lesson 8 early women sociologists and classical sociological theory robert wonser soc 368 –...

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Lesson 8Early Women Sociologists and

Classical Sociological Theory

Robert Wonser

SOC 368 – Classical Sociological Theory

Spring 2014

22Lesson 8: Early Women Sociologists, Classical Sociological Theory

Redefining History

The traditional telling of sociological theories (the canonization) has been shaped by politics of gender that tends to emphasize male achievement and erase female contributions.

Modifies conventional history:

1)Harriet Martineau to sociology’s first mid-nineteenth century of founders, perhaps even sociology’s original founder

2)The interconnected community of women during sociology’s emergence 1890-1930

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Who Gets Included?

“a sociology is a systematically developed consciousness of society and of social relations.” (Dorothy E. Smith)

Essential parts include:

1)Fundamental organization of society

2)Nature of the human being

3)Relation between ideas and materiality

Lesson 8: Early Women Sociologists, Classical Sociological Theory

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Essential Parts Include

4) Purpose and methods appropriate to social science study

5) Definition of the social role of the sociologist

6) Articulation of a position to judge the essential fairness of society in place.


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Theories as Feminist

Certain themes and concerns:

1)Theorists awareness of her gender and her stance in that gender identity as she develops her sociological theory.

2)An awareness of the situatedness of her analysis and the situatedness of the vantage point of others.


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Theories as Feminist

3) Focus on the lives and work of women

4) Critical concern for the practices of social inequality

5) Commitment to the practice of sociology in pursuit of social amelioration.


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Harriet Martineau (1802 – 1876)


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Same generation as Comte, Spencer and Marx, thinkers who undertook the ambitious task of delineating an intellectual undertaking that would systematically and scientifically study human society.

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The Social Role of the Sociologist

Published 25 novels, Illustrations of Political Economy, intended to teach sociology to general middle and working class audience.


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The Organization of Society

Sociology’s subject matter is social life in society—it’s patterns, causes, consequences and problems.

Most important law of social life: “the great ends of human association” aim above all “to the grand one,--the only general one--…human happiness.”

This is the principle by which she judges the essential fairness of society.


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Morals and Manners

Sociology’s project is to assess the extent to which people develop “morals and manners” that produce or subvert the end of human happiness.

“morals” – society’s collective ideas of proscribed and prescribed behaviors

“Manners” – patterns and associations Human association should lead to

happinessLesson 8: Early Women Sociologists, Classical

Sociological Theory10

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Similar focus as Marx, though while Marx was focused on class injustice and militant, hers was woman-centered and reformist.

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Anomaly

The well being of a society is judged by its alignment with between moral codes and actual behaviors or manners.

Misalignment = anomaly. She identifies 4 in America:SlaveryUnequal status of womenPursuit of wealthFear of public opinion

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Methods

Develops first guidelines for the practice of interpretive sociology.

The sociologist must try to develop a sympathetic understanding as a strategy for discovering the meanings of an activity for the actors.

To overcome the problems of sampling the sociologist must loom for “things” that represent the collectivity.

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Feminism

Martineau’s feminist sociology is grounded in empirical research and theoretical.

The domination of women closely parallels the domination of slaves.

She brings together the double oppression of class and gender as well.

Her experiences as a woman informed her sociology but she goes beyond that to a general sociology of all social life.

She was well aware of her gender and how others saw her and her work as a result of her gender.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935)

Similar to contemporary male theorists in tone and intention.

Her method of doing sociology was theory building.

Though her audience was general.

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The Sexuo-Economic Relation

“.. But beyond these forces, we come under the effect of a third set of conditions peculiar to our human status; namely social conditions...

We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. With us an entre sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is combined with the sex-relation.” (Gilman, 1898/1966:1-5)

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Economy and family are gender stratified leading to gender inequality.

“excessive sex distinction” = genderGender stratification produces two sexes:

Men as a “master class” and women as subordinated and disempowered social beings, this is the sexuo-economic relation

Mirrors Marx’s analysis of economic class.

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For Gilman as for Marx, the economy is the basic institution, produces individual and social life and moves society forward. Through work, species-being, we realize human potential.

Hence, the diagnosis in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

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Origins of Gender Stratification

Man’s domination of women springs from his need for sociability with or recognition by an other.

Psychologically bonding with her while appropriating all the economic agency and relational control.

Gender is her only instrument of countervailing power, the wiles of femininity, sexuality; because of her economic helplessness

Reproduced through gender roles in an androcentric culture

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Feminism

The solution to the wasteful sexuo-economic arrangement is to break up the arrangement of the sex classes.

First step? Economic emancipation of women.Closest approximation of her utopia is the Hull

House.For some reason, Gilman was systematically

written out of sociology’s history…She was a woman, an activist (as opposed to ‘value

neutral).

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Jane Addams (1860-1935) and the Chicago Women’s School

Addams’ sociology grew out of her activism.Until recently, only remembered for her activism

Women of Chicago defined their role as sociologists and sociology’s purpose as the reform and improvement of society.

They sought to reign in the negatives only discussed by the male theorists of the time.

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The Basic Thesis

Create society based on a “democratic social ethics” to achieve the democratic transformation of all parts of the society through the inculcation of social ethics.

Social ethics – the practice of rules of right relationship that produce and sustain in the individual an orientation to action based on “concern for the welfare of the community” or “identification with the common lot”

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Methods

“bifurcated consciousness” the awareness of a division between formal textual descriptions of life and one’s own lived experience (Dorothy Smith, 1987)

Philosophical pragmatist epistemology – truth emerges through living

She values her own experience over textual authority

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Methods

She didn’t craft sociological generalizations so much as through the presentation of paradigmatic case studies from participant observations and key informants at the Hull House and the city of Chicago.

