Feminist Sociology

Life Histories of a Movement

Barbara Laslett and
Barrie Thorne, editors

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Feminist Sociology : Life Histories of a

title:
Movement
author: Laslett, Barbara.
publisher: Rutgers University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0813524288
print isbn13: 9780813524283
ebook isbn13: 9780585027357
language: English
Women sociologists--Biography,
subject
Feminists--Biography, Feminist theory.
publication date: 1997
lcc: HM19.F35 1997eb
ddc: 301/.0823
Women sociologists--Biography,
subject:
Feminists--Biography, Feminist theory.
 Page iv
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feminist sociology : life histories of a movement / Barbara Laslett
and Barrie Thorne, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-2428-8 (cloth: alk. paper).ISBN 0-8135-2429-6
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Women sociologistsBiography. 2. FeministsBiography.
3. Feminist theory. I. Laslett, Barbara. II Thorne, Barrie.
HM19.F35 1997
301'.0823dc21 97-1778
CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available
This collection copyright © 1997 by Rutgers, The State University
For copyrights to individual pieces please see first page of each
essay
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the
publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, Livingston
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defined by U.S. copyright law.
Manufactured in the United States of America
 Page v

Contents
Life Histories Of A Movement: An Introduction 1
Barbara Laslett And Barrie Thorne
My Life as a Feminist Sociologist; or, Getting the Man out of My 28
Head
Joan Acker
On Finding a Feminist Voice: Emotion in a Sociological Life Story 48
Barbara Laslett
Looking Back in Anger?: Re-remembering My Sociological Career 73
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Brandeis as a Generative Institution: Critical Perspectives, 103
Marginality,
and Feminism
Barrie Thorne
Disloyal to the Disciplines: A Feminist Trajectory in the 126
Borderlands
Judith Stacey
Long and Winding Road 151
R W. Connell
Brave New Sociology?: Elsie Clews Parsons and Me 165
Desley Deacon
Lesbian in Academe 194
Susan Krieger
Telling Tales out of School: Three Short Stories of a Feminist 209
Sociologist
Sarah Fenstermaker
 Page vi
Sisterhood as Collaboration: Building the Center for Research on 229
Women at the University of Memphis
Lynn Weber Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill
A Second-Generation Story 257
Marjorie L. Devault
About the Authors 275
Index 279
 Page 1

Life Histories of a Movement: An Introduction

Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne
Feminism helped me to begin to make some order in my theoretical
thinking and to understand why sociology had been alienating and
confusing to me.
Joan Acker
But, I confess, there is anger . . . My anger may be somewhat inexplicable
to colleagues who, despite the best intentions, have difficulty
understanding at a gut level the injuries inflicted through large and small
acts of arrogance by white men as they go about their business.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Homophobia has a hidden nature because it is a fear: Acts that stimulate
that fear are interrelated. They are also, I think, disabling. I have found
the repeated job rejections I have experienced to be disabling, not only
externally, but internally, in terms of my self-confidence and ability to do
my work.
Susan Krieger
This book is a collection of life stories by participants in the
movement to bring feminist insights into the field of sociology. The
authors reflect on personal experiencessome extending to
childhood and many encompassing friendships and intimate
relations, as well as schooling, work, politics, and intellectual
lifethat illuminate two decades of convergence between a political
movement and an academic discipline. This volume is organized
around life histories. In addition to the life stories of thirteen
individuals, each detailing a different biographical trajectory
through a shared historical moment, the book conveys the life
history of a movement that generated a new area of knowledge.
And the book calls attention to life histories themselves as a
resource for social theory and for the sociology of knowledge.
We open with a discussion of life history as a genre that is
especially
 Page 2
useful in examining the contextual nature of social life, tracing
nuanced connections between social structure and human agency,
and investigating the relationship of gender to the social
construction of knowledge. We then focus more specifically on the
case at hand, which is anchored in the autobiographical essays: the
creation of feminist sociology as a field of inquiry.

