Kim Chernin, Who Wrote About Women, Weight and Identity, Dies at 80

Kim Chernin, a feminist writer and counselor who wrote with compassion about feminine physique dysmorphia and its cultural causes, in addition to her personal upbringing because the daughter of a fiery Communist organizer jailed for her beliefs, died on Dec. 17 at a hospital in Marin County, Calif. She was 80.

Her spouse, Renate Stendahl, stated the trigger was Covid-19.

Ms. Chernin’s mom was Rose Chernin, a labor organizer and Communist Social gathering chief who was convicted with others within the McCarthy period of trying to overthrow the federal government (The federal government would additionally attempt twice to deport her to her native Russia). In 1957, in a landmark case, the Supreme Courtroom overturned the convictions, ruling that merely encouraging folks to imagine a sure doctrine was not against the law.

It was a seismic second for the nation, and for Rose’s daughter, who wrestled to outline herself in relationship to her mom — the “Pink Chief,” because the newspapers appreciated to name Rose — instilling within the youthful Ms. Chernin a lifelong aversion to publicity.

In 1980, Ms. Chernin was an unpublished poet when Ticknor & Fields purchased her ebook “The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness.” The manuscript, seven years within the making, had been rejected by 13 publishers.

Anorexia and bulimia have been little-discussed problems on the time; on faculty campuses, nevertheless, there was an rising disaster amongst younger ladies, and when Ms. Chernin’s ebook appeared, she grew to become a sought-after speaker on tv and on faculty campuses. The ebook, which had a restricted first print run, bought out shortly.

“Obsession” was the primary of what could be a trilogy about ladies’s appetites and identification. In it, Ms. Chernin wrote of her personal obsession along with her weight and her makes an attempt to equate meals with nurturing. She used a wide range of lenses — cultural, feminist, anthropological, religious and metaphorical — to discover why so many ladies felt alienated from their our bodies.

“A lot of life’s feelings — from loneliness to rage, from a love of life to a primary falling in love — will be felt as urge for food,” she wrote. “And a few would clarify the obsession with weight in these simple, acquainted phrases. However there are deeper ranges of understanding to plumb. That night time, for instance, standing in entrance of the fridge, I noticed that my starvation was for bigger issues, for identification, for creativity, for energy, for a significant place in society. The starvation most ladies really feel, which drives them to eat greater than they want, is fed by the evolution and expression of self.”

She argued that the bodily ideally suited for an American girl was a person’s physique — lean and wiry, moderately than comfortable and rounded — and if that was so, she requested, what did that say about society?

“There’s a poetic fact on the coronary heart of ‘The Obsession,’” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his New York Occasions evaluation of the ebook in 1981. “Eloquently written, passionate in its rhetoric and persistently absorbing, it turns an apparently trivial topic inside out to disclose unacknowledged attitudes and prejudices. We Individuals in all probability do fear far an excessive amount of about fats and its look. Maybe Miss Chernin is correct when she argues that the issue shouldn’t be the vanity of our perceptions, however moderately, the depth of our emotions.”

Elaine Kusnitz, referred to as Kim, was born on Could 7, 1940, within the Bronx. Her father, Paul Kusnitz, was a structural engineer educated on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how; her mom, Rose Chernin Kusnitz, who glided by her maiden identify, had graduated early from highschool and labored in a manufacturing facility to help her mother and father and sisters.

Each Kim’s mother and father have been Russian-born Jews and dedicated Marxists, and earlier than Kim’s delivery they returned for a time to Russia, the place Mr. Kusnitz labored on plans for the Moscow subway.

When Kim was 4, her older sister and caregiver, Nina, died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Rose moved the household to Los Angeles and commenced working as an organizer there, championing farm staff and housing rights for her Black and Latino neighbors.

Kim grew up attending Communist Social gathering rallies, at first in her stroller. From a younger age she learn Marx, Lenin and accounts of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the 9 Black youngsters falsely accused of rape in Alabama. Kim fought bitterly along with her mom, whom she additionally revered.

On the Yiddish faculty sponsored by a left-wing Jewish group she briefly attended, Kim quacked like a duck when spoken to in that language. But when her mom was imprisoned for 5 months when Kim was 11, she was disconsolate. And when she wrote her 1983 memoir, “In My Mom’s Home,” weaving her personal story with that of her mom’s, she captured her mom’s distinctive, Yiddish-inflected voice: “You need to fly? Develop wings. You don’t like the best way issues are? Inform a narrative.”

Ms. Chernin studied English on the College of California, Berkeley, the place she met David Netboy The 2 have been married, had a daughter, Larissa, who survives her, and shortly divorced. Her marriage to Robert Cantor additionally resulted in divorce, after which she took her mom’s maiden identify as her personal, as did Larissa.

Ms. Chernin met Ms. Stendhal, a journalist and writer, at a restaurant in Paris. Collectively since 1985, they married in 2014. They have been collaborators and editors of one another’s writing and the co-authors of “Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Intercourse Ceaselessly Package,” amongst different books.

After “Obsession,” Ms. Chernin printed practically 20 books, however her distaste for publicity and advertising and marketing deepened as she grew older, Ms. Stendhal stated, and her final writings have been donated on to her archive within the Schlesinger Library at Harvard College.

Ms. Chernin, who was in psychoanalysis for 25 years and commenced counseling ladies with consuming problems after “Obsession” got here out, earned her doctorate, as did Ms. Stendhal, within the mid-Nineties in religious psychology, which blends religious teachings of all faiths with standard psychotherapy.