The goal of this Essay is to (1) Give you the opportunity to “study” our theorists so that you feel you have mastered the material and can deploy it when needed to help you makes sense of empirical data; (2) Place theorists in conversation with each other to both explicate different approaches to analyzing our social world and to reflect critically on our discipline’s canon for classical sociological theory.
Essay Prompt:
Please choose one theorist from each of the following groups—accepted as part of the canon (Max, Simmel), feminist theorists (Weber, Wollstonecraft, Gilman, Kollantai, Cooper), critical race/intersectional theorists (Du Bois, Wells-Barnett)—and compare and contrast their sociological theories regarding two of the following themes: the transition from a premodern to a modern society, the relation of the individual to society, understandings of methods and epistemology, a theme of your choosing. What does sociology as a discipline gain, if anything, by including theorists of gender and race in the classical sociological canon?
Instructions:
Please give the essay a title and include the essay’s word count. The essay should be 5-8 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12pt font, 1inch margins) with a maximum of 1,800 words. The essay must include 3 theorists whose ideas you should compare-and-contrast regarding 2 themes suggested above.
Tip:
Remember you are making an argument—not just regurgitating everything you know about 3 theorists! You should have a thesis/argument in the opening of your essay. You might underline those sentence(s) to make sure the argument is clearly there, front and center! You have a two- step argument to make: (1) You must convince the reader that the way you are presenting your theorists in the compare/contrast is an accurate interpretation or extrapolation of their sociological thought. You must marshal evidence from their writings, class notes, and so forth to show that you are correct in framing your theorists in the way you do; (2) So what? What does this comparison between a canonized theorist with two theorists knocking on the door of canonization offer the field of sociology if anything?
L E G I T D O M I N AT I O N &
BUREAUCRACY
WEEK 11
DR. CINZIA SOLARI
THE DEFINITION OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL
ACTION”: PP. 3-12, 22-36
• How does Max define sociology? How would you compare Durkheim and
Martineau’s approach to Max’s goal of sociology?
• What is social action?
• To systemize an interpretive analysis of meaning, Max distinguishes 4 types of social
action. What are they?
• What is Max’s concept of a “Legitimate Order”?
“THE TYPES OF LEGITIMATE DOMINATION”:
PP. 212-254
• What does Max mean by domination and legitimacy?
• What are the three ideal types of domination/legitimate authority and why should
we care?
• Max defines bureaucracy as an ideal type and is having a conversation with Marx.
Discuss!
CLASS, STATUS, PARTY, 926-39
• How does Max define power?
• How does Max define class? How does it differ from Marx?
• What are status groups?
• What are parties?
“BUREAUCRACY”: PP. 956-968, 990-998,
1002-1003
The question is: how can the center or ruler hold onto resources that
allow the ruler to rule over his subordinates? Bureaucracy is Max’s
answer – there is a causal logic
• Why does Max see bureaucracy as indispensable to modern life?
• What features, ensure the technical superiority of bureaucracies?
• What about bureaucracy has max worried?
• What is the relationship between bureaucracy and revolution?
INDIVIDUALS & MODERNITY
WEEK 12
DR. CINZIA SOLARI
MARIANNE WEBER (1870-1954):
A WOMEN-CENTERED SOCIOLOGY
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Socialism and Its Relation to Marxist Doctrine (1900)
“Politics and the Women’s Movement” (1901)
Occupation and Marriage” (1906)
“Marriage, Motherhood, and the Law” (1907)
“The Question of Divorce:”(1909)
“Authority and Autonomy in Marriage” (1912)
“On The Valuation of Housework” (1912)
“Women and Objective Culture” (1913)
“The New Woman” (1914)
“The Ideal marriage” (1914)
“War as an Ethical Problem” (1916)
“Changing Types of University Women” (1917)
“The Forces Shaping Sexual Life” (1918)
“Women’s Special Cultural Tasks” (1918)
“Memoirs of a Life” (1948)
BIOGRAPHY (1 OF 3)
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•
•
•
•
•
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“Iron
Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck.
rapid industrialization (1870-1900)
Genteel poverty – On father’s side of family
Webers sent her to finishing school at age 16
Married Max 1893: amidst the flurry of their engagement
Weber notes that she regarded herself as at the beginning
of her intellectual development
– Autonomy and intimacy in marriage
Begins her studies at Heidelberg
– became the leader in a newly organized society for the
dissemination of feminist ideals
Max has nervous breakdown 1897
– found herself in the role reversed situation of
becoming the public speaker in the marriage often
staying at political meetings late into the night while
Max stayed silent and rested at home.
