Annie Marion MacLean, Feminist Pragmatist and Methodologist

Abstract

Annie Marion MacLean was a major Chicago sociologist and methodologist. She was profoundly influenced by the gendered division of labor in sociology during her era. MacLean combined her work with the men and women of the early Chicago school of sociology and the women of Hull-House, an early social settlement. As a feminist pragmatist, MacLean was both a theorist and practitioner who used qualitative and quantitative methods. She set precedents in the Chicago school of ethnography, participant observation, and critical methodology. MacLean, however, was not the “mother” of ethnography. Harriet Martineau holds a far stronger claim to be a founding contributor to the origin and development of ethnographic methodologies in the social sciences.