The Impact of Feminist Thought on Sociology

Abstract

More women than men are interested in gender. Thus, what it took to get gender studies into sociology was mundane and demographic: It took letting women into the discipline. In the 1970s, more doors opened to women, and more women walked through. Since then, writing on gender has increased exponentially in all the social sciences and humanities, and gender has become a subfield with substantial legitimacy in sociology. Credit the second wave of the women's movement for the fact that the typical female assistant professor of the 1970s and early '80s was a feminist. Feminists were drawn particularly to studying gender, but the legitimacy of gender as a specialization was in question. Most of us entered departments that had few other women. Many of us sought out women in other departments out of a desire for women friends and for moral support for our interest in feminism and gender. In the 1980s, whenever I visited a university to give a talk, I found women forming informal feminist reading groups that spanned disciplines; I was in such a group. What had started as a way to make friends and get support often led to interdisciplinary feminist dialogue. The bridging of disciplinary boundaries was also fostered by the fact that sociologists studying gender in the 1970s were literally inventing a new literature. It may be hard for younger readers to believe that when I started my dissertation on the sex gap in pay in 1974, I could locate only about 10 decent articles on the topic. Because most of us could find little written in our own discipline, we poached, sometimes reading feminist theory. The feminist theory being developed inside the academy in the 1960s and '70s was mainly by philosophers and political theorists. One tension for sociologists importing ideas from feminist theory was that sociology was developing as a science with methods that speak to positive but not normative questions (i.e., to questions about what is, not about what ought to be). The philosophical traditions that spawned feminist theory combine positive and normative argumentation. Since many sociologists have a hunger for addressing moral issues, the normative thrust of feminist theory was also part of its appeal. U fortunately, on gender as on other topics, the desire to bring a moral voice into our field has sometimes meant that normative claims masquerade as empirical claims. It would be better to discuss explicitly whether and why we want to rule moral reasoning out of sociology, but we seldom get around to that discussion. Well into the 1980s feminist theory was often divided into liberal, socialist, and radical feminist theory. (For overviews using these categories, see Sagger 1988; Tong 1998. ) Complicating developments such as the influence of postmodernism have since rendered the categories outdated. Further complexity came in the 1980s and l990s from critiques by women of color, pointing out that the sources and particulars of women's oppression and male privilege differ by race and nation (Spelman 1988; Collins 1990; hooks 1990). It seems that there is neither a universal patriarch nor a universal woman. What has been the effect of feminist theory on sociology? To explore this, I discuss three themes that cross-cut feminist theory and sociolgy. I will point out parallels between discussions in sociology and interdisciplinary feminist thought. My sense is that, early on, the sociology of gender was a net importer of ideas from feminist literatures outside sociology. In more recent years, as gender has become an established field within sociology, more of sociologists' debates have occurred within our discipline.