BIOGRAPHY (2 OF 3)
• As Max recovered Weber became more active in
scholarship and public life.
• On the American tour she met both Jane Addams and
Florence Kelly, and between 1904 and1907 she
published several papers on women’s experience
engaging critically with the theories of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman
• Built her intellectual salon which included George
Simmel as well as prominent feminists like Gertrud
Baumer and Gertrud Simmel
• By 1908 Weber was well known in political and
intellectual circles as a feminist.
• Reflections on women and women’s issues (1919)
• WWI
• In 1920 she was elected President of the Federation of
German women’s organizations & that same year Max
dies
BIOGRAPHY (3 OF 3)
• Writes Max’s biography & compiles his work
• Meantime Nazism is on the rise and WWII (1939-1945) is on
the horizon
• In 1926 she reestablished her weekly intellectual salon
• She entered upon her most intense phase of public speaking
on women’s issue often speaking to audiences of over 5,000
people.
• This was ended by Nazi repression in 1933
– Hitler dissolved the Federation of German women’s
organizations and political discussion even in private circles
became a dangerous activity.
• She kept writing — her own memoirs in 1948 then a revised
edition of Max’s biography in 1952.
• In her last year’s she watched the construction of a
prosperous and democratic West Germany, many of whose
elder statesman were drawn from her old Heidelberg salon.
• Died 1954
THE “WOMAN QUESTION”
• Bismarck = magnified a traditional ideal of manhood in late 19th
century
• Among liberal middle-class the debate over women’s second-class
social status became an important political issue and a series of
women’s organizations sprang up to claim better conditions for
women
• Among working class political mobilization by forms of socialist
thought, including that of German exiles Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels.
• Four approaches to the women’s question:
– liberal feminist agenda
– Socialist feminists
– Cultural feminism
– Erotic feminism
CONTRIBUTIONS
1.
Science is not value neutral
2.
Woman-centered sociology
3.
treats marriage as paradigmatic of the patriarchal
distortion of human life – ideal type of ‘autonomy in
Marriage”
4.
Women’s work = construction and reproduction of
social person and social world
– middle ground of immediate daily life – women’s
work is the solution to Simmel’s ”made problem”
between objective and subjective culture
5.
Differences between women
GEORG SIMMEL (1858-1918)
• Born in Berlin
• Father successful businessman – well off childhood
• Unable to ever secure a permanent academic position
– too eclectic (soc of smell, secrecy, fashion)
– not many soc positions
– he was a Jew so discrimination
– His audience included women!
• With Max he founded the German Society for
Sociology-–allowed soc as emerging discipline to gain
foothold within German university system
• Symbolic interactionism – focus on the individual in
modernity
• Dies in 1918 from liver cancer
WHAT IS SOCIETY?
• Disagreed with Durkheim & Comte organic view of su generis
society
• For Simmel, society = interactions that take place between
individuals and groups
– Society = “a number of individuals connected by interaction….It
is not a ‘substance,’ nothing concrete, but an event: it is the
function of receiving and affecting the fate and development of
one individual by the other.”
– Society is something individuals do
– Duality = individuals want to both conform to their group AND
preserve individuality (she studies fashion)—individuals are
shaped through interactions in the moment (Goffman)
INDIVIDUAL & MODERNITY
• Not completed immersed in any specific group, individuals are freed from domination of group life
that characterized premodern society BUT they are forces to to develop a unique personality
• Tragedy of culture:
– Objective culture = ideas and products sparked by human creativity comes to dominate
Subjective culture = individual will and self-development
– Marx centered analysis of alienation of capitalist mode of production, Simmel, like Max, saw
rationalization as producing alienation
– What was initially the expression of individual growth and creativity (subjective culture) later
confronts the individual as an autonomous force that requires submission to its own internal
logic
– The very cultural objects (developments in science, religion, politics etc.) that were once
expression of individual ingenuity have imprisoned us. We are dependent on then not only to
meet our everyday needs (iPhone!) but also because they are paradoxically, the alienating
mediums through which we express of individual creativity
– The tragedy is not only that commodities become fetishized, but that they hinder selfdevelopment and individual freedom.
