Diane Rothbard Margolis

Diane Rothbard Margolis, a sociologist who spent her life studying and building communities, died on October 31, at the age of 93, following a fall the previous day as she was leaving a Halloween party.

Diane was deeply passionate about her family and friends, world travel, politics, classical music, Scrabble, dark chocolate, lobster, and boxed wine. She moved through life with a persistent curiosity about the world that waned only slightly as she became less mobile in her final years.

The youngest of three siblings, Diane was born in Newark and raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Her parents, Paul and Mollie, were Russian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry-cleaning service. Her world expanded when she was accepted into the prestigious High School of Music & Art, where she somewhat reluctantly took up the cello despite, by her own estimation, possessing little natural musical ability. In her later life, listening to music, if not playing it, remained one of her great pleasures.

In 1951, Diane enrolled at Cornell University. Her life changed forever during the summer between her junior and senior years, when she attended a housewarming party given by a young journalist named Richard J. Margolis, who had just moved to New York. After a whirlwind courtship, Diane and Dick married in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota in 1955.

Following their marriage, Dick and Diane lived in Brooklyn Heights, where they bought and ran a neighborhood newspaper, the Brooklyn Heights Press, which won the George Polk Award for Community Service in 1958. Their two sons, Harry (1955) and Philip (1957), were both born in Brooklyn. The family ultimately settled in Wilton, Connecticut, where Dick launched his freelance writing career. Their home there—on a wooded plot with a pond and, up the hill, a studio for Dick—was an idyllic place to raise a family.

The politics of Wilton were less idyllic, at least from Dick and Diane’s perspective: Republicans outnumbered Democrats by roughly three to one. Dick and Diane became deeply involved in local Democratic politics, and many of their closest and most enduring friendships grew out of that involvement. In 1976, Diane served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

In the 1960s, while raising her family, Diane returned to school, ultimately earning a PhD in sociology from New York University in 1972. She went on to become a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she taught for over two decades and published two well-received books, The Managers (1979) and The Fabric of Self (1998).

After Dick’s premature death in 1991 and shortly before her retirement from teaching in 1999, Diane moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she became involved in the creation of an intentional community based on the then relatively new concept of cohousing. For nearly three decades, Cambridge Cohousing became both her home and her life’s work.

She took a leading role in the daily triumphs and frustrations of consensus-based governance, traveled frequently to cohousing conferences, and spent more than a decade writing about the experience. She was immensely proud of the community she had helped create at Cambridge Cohousing. Her book on cohousing, We Built A Village, was published in 2022, when she was 89.

Retirement also gave Diane more time to pursue other interests, particularly painting and travel. She remained intensely inquisitive about other places and people and traveled widely for as long as she was able, including annual trips to an artists’ colony in Costa Rica. But her greatest joy was her family, and especially the time she spent with her sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.

Diane spent her final months at Cadbury Commons in Cambridge, which provided her with the support she needed and a new community of friends, and where she quickly became known as a poker shark.

Diane lived a life shaped by curiosity, community, friendship, music, travel, and an enduring belief that people could find better ways to live together. She will be deeply missed by her family, her many friends, and the communities she supported.

She is survived by her sons, Harry and Philip Margolis; her daughters-in-law, Susan Phillips and Susanne Mützenberg Margolis; her grandchildren, Anna, Isabel, Maya, and Jeremy Margolis; her sister, Sheila “Skip” Nowell; her sister-in-law, Nancy Margolis; and many nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, remembrances can be made to WBUR at wbur.org or the National Cohousing Alliance at cohousingalliance.org/donate .