Robin Tolmach Lakoff

Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1942 - 2025

Robin Tolmach Lakoff was born in Brooklyn, NY and grew up in Stuyvesant Town in lower Manhattan. She was the daughter of Samuel Tolmach, a high school history teacher, and Beatrice Tolmach (née Bressler), a grammar school teacher. She was the eldest of three kids and gave nicknames to her younger siblings, Martha (Marzy) and Philip (Fiji).

Her parents were charter members of the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society and members of the pioneering socialist collective in Putnam Valley, NY, Three Arrows. They were both labor organizers in the New York City schools and staunch democratic socialists in the mould of Norman Thomas. The atmosphere of political engagement and cultural cosmopolitanism in which Robin was raised would shape her future work.

Robin attended the prestigious Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where she excelled in Latin, and from there went to Radcliffe, where she studied classics and graduated summa cum laude. She received her PhD from Harvard, in Linguistics, and went on to become a professor first at the University of Michigan and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught from 1972-2012. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1971-1972.

Her initial contributions to linguistics, building on her dissertation, focused on syntax in Latin, but as an early career scholar she shifted her analytic gaze to the relation between the structure of language and the operation of power in social life.

In 1975 she published the pioneering book, Language and Woman's Place, which helped inaugurate the study of the relation between language and gender inequality. Her influential work on language, power and gender continued in books such as Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (with Raquel Scherr) (1984), Talking Power: The Politics of Language (1990), The Language War (2001), and Context Counts: Papers on Language, Gender and Power (2017). She also wrote incisively on psychoanalysis and gender, publishing (with James Coyne) Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of Dora (1993). She is credited as one of the major figures in the field of sociolinguistics, and trained numerous PhD students who have gone on to distinguished careers.

Her experience as an ambitious young female scholar in the male dominated academic world of the 1960s and 1970s helped point her attention to language and gender inequality. It also led to her determination to be a pathbreaking figure and to mentor other female scholars. She brought her ideas to a broad public audience, writing op-eds in venues such as Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huffington Post, and appearing frequently on Bay Area public radio as a commentator.

She was known for her mordant wit, her wide erudition, her love of language and of puns, and her theories of the machinations of cats. She was also a devotee of fine cuisine and an excellent cook.

She was married to linguist George Lakoff from 1964-1975. She is survived by her son, Andrew Lakoff, her daughter-in-law, Daniela Bleichmar, and two grandchildren, Natalia Lakoff and Paloma Lakoff.