– Gendered analysis
INDIVIDUALS & MONEY
• Money is also a tragedy of culture
• Money economy represents the alienating duality
between objective and subjective culture
• Abstract standard for measuring not just value of goods
but services humans provide
• To the extend that we are dependent on money to buy
what we need we become less dependent on other
people
– Provides possibilities for freedom of expression (rise
of gay identity) but separates us from each other
(post Soviet immigrants!)
EQUALITY FEMINISM:
WOLLSTONECRAFT & GILMAN
WEEK 13
DR. CINZIA SOLARI
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
(1759-1857)
• Radical thinker whose Vindication of the Rights of Women
influenced generations of radicals and feminists
• Influenced by Rousseau but deeply critical of him
• Stresses reason, being useful to society, inner and outer
improvement
• Hopes focused on middle class women, critical of
aristocratic women, admired working class women
• Against double standard of sexual morality
• Wrongs of women are linked to inequalities and injustice in
the wider society
• Male hegemony
WOLLSTONECRAFT: BIOGRAPHY
• Born in London
• Supports herself at 19 as lady’s companion
• Starts a struggling school, publishes work on education
– Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787).
– book was published near the end of the French
Revolution, which failed to bring about the equality of the
sexes that Wollstonecraft and other radicals anticipated.
• Circle of radical intellectuals while working as a translator
for a publisher of radical texts
– A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
– made her both famous and infamous in her own time
• Dramatic love life
• Died soon after giving birth at age 38 – daughter is Mary
Shelley (famous for what??)
WOLLSTONECRAFT
STATUE AT
PALACE OF
WESTMINSTER
• UNVEILED
NOVEMBER 2020
• BACKLASH AS MANY
FOUND IT
OFFENSIVE
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF
WOMAN (1792)
Her goal is to argue for higher education of women as a
core feature of an enlightened society
• She begins the Intro says she’s been feeling depressed
lately. What is depressed about? How does she think
about biology?
• What education are women currently receiving and
what are the results?
• What does she think of reason, objectivity, &
prejudice (11)?
• What is her argument with Rousseau?
• What is her argument about the professions shaping
men too?
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(1860-1935)
• The Yellow Wall-paper. (1892)
• Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation
Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898)
• Concerning Children (1900)
• The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903)
• Human Work (1904)
• “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem.” American Journal of
Sociology (1908)
• “How Home Conditions React Upon the Family.” American
Journal of Sociology (1909)
• The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911)
• Herland: a novel (1915)
• The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography(1935)
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(1860-1935)
• Born in Hartford, Connecticut to famous family
• Father abandoned his family soon after Gilman was born
• period of widespread debate over the nature and place of
women: “cult of true womanhood” and “cult of
domesticity”
• Fell in love with Martha Luther
• Married Charles Walter Stenson, Daughter Katharine born
1885
• Fell into depression
• Divorced Stensen, moved to CA, gave Stensen custody of
daughter
• Embarked on 5 years of travel and lecturing
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
(1860-1935)
• Women and economics was published in 1898.
– Received as a work of genius
• Married again in 1900: George Houghton Gilman
• This marriage worked and between 1900 and 1911 she
produced four major books.
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–
–
–
Concerning Children (1900)
The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903)
Human Work (1904)
The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911)
• She identified as a sociologist
– published in the American Journal of sociology
– attended and presented at ASA mtg
– she was an ASA member for 25 years.
• Breast cancer 1932
• Took her own life 1935
• The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, was
published in 1935 shortly after her death.
INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
• Problem= human pain (only species to commit suicide)
• relationship between the individual and the economy
• economic independence exists for the individual when they are assured
a fair and predictable livelihood in return for their work
– Work should allow us to express the Self
– Work should be should be the source of humanity’s greatest joy but
it has been distorted by culture
• theoretical work was a form of critical practice-= a means to correct the
major cause of socially produced human pain: people’s false concepts
about reality
• multi-dimensional theory of gender inequality
– drew on Marxism, symbolic interactionism (Simmel), and on
sociobiology
MARXISM
• DOL in the traditional family (breadwinner
husband/stay at home wife) was inherently
problematic because it made women economically
dependent on men
• traditional family structure inherently exploitative
because the economics compensation of women
bears absolutely no relation to her labor
• Regardless of how much work she actually does or
doesn’t do in the home, the housewife’s social and
economic standing comes from her husband
– her labor also belongs to her husband, not to her.
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
• emphasized how differential socialization leads to and sustains
gender inequality
• Challenged the long-standing assumption that inherent
biological differences produced men and women as so different
they could never pursue the same social activities
• Instead maintains that from the earliest age young girls weren’t
encouraged, if not forced to act think look and talk differently
from boys, though their interests and capabilities at that age
might be identical –oversexed women
SOCIOBIOLOGY/SOCIAL DARWINISM
• biological differences exist
• apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to human societies and
maintain that human existence was based on survival of the
fittest.
• fascinated by the animal world
• Argued that the civilizing capacities of women could compensate
for the destructive competitiveness of men
• made patently racist remarks
• implicitly assumed that she was speaking about all women when
she was really referring to white women.
• writes in the in the voice of the grand theorist
– As someone who can stand outside the social frame and see
describe analyze and prescribe changes in social
arrangement
– Not an empathetic stance
WOMEN & WORK , SUSAN FERGUSON
Focus of book is on the different ways feminists have understood women’s work in relation to
freedom and oppression.
• Why are feminists obsessed with work?
• She sees three strands of feminist theories of labor: equality feminism, Critical equality, and social
reproduction feminisms. How do these 3 approaches understand the problem of gender & work?
What does Ferguson think is the way forward? (Let’s keep reading and next week think about what
YOU think is the way forward!)
• What happened to ”women & work” in the move from feudalism to modernity? How is racism and
colonialism implicated in the “housewification of European women?
• In what way is Wollstonecraft’s call for a “revolution in women’s manners” and a focus on
education connected to arguments about work?
T H E R AT I O N A L I Z AT I O N O F
MODERN LIFE–CONTINUED
WEEK 10
DR. CINZIA SOLARI
INTRODUCTION
• What is MWBRC?
– How is it different from other forms of capitalism?
– Why does it have “universal” value” and universal
significance?
• Where does MWBRC come from?
• What is Weber trying to explain? What is his
dependent variable?
MWBRC
Spirit of Capitalism
Calculation
Separation of home
& Work
Rule of law: Legal
system guarantees
relations of
capitalism
Application of
science
Wage labor (formally free
labor)
PART 1: THE PROBLEM
CH 1 RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
• What is Weber’s set-up here? What groups is he
comparing?
– What factors besides religion might explain the social
stratification he finds?
• Why does he land on religion?
• What, exactly, is “the problem” Weber seeks to
address?
CH 2 THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM
• What is the “spirit” of capitalism and how is is a
“historical individual”?
• How does Ben Franklin embody the spirit of
capitalism?
• What does Weber think about the spirit of capitalism
(60)?
• What is his argument about men agricultural and
women textile workers paid by piece-meal?
• What does he think of Marx’s claim of historical
materialism?
CH 3 LUTHER’S CONCEPTION OF THE CALLING:
TASK OF INVESTIGATION
• What is Luther’s idea of the calling?
– How does this differ from religions that promote monasticism (i.e.
Catholicism, Buddhism)
• What is the Reformation?
• Weber says the calling was traditionalistic – so how does it give rise to the
spirit of capitalism?
• Why does he have an argument with Marx again at the end of the
chapter?
• What is an “ideal type”?
IDEAL TYPES (EXPLAINED AGAIN)
Methodological problem: How do you interrogate historical particulars and make
generalizable causal arguments?
• Ideal types are abstracted from human cultural reality—pure type of rational action
• Must be “internally consistent” and contain only those actions which would exist as a
causal result of the exclusive influence of the “exaggerated” inner logic– You center the
relationship between belief and actions then think it out to its logical, rational conclusion
• You apply ideal types by looking at where the empirical and ideal worlds coincide.
