FEMINIST THEORIES

Women’s Inequality
 Why study feminist theories in sociology?
o There is a lack of feminism in sociological theories OR “missing feminist
revolution in sociology”

Waves of Feminism
 1st Wave (1848-1920): West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving
political equality for women
 2nd Wave (1963-1980): The Personal is the Political (Friedman’s Mystique and de
Beauvoir’s Second Sex)
 3rd Wave (1990s-early 2000s): The micropolitics of gender equality; intersectionality
 4th Wave: Queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven, use of
internet and new media

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1st Wave)

 Women’s Inequality
o Argued that women and men live in an andro-centric culture
 Man as accepted race, women as “sub-species”
o True progress could only be achieved, when society transcended its abnormal
androcentric divisions and allowed women to be both workers and mothers
o Women’s equality
o A critique of the first wave is that it’s very elitist: What about the middle class?

Dorothy Smith (2nd Wave)

 Ruling Texts
o Authoritative knowledge in sociology and in society is determined by standards
that privilege men and exclude women
o Ruling Texts = core man-made texts which define gender and other power
relations in society
 i.e. Bible, Constitution, written history
o It’s not men’s fault necessarily, but it’s the systems and structures. It’s been
institutionalized.
 Rules of Sociology
o What is the ruling text for sociology?
 Conceptual and methodological rules and procedures
 Texts that organizes sociological practices
 These ruling texts marginalizes women
o Research or knowledge excludes the direct experiences of women BUT it is
presented as universally true, objective account of the world
o Missing from sociological and other texts that comprise our society’s objectified
knowledge are the everyday experiences of particular situated contexts
  Knowing from within
o Sociological inquiry is necessarily a social relation
o Sociologists inhabit particular social worlds and the people we study also inhabit
particular social worlds; cannot assume that we know and understand what is
going on in those worlds
 The standpoints of the researcher and the standpoint of individuals and
groups
 Women’s realities
o Women’s phenomenological reality their everyday “here-and-now” relevances,
also matter
o “The opening up of women’s experience gives sociologists access to social
realities previously unavailable, indeed repressed”
o Domestic world = world of household, children, and neighborhood (women’s
reality)
 Public world = men’s reality
 Negotiating two worlds simultaneously
o Bifurcation of consciousness = knowledge that emerges from the contradictory
realities women experiences due to the split between objectified knowledge and
the public world of work etc., and women’s everyday, localized experiences (in
the home, as mothers, etc.)
o Women who move between the domestic and the public worlds
 Standpoint Theory
o “An alternative sociology, from the standpoint of women, makes the everyday
world its problematic”
o Marx’s standpoint of the proletariat  Smith’s women’s standpoint
 Gender contradictions in society can be apprehended and transformed

Patricia Hill Collins (3rd Wave)

 Black Women’s Standpoint
o Absence of black women’s voices from the structures of power has both defined
black women and exacerbated their oppression
o Different black women have different localized experiences
 Commonality of black women’s shared history
 Shared history of struggle including the formative experience of slavery
o Gender x Race
o Mothering + work
o Controlling images = demeaning images and representations of black women
circulated by the largely white-controlled mass media and other social
institutions
 Black feminist thought
o Knowledge voiced by black women from their lived experiences and across the
different sites of their everyday reality
o Produced to vocalize their experiences of and responses to the cultural
contradictions they encounter as black women
o Intersectionality = multiple crisscrossing ways in which different histories and
diverse structural locations (based on race, gender, class, sexuality, etc.) situate
individuals’ experiences and life-chances
 Whatever the source of oppression, it is their intersectionality that
matters
 This produces activist knowledge (knowledge generated from within
oppressed groups’ lived experiences) and empowers them to resist and
take action