Women's Subjective Experiences Research Articles

Sociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmation

The discussion of my work by Pat Hill Collins, Bob Connell, and Charles Lemert is generous and very much appreciated. My difficulty in responding is that each develops a critique from a very different theoretical stance.' Lemert brings to bear his interest in what he describes as the sociological dilemma of the subject-object relation, and the postmodernist critique of modernity and its unitary subject. Pat Hill Collins draws on the tradition of critical theory, strikingly informed by her experience of and commitment to recovering the suppressed feminist thought of black women. Connell works within a Marxist tradition and with specific concerns about the relation of sociology to political practice. Also, each constructs her or his own straw Smith. Lemert reads the project of an inquiry beginning from women's experience as a sociology of women's subjective experience. Collins reads into my project her objective of creating a transformative knowledge. Connell confounds beginning from experience with individualism, and interprets my rather careful (and critical) explications of the conceptual practices of power as an abhorrence of abstractions in general. In response I will clarify how I've understood and worked for a sociology beginning from women's experience. It is not, I insist, a totalizing theory. Rather it is a method of inquiry, always ongoing, opening things up, discovering. In addition, to reemphasize its character as inquiry relevant to the politics and practice of progressive struggle, whether of women or of other oppressed groups, this essay refers to some of the work being done from this approach.

The experience of dysmenorrhea and its relationship to personality variables

The aims of this study were: to relate women's subjective experience of primary dysmenorrhea to psychogenic needs assessed longitudinally at the age of 15 and at the age of 25 in a nonclinical sample; to compare the psychogenic needs of women with severe primary dysmenorrhea with those of other women who never have experienced dysmenorrhea; and to examine whether women with severe dysmenorrhea were less conventionally feminine than women who never have experienced dysmenorrhea. At 25 years, 42% of the women experienced dysmenorrhea and 15% experienced pain that limited their daily activity. Differences in psychogenic needs according to the Cesarec Marke Personality Schedule and in psychological masculinity and femininity according to the Attitude Interest Schedule were found in women with severe primary dysmenorrhea compared with women who never experienced dysmenorrhea. The results indicate that women with severe dysmenorrhea have less self-esteem at 15 years, but compensate for this at 25 years by being more achievement-oriented and aggressive than women who never experienced dysmenorrhea. Further, women with severe dysmenorrhea are more conventionally feminine than women who never have experienced dysmenorrhea.

Claiming Reality: Phenomenology and Women's Experience.

An important, yet little explored, area of feminist research is women's subjective experience of everyday life. Claiming Reality is the first study to apply the insights of the growing discipline of phenomenological sociology to women's experience, particularly the experience of childbirth, in an attempt to develop a feminist phenomenological perspective.