Biography

Lois Wendland Banner (born 1939) is an American author and emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern California. She is one of the earliest academics to focus on women's history in the United States. Her work includes biographies of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo as well as the textbook Women in Modern America: A Brief History.

She was born Lois Wendland on July 26, 1939, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Harry J. and Melba Wendland.

She received her doctorate of philosophy from Columbia University in 1970. Her doctoral dissertation was on religious benevolence and reform in the antebellum era. Realizing the many women who were leaders in that movement pointed her towards women’s history when she taught in the History Department of Douglass College of Rutgers University. While at Douglass she wrote the textbook Women in Modern America: A Brief History, which is commonly used in introductory Women's Studies classes at the university level. Commencing with the second edition she included scholarship on race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Banner subsequently taught at Princeton, George Washington University, Stanford University, the University of Scranton, Hamilton College and UCLA before achieving tenure and a full professorship at the University of Southern California in History and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

In 1983, she released American Beauty about which scholar Ann Douglas of Columbia University wrote: "Banner is alert to several interesting aspects of the story that she chronicles. She sees the matter of the definition and marketing of beauty as a complex process: those involved were able to impose their high valuation of female good looks on a public that already equated beauty with femininity, yet they were unable to stabilize and market a single type of beauty."

In 1992 Banner published In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality about which Publishers Weekly noted: “This is a masterwork of scholarship and a milestone in our understanding of how Western civilization has demeaned the older woman. … Like an archeologist, the author sifts through myth, literature and history--her Rosetta stone, the film Sunset Boulevard. … Banner turns to African American women for positive middle-aged and elder role models in a study that helps set the historical record straight.”

Banner later wrote about the intellectual history of the United States and anthropology's place in that story with her 2003 book Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle: "By focusing on the interplay of Benedict, Mead, their husbands, friends, lovers, and protégés, [Banner] takes readers well beyond the two women’s published work and shows the genesis of their thoughts on human plasticity, diversity, potential, configurations, and patterns, all pearls on a string of shared ideas."

In Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox she focused on the iconic American actress with an unusual angle: “Banner is less interested in definitively collapsing the poles than in teasing out the contradictions and underlying motives of a complex character. She takes us through Marilyn’s nomadic childhood to her breakthrough in Hollywood and her storybook marriage to Joe DiMaggio, to her escape to Miller and acting classes in New York, to her brief and ultimately tragic return to Hollywood," wrote Zoë Slutzky of the New York Times.

She also published a book on spiritual communes in the 1970s and their connection to Christian religions and Islam, in Finding Fran (Columbia University Press, 1989). Her many awards include the Bode-Pearson Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Studies Association, of which she was the first female President.

In 1973 she and Mary S. Hartman founded the now triennial Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, run by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. They also edited the proceedings of that conference, Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (1974), the first academic edited collection in women's history.

At 84 years old, Banner made racist public comments at the 2023 Berkshire conference that resulted in condemnation from the audience and on social media. During a speech, Banner, an 84 year old white woman, wished she was black, claiming it would have made her career easier.