Goes beyond verstehen and seeks an authentic caring relationship between the researcher and the subject of the research “the neighborly relation” experienced at Hull House.

Utilized a “vantage point”, rendering social reality from the perspective of the individuals involved.

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The Organization of Society and Human Nature and Ethics

Society is the coming together of individuals to realize both material interests and ethical ideals.

Concerned with social democracy.Democracy cannot be built by people who

expect other people to “see the light,” such demands are grounded in people’s inability to understand the vantage point of others (they lack empathy).

Humans desire sociality, as embodied people who seek ethical relations with others

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The Social Ethic

A democratic social ethic would be based on the facts, revealed through one’s own experience that:

1) No one set of people are more important than others

2) All people may be active agents

3) As active agents, all people seek opportunities to enact kindliness

4) Others’ personal safety is our personal safety.

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The Social Ethic

Her theory is devoted to analyzing how to transform democracy from a political creed into a social creed informing all human interactions. Can be learned:

1) Through formal education

2) Through working together

3) “memory” and reflections shared and retold with others.

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The Chicago Women’s School’s Approach to the Organization of Society and the Sociologist’s Role1) Modern society is interdependence of human

beings and the structures in which they come together.

2) Turn an understanding of the human being into a agentic moral agent shaping society’s path for better.

3) The group’s most affected by change are the socially disenfranchised

4) Social scientist’s role is to give people the tools for understanding and action by presenting facts about social conditions, plans for associations, and proposals for state policies.

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Methods

Inventors of “social problems” in that they took situations most took for granted as inevitable (e.g. poverty) and redefined them as subject of social control, social improvement and social elimination.

Did this through personal and historic documents, statistical tables, maps of demographic traits, interviews, key informants, participant observations and photographs.

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Essential Principles of Sociology of Chicago Women

Social science must act for changeAll citizens are morally responsible for the

welfare of the countryEvery action ties a person to other peopleEffective personal virtue must be done through

associations through associations we gain knowledge and the power to make individual action truly “righteous”, that is, democratic and effective.

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Anna Julia Cooper (1859 – 1964) and Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)African American women of the same

generation as Gilman, Addams.Not self described sociologists but

worked with a sociological orientation.Both drew on lived experiences as

African American women to develop a “systematic consciousness of society and social relations”

Laid foundation of feminist sociological theory based on interests of women of color.

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Methods

Wells-Barnett more of a researcher who pioneered an adaptation of secondary data analysis that uses the oppressor’s own reports as the main source (e.g. lynchings)

Cooper was much more theoretical and described patterns of social life and situated herself in that work of theoretical creation.Also used oppressor’s own texts—stats, popular

literature and historical records.

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Lens of Race Relations: Groups and Power and Intersections between Race, Class and GenderRace was at the center of both women’s

theories.Power relations between whites and blacks in

history and American society give them their paradigm of domination and stratification.

Cooper analyzes gender inequality: “The colored woman today occupies…a unique position… She is confronted by both a woman questions and a race problem, and is yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.” (1892/1969:134)

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Organization of Society

Cooper’s criterion for a critical evaluation of society is whether or not it is characterized by equilibrium or domination, not that it is free of conflict.

Vantage Point: she inserted herself into her sociological analysis by speaking from her distinct vantage point as a black woman.

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Marianne Schnitger Weber (1870-1954)

Known in American sociology solely through her biography of her husband, Max Weber: A Biography

She wants to know, how well do social structures make such self fulfillment possible for men and women?

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Creating a Sociology from the standpoint of Women

Develops 3 themes:

1) Need for women’s equal autonomy with men (a debate with Max)

2) Significance of women’s work in the production of culture (debate with Simmel)

3) Situated differences of standpoint among women (a debate partially with Gilman).

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Gender and Power: Authority is Autonomy

Brings woman centered focus to Max’s typology of power.

Since the distinction is not between legitimate (authority) power and illegitimate power (coercion) between men and women because it’s all legitimate from the law, the struggle is on autonomy and that men get more in marriage and relationships.

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Talking back to Simmel: male world is “objective” and concerned with public achievement and the “personal” world of inner self development is female (says Simmel) “middle ground of immediate daily life” in which the individual is constructed and reproduced as a social being capable of intelligent responses to others.

Concludes: more useful to think of a common nature and of typical maleness and femaleness as circles intersecting within the common space.

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Differences Among Women

Women’s standpoints are different because of social class stratification.

She argues it is absurd to speak of reforms needed for all women from a privileged standpoint (looking your way American sister in struggle Gilman…)

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Social Change

Only hope is to escape sites of oppression.

Capitalism can lead to some emancipation in its acceleration of individualism and eroding of older systems like patriarchy.

Acutely aware of vantage points…

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Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943)

Amalgam of contradictions, born to extreme wealth

She chose to be a female brain worker

Intellectual curiosity came from debates about whether the misery of the many was necessary condition for the wealth of the few and whether the poor are responsible for their fate or is it social forces.

Studied under and friends with Herbert Spencer

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Webb’s vision of society is the working out of processes between the structures in which people are contained—structures such as state, class, trade unions, and sweatshops.

Sociologist’s role is to provide the info on which a reformist state can be established and make policy.

Probably didn’t see herself as a member of a subordinate class (and why would she? She was rich) though worked to help the subordinated her whole life.

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Summary

Sexism!All shared in common:Awareness of the fact that they spoke

from the particular vantage point of womenAn analysis and ethical concern with

society’s power arrangementsA commitment to sound research as a

necessary means to social amelioration and change.

lesson 8 early women sociologists and classical sociological theory robert wonser soc 368 –...

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