– The idea type tells you where to looks, it lists the things which should be there if
certain motives had been operating.
– Assuming the ideal type has been correctly constructed, if only some expected
things are present, the scientist must infer that other motives also had a causal
influence
– You constantly compare the ideal type to empirical reality so that you can see which
actual action in influenced by irrational factors (factor not prediction by the process
of rationalization)
– The sharper and more precise the ideal type (and thus the more abstract and
unrealistic–Max calls them Utopia) the more useful it is
CH 4 THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF
WORLDLY ASCETICISM
• Why is Max looking at 4 forms of ascetic
Protestantism and what do they have to do with the
calling?
– What motivated these followers?
– How are these ideal types?
• What are the characteristics of Calvinism?
• How does Calvinism compare to Catholicism? What is
predestination?
– (There isn’t much to report on Pietism, Methodism &
Baptists—maybe a point or two about the Baptists)
CH. 5 ASCETICISM AND THE SPIRIT OF
CAPITALISM
Here Max digs deeper into his Ideal Type Construction of
the Protestant Ethic (drawing collectively on the 4 less
ambitious ideal types from Ch 4.)
• What are the key links between social thought and
action that define this ideal type? (Ex. Wasting of time
is the deadliest of sins (157-8)
• Why does the Protestant ethic continue to direct
social action even when the religion falls away?
• Why does Max write: “The Puritan wanted to work in
a calling; we are forced to do so.”
• What is the causal argument Max is making?
• What is the iron cage?
• Explain Martineau’s
methodological approach.
How does it differ from
Comte’s methodology?
MIDTERM EXAM
• Explain Marx’s theory of
history. How do the ideas of
Lenin and Luxemburg compare
to Marx’s theory of history?
• Compare and contrast Marx
and Durkheim’s future ideal
societies.
Would you rather live in Marx or
Durkheim’s ideal society and
why?
SOCIALIST & ANTI-RACIST FEMINISM:
K O L L A N T A I , W E L L S – B A R N E T T, C O O P E R
WEEK 14
DR. CINZIA SOLARI
SOCIALIST FEMINISMS: CRITICAL EQUALITY
• What is equality feminism again?
• What is critical equality feminism and what makes is “socialist”?
– women’s domestic labor is essential but irrelevant to the workings of
capital
– patriarchal power relations exist outside capitalism ∴ the struggle
against patriarchy can only be in addition to the struggle against
capitalism
– domestic work has high moral not economic value
– Capitalist use women’s inequality to undercut men’s wages and pit
workers again each other thus men must unite with women in class
unity–The enemy is not men, but capital
– Who is our representative Critical Equality Feminist theorist?
SOCIALIST FEMINISMS: CRITICAL EQUALITY
SOCIALIST FEMINISMS:
CRITICAL EQUALITY–ENGELS
• Engels calls for socialization of women’s labor but still
assumes it will be women’s responsibility
• Ignores sexism within workplaces and working-class orgs
• No analysis of how women’s unpaid housework sustains
the capitalist system as a whole
• No explanation for why the socialization of housework
was tied to overthrowing capitalism
– ∴ support of women’s issues becomes separate from
the general workers’ struggle
• Defers women’s struggle to sometime in future after
capitalism is overthrown
CENTRAL FEMINIST PROBLEM FOR
CRITICAL EQUALITY (& EQUALITY) FEMINISM
DW is gendered work—work for which women take near exclusive responsibility &
which prevents them from partaking in waged work on equal terms with men
SOCIALIST FEMINISMS: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
What is social reproduction feminism?