Life Histories as Genre

In 1959 C. Wright Mills wrote that "the sociological imagination
enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between
the two within society" 1 Sociologists have long worked with
narratives of individual lives, but since the early 1980s there has
been renewed interest in the uses of biographies, autobiographies,
and life histories in the social sciences, including among
sociologists.2 This approach resonates with feminist perspectives in
a number of ways.
Life histories bring forth "experience" and "voice"; they link the
personal and the political, the private and the public. Like
consciousness-raising, they can bridge from individual experience
to the development of more general and codified knowledge. They
can also illuminate the dual aspects of experience as event,
happening, occasion, and as subjectivity and interpretation.3Life
histories draw attention to the specificities of historical contexts
and the ways in which they are implicated in social action. For
example, from the end of World War II onward, women's
increasing presence in public lifein the labor force, in institutions
of higher learning, and in the social movements of the 1960s and
1970sprovided a context of possibilities for the creation of feminist
scholarship. One focus of this scholarship has been an important
and neglected theme in the sociology of knowledge: the
relationship of gender to the social construction of knowledge. Life
stories provide a way to understand how this happened.
Life histories can reveal categories of meaning that have been
submerged in the prevailing social science language of "interests."
Illness, sports, marriage, politics, summer camps, relocation
campsall parts of the stories told herelose meaning when translated
into a single metric. The essays in this volume point to complex
constructions of self, motivation, and meaning. They show how
childhood and family relationships, personal experiences of
inequality and identity, visions of alternative possibilitiesand
feelings associated with all of these dimensionshave shaped
research agendas, teaching, and the creation of new kinds of
relationships in homes, in communities, and in paid labor. These
narratives also reveal the retrospective shaping of meanings over
time not only through the inevitable effect of
 Page 3
the present on stories of the past, but also through conscious
reconsideration of past events and actions.
Life histories draw sociological attention to temporality in other
ways. They articulate life course transitions as they occur in
particular historical contexts, as well as contingency, contradiction,
and ambivalences, as Bob Connell's experiences in both Australian
and U.S. sociology exemplify Although varying by cohort, all of
the people whose essays are included in this collection grew up as
sociologists within a relatively narrow historical time frame and
were affected by the reigning paradigms of American-brand
structural functionalism, quantitative analysis, and positivism. 4 All
were influenced by their graduate training programs and by the
institutional hierarchies of prestige and resources that are part of
contemporary American sociology. These intellectual and
institutional contexts created the terrain on which each of us was
professionally socialized into the discipline of sociology. They
provided the frameworks within which contemporary U.S. feminist
sociology came into being.5
Life histories expand the narrative and discursive repertoire of
sociology. Conventional sociological writings are associated with
specific styles of prose;6 they call forth and create particular forms
of writing, as does the writing of autobiography. Most of the
authors in this volume found writing their essays to be an
illuminating experience. For Joan Acker, it was a time for
articulating the importance of "getting the man out of her head."
Marjorie DeVault, who deliberately created space for
experimentation in one of her classrooms, experienced surprise and
embarrassment when she found herself worrying, "But is it
sociology?" For Barbara Laslett, there was the gradual realization
that the norms of a ''cool" culture that defined professionalism and
into which she had been socialized masked complex emotions and
inhibited the rich possibilities of the sociological imagination.
The reading, as well as writing, of autobiography deserves
considerationfor example, the ways in which readers enter the
personal narratives of others by reading between the lines and
using empathy and identification.7 Life histories have an open
quality; they present the author's understanding of her experiences,
but with enough texture and detail to support other interpretations
as well. Additionally, many people find life stories pleasurable to
read; the narrative, plot, and action can engage readers, whereas
other kinds of texts, such as tables and path models, and other
languages, such as mathematical symbols and equations, are
enjoyed by a more limited audience. Reading (and writing) life
stories can also include pleasures of discovery, of reading accounts
that one wishes to claim as one's own, as in Desley Deacon's
fascination with the life of Elsie Clews Parsons.
 Page 4
Writing one's own life against the stories of others can also be a
provocative experience. Carolyn Heilbrun tells us that writing a
woman's life may require different plots than those that have been
most common in male life writing. 8The essays in this collection
are not stories that foreground only individual achievement; instead
they recognize and celebrate connections with othersfamily
members and friends, graduate student support networks and
women's groups, political comrades and intellectual mentors. There
is a pleasure in naming names, of those who helped and those who
hindered the building of individual careers and the feminist
sociology that was part of them. Some of the names are
surprisingfor example, of people, mostly men, who have
subsequently become known for their hostility to feminist
scholarship and feminists but who were, within the life stories told
here, supportive of individual women. However, proponents of
feminism are there in even greater numbers.
Life histories can broaden the literary conventions of sociology by
helping to construct a "blurred genre" of sociological writing, one
in which personal narratives and social theory come together. But
life histories also have certain limitations as a resource for
sociological inquiry. Autobiographical writing involves the
uncertain realm of memory and the construction of narratives in the
present about the past, as many of the authors included in this
volume discuss. It is not simply a problem of the accuracy of
memory; emotions, images, and representations are also involved.
As Luisa Passerini, who has used and written extensively about the
life history method, observes, autobiographical narration "is not
static and given once and for all, but moves and changes according
to the strength of feelings as they are influenced and formed by
ongoing processes."9 Thinking about this dynamic is important to
how we understand sociological "data" of all kinds. It also raises
questions about reader interpretation of life stories and the limits of
author control over them. Although these issues resonate with
feminist approaches to scholarship, they are not gendered in any
simple way. Nancy Miller points out that men's autobiographical or
confessional writing shares many of the characteristics associated
with women's life writing, especially self-portrayal through
relations with others.10 However, these similarities have often gone
unrecognized in favor of a rhetoric of individualism or gender
difference.
Mary Jo Maynes argues that autobiographical texts are shaped by
literary conventions and by the contexts in which they are
written.11 They reflect the purposes of their writing and the
audiences for whom they are intended, which raises issues of
disclosurewhat life writers say and do not say. Individual writers
are differentially able and willing to be
 Page 5
self-revealing. We have written these stories not for an audience of
intimates but primarily for an audience of professional peers who
may or may not be friendly to our stories and to the reasons for
telling them here; the stories have thus been edited in their very
telling. Supporters and positive influences are readily
acknowledged, detractors less so, and these considerations have
certainly affected the material presented in this collection.
Several conventions for writing life stories recur in this volume.
Some of the authors tell "before and after" stories; others tell
stories of "becoming." Although not necessarily experienced as
such, these are primarily "success stories"tales of overcoming
adversity to achieve a professional status that rarely was a taken-
for-granted, or even an anticipated, outcome. Many of the essays in
this collection describe parallel becomings: becoming a sociologist,
becoming a feminist, becoming politically aware and active (for
some before, for others through feminism), becoming friends,
colleagues, lovers, partners, parents. Losses, of husbands,
colleagues, friends, are also part of these stories. 12 The authors
describe tensions and convergences between these events and the
shaping of identities. Bob Connell reminded us that because
biographical and autobiographical narratives put the actor at the
center of the story, they may exaggerate the importance of human
agency and underestimate the constraints of social structures.
Marjorie DeVault offers another useful reminder: life histories
should be read not as straightforward accounts of agency but as a
genre that puts more on the table and therefore provides more food
for analysis.
Although written as individual narratives, the autobiographies also
refer to collective experiences, including some of the formative
moments of feminist sociology in the United States as an organized
effort: the convening of a women's caucus during the 1969 annual
meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in San
Francisco, the creation of the Sex Roles Section of the ASA, and,
in 1971, the founding of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS),
an independent organization dedicated to professional development
of and political advocacy for women within and outside of
sociology The essays recall moments of high energy, even
epiphany, when local and national networks of women academics
constituted themselves as gender-conscious collectivities.13
These life stories by no means encompass all, or even a substantial
number, of the actors, actions, and institutions that have been
significant in the growth of feminist sociology since the early
1970s. Desley Deacon and Bob Connell call attention to one other
site of this development, Australia, but it is certainly not the only
one. Although primarily raised and trained in the United States, the
authors vary to some degree along lines of
 Page 6
class origin, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation,
cohort, and institution. Each of these dimensions gives a somewhat
different angle on feminist sociology as an intellectual and social
movement.
Finally, we believe that life stories can contribute to contemporary
theoretical debates in the social sciences. Life histories of
intellectuals can provide insights into the social processes through
which knowledge is created, transmitted, and changed. In so doing,
life histories can demonstrate intersections of social structure and
human agency in ways that are more empirically rich and
theoretically nuanced than other techniques more commonly used
by sociologists. In making these substantive linkages, however, we
also want to draw attention to the peculiarly abstract character of
much sociological theory in the United States, especially since
World War II. The essays to follow demonstrate that narratives can
provide alternative ways of "doing social theory" and have a useful
place among the practices in which sociologists are engaged.
The Theoretical Agenda
Feminist scholars have raised new theoretical questions about
gender relations as one key dimension of social organization, and
they have examined the gendered nature of institutions such as the
state, economies, families, schools, politics, and sexuality
Feminists have also raised innovative questions about the
epistemologies and methodologies of research. How did these
innovations develop? How have they changed? And how are we to
understand their still uneven institutionalization?
To consider these questions theoretically, we begin from Philip
Abrams's concept of "structuring," a process in which "history and
society are made by constant and more or less purposeful
individual action and that individual action, however purposeful, is
made by history and society" 14 If, as Abrams argues, the goal of
sociological explanation is to understand the "'two-sidedness' of the
social world," then life histories and autobiographies can make a
particular contribution by allowing us to see, within concrete
historical cases, how people use available cultural, material, and
political resources to shape their own lives and the social
institutions within which they live.15 Life histories provide an
especially insightful route to observe social actors over time, life
course time and historical time, and to theorize human agency as it
intersects with social structure.
Our interest in understanding "agency" as a sociological concept
has both autobiographical and intellectual roots. The life stories in
this book clearly demonstrate that in building feminist sociology,
the authors, along
 Page 7
with many others, were conscious agents of social change. It was
not an innovation that could have been predicted by the structures
of opportunity available to us as we entered the profession of
sociology Nor was it simply the outcome of the elan or the lessons
we gained from activist lives in social and political movements,
including the women's movement. Much of our inspiration came
from those sources, but they did not determine the outcomes. Our
efforts, with all their limitations and flaws, reflected purposeful
action, inspired by values of social justice and equality, infused
with powerful feelings (some of which may have had little or
nothing to do with social justice), and enacted through conscious
activity Our actions may have reflected motivations that were more
personal than institutional, intellectual, or politicalfor example, the
search for independence, security, acceptance, successbut these,
too, were energizing.
This belief in the possibilities of shaping our worlds, and not just
being shaped by them, has also posed key theoretical questions that
in some ways contradict the structuralism that is central to
sociological theories ranging from structural functionalism to
Marxism, symbolic interactionism, and linguistic analysis. Our
experiences as feminists in sociology reflected what Dorothy Smith
has called "bifurcated consciousness": sociological explanations
did not accord with many of our lived experiences. 16 Explanations
that saw us as determined by social structure, institutions, cultures,
and even personalities did not accord with what we were doing as
we helped to build feminist sociology or, for that matter, lives
outside the normative social order. The essays describe not only
serious commitment to professional lives and careers but also
struggles to create equitable personal relationships, develop
noncompetitive and caring contexts for work, raise nonsexist and
nonracist children, and value ties to women. Of course, we were
not always successful, and at times the personal costs of these
efforts were high. Nonetheless, we were agents of change in
sociology, in our lives, and beyond.
