Considering Dorothy Smith's Social Theory: Introduction

Abstract

We have organized this symposium to help foster a dialogue that is long overdue. For more than two decades feminist theorists, inspired by the women's movement and drawing upon many academic disciplines, have addressed issues pertinent to sociological theory. Feminists have raised profound questions about epistemology and the sociology and politics of knowledge. They have developed original theoretical perspectives on paid and unpaid work, families and households, sexuality, reproduction, legal and religious institutions, the state, and popular culture. Above all, feminists have shown the centrality of gender-not understood as simply biological, natural, or functional, but as enormously varied in social and historical construction-to social relations in every institution. (For reviews that suggest the scope and the central concerns of feminist theory, see Connell 1987; Harding 1986; Jaggar 1983. Also see the interdisciplinary journals Signs: Journal of in Culture and Society and Feminist Studies.) Sociologists in subfields such as work and occupations, organizations, and family have begun to recognize the contributions of feminist scholars, but a wall of silence remains between sociological theory and feminist theory. Wall of silence perhaps may not be the most appropriate metaphor because the silence is largely one-way. Feminist theorists have long drawn upon and reworked various traditions of social theory, especially Marxism, liberalism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and, more recently, poststructuralist theories. In short, feminist theorists have more than kept up their side of a potential conversation with sociological theorists. Yet sociological theorists of virtually every school of thought have largely ignored the writings of feminist theory. Sociological theorists' neglect of Dorothy Smith's work is especially telling. Smith has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, is currently a professor of sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and has been publishing theoretical work for two decades. Her early essays, A Peculiar Eclipsing: Exclusion from Man's Culture, A for Women (both reprinted in Smith 1987), and Women's Experience as a Radical Critique of Sociology (reprinted in Smith 1990a), had an enormous influence on the sociology of sex and gender as it emerged as a field of study in the 1970s. Smith's insights helped us articulate and begin to remedy the striking absence and distortion of women's experiences in traditional sociology. In her more recent work she has continued to broaden and deepen her theoretical framework, which is much admired by feminist sociologists, and by feminist scholars in many other disciplines as well. Like other scholars who construct bridges between their disciplines and the lively interdisciplinary field of women's studies, Smith might well have begun to address herself