• William Thompson & Anna Wheeler’s The Appeal of One Half of the Human
Race, Women, Against the Pretension of the Other Half, men, to Retain Them in
Political, and Thence in Civil Slavery (1825)
• capitalism has no way to account for those unable to work for a wage ∴ simply
giving women access to work will not emancipate them
• domestic work is not women’s god-ordained duty but acts of PRODUCTION ∴
Just like the production of things, this labor can be socially reorganized as
collective labor in cooperative society
– This would increase efficiency and decrease the # of hours one must labor
in the “realm of necessity”
• women’s work = socially productive but systemically degraded and devalued
under capitalism
• women’s oppression = attributed to the relational dynamic between
reproductive and productive work (47)
– The product is not just a citizen as Wollstonecraft would say, but a worker
who contributes to overall social wealth
CENTRAL FEMINIST PROBLEM FOR
SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
NOT that DW is gendered but rather:
• The division between two forms of work (paid and
unpaid) within the capitalist system
• The privatization of reproductive labor which is part of
the social process of wealth creation
• Must reorganize of all work to eliminate the distinction
between productive and unproductive labor to
emancipate women
• Very different from the project of promoting women’s
independence from and equality with men through
waged labor
**** This is the so what! We care about these two socialist
approached to women and work because the lead to
different political projects AND …
(2019)
THE GOAL IS AN INCLUSIVE FEMINISM
ANTI-RACIST FEMINISM
What is anti-racist feminism?
• Category “woman” racialized as white
• domestic labor ≠ privatized motherhood and full-time unpaid housework
– Domestic labor in the home organized collectively, among multi-generational networks of
unrelated women
– time spent sustaining themselves and their households tended to be valued as time not
given to eth “master”– assertion of their humanity in the face of deeply dehumanizing
forces
• domestic labor = servitude, the extension of racialized work from slavery to waged labor
– Noted the racialized & servile terms of entry to PAID domestic labor and service work
• Black feminists knew access to waged work ≠ liberation
• Women’s struggle for freedom is tied to struggle against racism
ANNA JULIA COOPER (1858-1964)
• Born in North Carolina, mother slave and father was likely
the white slave owner
• taught herself to read and write by age 7
• one of the first girls admitted to a freedmen’s school
• married her teacher from this school at age 19, he died two
years later, never remarried
• Oberlin University—earned an MA in math
• in demand as public speaker – used those speeches to
write Voice from the South
• 1902 – principal of M Street School & debate about Black
education
• PhD from Sorbonne in Paris at age 63
• Founder of Black feminist thought and excluded
IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT (1862-1931)
• Born in Mississippi as a slave during Civil War
• parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics—
her father refused to let whit employer dictate his vote
• Attended Rust College until 1876 when a yellow fever killed her
parents and left her oldest of 5 kids
• Became a teacher
• In 1884, Wells-Barnett filed a lawsuit against a train car company
in Memphis for unfair treatment
• Published 1st anti-lynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors (1892) in
Memphis
– Driven out after her press was set on fire
• A Red Record (1895)–”Out of their own mouths shall the murders
be condemned.”
• Married F.L. Barnett, a Chicago lawyer. They had 4 children.
• traveled internationally, shedding light on lynching to foreign
audiences
• Confrounted racism in white women’s orgs
• Founded National Association of Colored Women’s Club
• Died of kidney disease in 1931
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI (1872-1952)
• Born Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich in St.
Petersburg – Upper class family
• Ran away at 18 to marry a struggling engineer named
Vladimir Kollontai, had a son
• Left husband and child and devoted herself to Marxist
feminist politics after touring a massive textiles factory in
1896
– The barbaric living and labor conditions: “women, their
fate, occupied me all my life; the lot of women pushed me
to socialism.”
• questioned whether “bourgeois feminists” would ever
really lift working-class women out of their misery
• saw the institutions of marriage and the traditional
family as contributing to women’s oppression
KOLLONTAI CONT. (1872-1952)
• “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” (1909)
• Only collective childrearing and the socialization of
cooking and cleaning would liberate women to pursue
their own goals in the formal economy, which would
provide them the economic independence to exercise
full autonomy over their own lives
• promoted radical ideas about women’s sexuality
• argued that sex was a natural instinct, like hunger or
thirst, and that women’s natural sexuality suffered
under an economic system where it became a
commodity to be bought and sold on marriage
markets
• By granting women economic independence and
liberalizing divorce, Kollontai believed state policies
could usher in a new world where couples came
together for reasons of love and mutual affection
rather than crass monetary exchange.
RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS
• Russian Revolution of 1905 she sided with the Mensheviks
• Hounded by the czarist police—spent years in exile, in and out
of prison but returned to a Soviet Russia after the October
Revolution of 1917
• Lenin named her Minister of Social Welfare in the first Soviet
cabinet
• organized the socialization of women’s domestic work through
a vast network of public children’s homes, laundries, cafeterias
and mending cooperatives
• 1918 Family Code
• Prostitution was decriminalized
• legalized abortion, divorce, and birth control
• SU become one of the first countries to grant women the right
to vote
• United States government deemed her a national security risk
& refused to let her come to US as diplomat
DIPLOMAT
• became increasingly critical of the Communist Party
• 1921 pamphlet” The Workers’ Opposition”
• Lenin sidelined her by giving her diplomatic posts abroad
• served as the Soviet ambassador to Sweden throughout World
War II
– Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice—in 1946 and
1947 — for brokering the Finnish-Soviet ceasefire
• lived to see her initial feminist policies revived in the countries
of Eastern Europe after World War II and infuse progressive
women’s organizations and movements around the globe
included the US
• Her emphasis on the public provision of services for women
and children infused the key international UN treaty on
women’s rights: “The Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women”
• She died in Moscow (aged 79) in1952
• We live in a world she helped create but she has been erased!!
A RED RECORD (1895)
A VOICE FROM THE SOUTH (1892)
THE SOCIAL BASIS OF THE WOMAN
QUESTION (1909)
WORKING WOMAN AND MOTHER (1916)
• Are all women ‘in the same boat”? If the answer is “no”, how
do you organize a women’s movement? How do we address
“differences between woman?” Who gets to be in the category
“woman”?
• What is the relationship between class, race, & gender? What
methods do they use to illustrate this? (ie. “Mashenkas,” use of
”white data,” observation, content analysis, personal
experience)
• What is the problem of marriage, family, and sexuality?
• How do our theorists understand domination? What utopias do
they offer?
• What conversations might they have with Simmel, Weber,
Marx, Gilman, Martineau, Durkheim, amongst each other?
• What is the role of the sociologist and how do they construct
sociology as a “moral science”?
Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Kolontai
BLACK FEMINIST SOCIETY OF WELLS-BARNETT & COOPER
Sociology from the standpoint of the oppressed seeking justice, crossexamination as the method
• Cooper explicitly contrasts this orientation to sociology with that of
“scientific objectivity” (such as Comte & Spencer)
• For Cooper the fundamental source of truth is religion
• For Wells-Barnett it is (like Martineau) the principles of American
democracy
• Both argue that moral agency begins in a willingness to live what you
profess you believe
• must invent a strategy for doing research from the position of the
subordinate
• Image of courtroom and “cross-examination”
– establish their standpoint from the margin of power
– challenge dominants’ claims about the facts using their own
words as evidence
– offer eyewitness accounts of other subordinates into evidence.
BLACK FEMINIST SOCIETY OF WELLS-BARNETT & COOPER
Intersection of Difference & power can = Domination (pathology) or
Equilibrium (justice) — non-Marxian conflict theory
• racial domination distorts “difference” to mean departure from and
subordination to the norm of Anglo-Saxon whiteness
• Cooper also noted that black men were often complicit in denying black
women access to education and white women were complicit in denying
black men and women the vote
• Wells-Barnett sees lynching as the ultimate pathology of difference &
power—also see it about race, class, gender
• Equilibrium is not conflict free but domination free—requires balance of
group access to material resources
• Conflict is healthy Cooper says – but you must peacefully address it to create
equilibrium or coexistence
• Wells-Barnett more willing to use violent resistance
• Cooper argues domination exists in US because of two fundamental
disequilibriums– race and gender—must build alliances between
women
BLACK FEMINIST SOCIETY OF WELLS-BARNETT & COOPER
Domination is patterned by history, ideology, material resources,
manners, and passion
• Ideology is essential to domination–distort and exaggerate
selected differences between people (Gilman!)
– Social Darwinism– Cooper calls it the “survival of the bullies”!
– Construction of the Other as weak
• Material interest is insufficient to explain domination
• Manners: rules of civility that shape subject formation: “doing
race” = “doing domination and subordination” (symbolic
interactionism)
• Passion: domination rests on emotion
SOTAMAYOR & STANDPOINT THEORY
Which Option do you choose?
OR
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