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The Foundation of Feminist Sociology
Whose Knowledge?

In 1900 in the United States, 6 percent of all doctoral degrees were held by women and 20 percent of full-time faculty staff in universities were women. By 1970, those numbers had increased across the board. Women now held 13 percent of all doctoral degrees (the figure more than doubled); however, the percentage of women among full-time faculty members had increased only to 25 (Ferree and Hess 2000: 7). One way of looking at these numbers is to see them as progress by and for women. However, scholars Myra Marx Ferree and Beth Hess note that there is a darker backstory to these numbers. In universities, female faculty members found themselves facing a variety of gatekeepers, particularly in male-dominated professions such as medicine, law, business, and college teaching. Women in academia also found it difficult to combine career and family, received little support from their husbands and their workplace, and were often stuck in positions that gave them little mobility or status. Indeed, Ferree and Hess (2000) argue that it was the negative experiences in the labor force as well as discrimination in higher education that helped forge the feminist activism of the 1970s.

It was also that sense of marginality within academia that fashioned what was to become feminist sociology. As the quotation from Dorothy Smith indicates, women in sociology began to critique how they were being treated, as well as what they were learning. While women were growing in numbers in higher education, they were absent from most studies of society and missing in the texts and lessons of most classrooms. Like Smith, Ferree and her co-authors Khan and Morimoto argue that the creation of sociology as a discipline was gendered “with men actively excluding women.” “Although to most men the ASA and the discipline of sociology appeared to be gender neutral, the domination of men and the marginalization of women were not so invisible to the women who felt the brunt of them … This gendered exclusion only began to be made visible as feminism created opportunities to discuss and challenge it” (Ferree et al. 2007: 441). Indeed, the authors note how twenty-first-century readers would be shocked by how women were treated in past. Writing in 2007, they point out:

One key figure in the discussion of marginalization of women was sociologist Dorothy Smith. In 1974 Smith published in the Sociological Inquiry an article entitled “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” In it she noted that, in a sociology “put together by men,” women’s interests and lives were not represented (Smith 1974: 7). She made the point that women’s place in the social world was not valued, its relevance was not acknowledged, and the discipline needed to incorporate women’s experiences and lives to fully capture how society is ordered. This incorporation, Smith argued, was more than an “addendum of women”: it was a reconceptualization of the discipline. Sociology had lived in a “male social universe” that conceptualized methods, ideas, and theories as well as issues and subject matter through the lens of patriarchy and, through that lens, found women’s lives inconsequential. This male social universe was one in which the world of women and the world of men was not equal, and it had created the very ideas, concepts, and terms in which women “must think their world” (ibid.).

Drawing on this observation, Smith argues that women live in a world of bifurcated or double consciousness. “Double consciousness,” a concept introduced by W. E. B. DuBois (1903/2009) in relation to race, captures a situation where the subjects – in Smith’s case, women – live bodily in one world while also knowing the world of men. The result of this double life is that the study of society is incomplete unless women and their experiences become the center of research. Needed, then, is a focus on the bodily experiences of women (more than just a woman’s perspective) – a focus in which women scholars reject objectivity and study what it means to be a woman. By doing so, the knower (women) and what they know (women’s lives) are no longer separated by a male-centered science. While I discuss the issues of objectivity in more detail in Chapter 2, here I want to concentrate on how Smith draws our attention to the creation of knowledge and to the role that power and domination play in the construction of “facts.” It is this core idea – that the researcher shapes what is to be known – that underlies much of feminist sociology. Indeed, what Smith argued for in the early 1970s has become a central component of much of feminist sociology – the need to critique and re-envision knowledge claims and the tools – methodologies, methods, and theories – used to create that knowledge. The relevance of Smith’s work to feminist as well as general sociology continues, as evidenced in the December 2023 symposium dedicated to her work in Sociological Theory 40(1) (see the “Further Reading” section in the present chapter). In the introduction, Freeden Blume Oeur captures the importance of her work thus: “Smith’s theorizing carries even greater appeal, having expanded from a sociology for women to a sociology for people” (Oeur 2023: 283).

Questioning Knowledge

Much of this questioning of knowledge draws on the sociology of knowledge, whereby scholars examine how we come to know what we believe to be “true,” or the “facts.” Taking a sociology of knowledge approach, Marjorie DeVault notes that, with the re-emergence of the women’s movement, feminists began “embarking on a collective project of critique and transformation” within academia (DeVault 1996: 30; see also Ferree and Hess 2000). The sociology of knowledge asserts that what we claim to be knowledge does not exist separately from the social contexts in which knowledge is created. Knowledge claims are instead shaped by the social setting of the “knower” as well as by the dominant political interests of a society. For example, southern US landowners and politicians argued that enslaved Africans were lesser humans and that slavery helped them to survive. As “knowers” who had the power to control knowledge claims, white southern landowners and politicians justified slavery. But a more accurate justification of slavery was that the economy of the South, which focused on cotton, tobacco, and rice, depended on free labor (US History 2024).

At the time of Smith’s and other feminists’ analyses, a central goal in the field was to illustrate bias in the creation of knowledge (Swidler and Ardita 1994, DeVault 1996). Ann Swidler and Jorge Ardita argued that “knowledge and power are intimately related because power allows people to enact realities that make their knowledge plausible” (Swidler and Ardita 1994: 322). For example, if a common understanding of women is that they are less committed to their careers because of their families, women will find themselves shut out of certain jobs. This barrier then becomes evidence that women are not capable of doing certain work because of the scarcity of them in the field. In sum, the reality of the powerful becomes the knowledge of society. What feminists brought, and continue to bring, to sociology as a discipline is this attention to the power of those who are seen as legitimate creators of knowledge (that is, men’s power through the system of patriarchy).

While the first steps in the process of reclaiming and re-envisioning how to study the social world paid special attention to incorporating women, feminist sociology has moved beyond a singular focus on gender and sex and emphasized more complex ways of capturing how social identities and locations are shaped by, and in turn shape, society. However, I am going to address first what it means to bring women into sociology as both subjects and as researchers.

Incorporating Women

By coming to see how men’s interests and social locations shaped the discipline of sociology, feminists came to understand how women had been constrained, and knowledge of women’s lives reduced to simple categories. Before feminist sociology, women were often understood in simplistic terms: