Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim was a German sociologist. She held a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. She was one of the "first generation of female professors" in sociology and women's and gender studies.
Early life and education
Elisabeth Gernsheim was born in Freiburg on 14 October 1946. Her family had some Jewish heritage and relatives lived all over the world following the Holocaust. After studying sociology, psychology, and philosophy in Munich, she obtained her PhD in 1973, with a thesis The sociology of knowledge in the context of theoretical pluralism. Investigations into the mutual criticism of the sociology of knowledge, scientific theory and social psychology.After several fellowships, she qualified as a professor from Munich University in 1987. Her professorial thesis was a social history of motherhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, entitiled ''Geburtenrückgang und Kinderwunsch. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Mutterschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.''
Career
Beck-Gernsheim's main research interest was in social changes and the changing situation of the institution of the family. She worked on the sociology of work and occupation, the sociology of the family and gender relations, reproduction and technological development, as well as migration, ethnic and cultural differences, Her work dealt with sociological individualisation theory and questions of the transformation of modernity.Beck-Gernsheim was awarded several postgraduate scholarships. These included a doctoral scholarship from the University of Munich, an intercultural exchange scholarship from the Studienkreis Foundation, a postdoctoral scholarship and a Heisenberg scholarship from the DFG. She was a visiting professor at the University of Giessen and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
She was professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg, then from 1994 held the role at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. She held fellowships at Cardiff University, at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
Following an official retirement in 2009, she was visiting professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim until 2012, a senior research fellow at LMU Munich, and a senior professor at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 2016.
Personal life
She married German sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1975 and they remained together until his death in 2015. They enjoyed walking in the Bavarian Alps and worked together, Ulrich was the “beneficiary of her thoughts... with Elisabeth, I am forced to live the ‘cosmopolitan’ reality I am writing about”.Beck-Gernsheim died on 22 October 2025, at the age of 79.
Works
- Das halbierte Leben
- Vom Geburtenrückgang zum ganz normalen Leben
- Das ganz normale Chaos der Liebe
- Was kommt nach der Familie?
- "Ein Türke geht nicht in die Oper" – was Deutsche über Türken wissen, in: Robertson-von Trotha, Caroline Y. : Kultur und Gerechtigkeit, Baden-Baden 2007,