in ambiguity. Learning Through Doing in a Mental Hospital , 1979
In Defense of Modernity. Role Complexity and Individual Autonomy 1991
Social roles and social structures , ed. And introduced by Lewis A. Coser, 1999, ISBN 3-901402-06-3

literature

Joseph Maier : Coser, Rose Laub. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf, Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 2. Enke, Stuttgart 1984, p. 152.
Judith R. Blau, Norman Goodman (Eds.): Social roles and social institutions. Essays in honor of Rose Laub Coser. Westview Press, Boulder 1991, ISBN 0-8133-8320-X .

Web links

Literature by and about Rose Laub Coser in the catalog of the German National Library
Short biography in English in the Jewish Women's Archive
Obituary in the New York Times

Individual evidence

↑ Source of the biographical information is Lewis A. Coser, Introduction , in ders. (Ed.): Rose Laub Coser. Social roles and social structures , library of social science emigrants, Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 1999, pp. 7–23.
↑ Lewis A. Coser (Ed.): Rose Laub Coser. Social roles and social structures , library of social science emigrants, Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 1999, p. 9; he reports that Willy Brandt also visited the Laub'sche Haus several times.
↑ She had completed her first year of primary school in Berlin.
↑ The couple had two children, Ellen and Steve.
↑ In his biographical sketch Lewis A. Coser calls his wife Rose Coser from the time of the wedding, in the sociological literature, however, she is consistently called Rose Laub Coser, which is followed here.

personal data
SURNAME	Coser, rose foliage
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Foliage, rose (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American-German sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 4, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin , Germany
DATE OF DEATH	August 21, 1994
Place of death	Wellfleet, Massachusetts , USA

[1] Source of the biographical information is Lewis A. Coser, Introduction , in ders. (Ed.): Rose Laub Coser. Social roles and social structures , library of social science emigrants, Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 1999, pp. 7–23.

[2] Lewis A. Coser (Ed.): Rose Laub Coser. Social roles and social structures , library of social science emigrants, Graz: Nausner & Nausner, 1999, p. 9; he reports that Willy Brandt also visited the Laub'sche Haus several times.

[3] She had completed her first year of primary school in Berlin.

[4] The couple had two children, Ellen and Steve.

[5] In his biographical sketch Lewis A. Coser calls his wife Rose Coser from the time of the wedding, in the sociological literature, however, she is consistently called Rose Laub Coser, which is followed here.