The social contexts in which we had been raised and were living
were both enabling and constraining. Indeed, institutional,
structural, cultural, and emotional constraints made consciousness-
raising and support necessary Agency, in the sense of getting things
done and changing social circumstances, sometimes took the form
of conceptual and practical obsessions, even when given other
names, such as planning, strategizing, organizing, sharing ideas.
Life histories, we believe, help us understand agency in both
concrete and theoretical ways.
Life stories, especially contemporary ones, tend to highlight the
personalfor example, early relationships and childhood
experiences,
 Page 8
partnering and parenting. The feminist tenet "The personal is the
political" has strengthened this tendency, challenging the normative
separation of private and public life. Feminist reflections on the
construction of knowledge are more likely than other accounts to
attend to gender, sexuality, and emotions, as well as to political,
economic, and educational contexts. And here lies a major
contribution of feminism to social theory and the sociology of
knowledge.
Gender is relevant to the production of knowledge because the
gendered nature of social life, of families, workplaces, politics, and
cultures, establishes material and symbolic bases that help shape
individual behavior and identity. Gender relations affect how and
why people act as they do, including why they are attracted to
some forms of intellectual work more than others. 17 There is a
gendered component to the structures and cultures that shape
sociological knowledge.18
Personal life, sexual meanings, and emotionseach shaped by
gendered structures of possibilities, as well as their cultural
meanings can provide powerful motives for human action. In
second-wave U.S. feminism, the technique of consciousness-
raising generated insights into the importance of personal life for
understanding social action. And as these essays make clear, the
explicit integration of personal with intellectual and professional
concern has been central to the ideology and practices of feminist
sociology. This is evident, for example, in Evelyn Nakano Glenn's
discussion of the Women and Work group; in the principles of
collaboration that inform the University of Memphis Center for
Research on Women as described by Lynn Weber, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill; and in networks of
support in graduate school or early careersfor instance, the sharing
of lecture materials that Barrie Thorne discusses and the Red
Wednesday meetings for food, gossip, and intellectual critique in
which Barbara Laslett participated.19
There is another way in which gender has entered into the
construction of sociological knowledge: through the attachment of
gendered meanings to institutional cultures and to the emotional
dimensions of professional life and relationships. Laslett's
biographical research on William Fielding Ogburn, a prominent
American sociologist earlier in the twentieth century, reveals his
preference for a "cool" professional environment, his belief that
science is antithetical to emotion, and his wish to control emotions
as a means to achieving "scientific" objectivity.20Professional
cultures such as Ogburn and others espoused do not, however,
emerge accidentally, nor do they follow from an inner logic of
institutional forms or intellectual interests. They are fostered
through conscious and unconscious action. And the
 Page 9
contestation of this professional culture by feminist sociologists in
the contemporary period has been purposeful. The life stories in
this volume document an important moment of change in the
history of American sociology. They mark "decisive conjunctions
of action and structure; . . . moments of structuring at which human
agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly
as simultaneously determined and determining." 21
Emotions, of course, take many formsanger and love, passion and
passivity, jealousy and concern. They vary over time and situation,
are contradictory, and can often derail our best efforts to change the
hierarchy of sociological practices and the ideas we have inherited.
But the life stories in this volume show that emotions are more than
internal psychological states. As all the authors in this collection
make clear, emotions are social phenomena shaped by the
inequalities, cultures, and institutions (including families) in which
we live our lives. Emotions are also implicated in social action.
They are a source of energy, a reason for resistance and for
cooperation, and a subject for sociological analysis.
Gender relationsrelations to mothers and fathers, husbands and
lovers, sons and daughters, "sisters" and "brothers," and to mentors,
colleagues, and friends as gendered beingsare complex, varied and
changing. They often involve inequalities of power and resources,
competition and contestation, as well as companionship, comfort,
and desire. Gender relations, historically variable and constructed
through interaction and through culture, are also central to personal
identity. Sexuality, as identity and as desire, and the contexts within
which sexual feelings emerge (often, in these stories, in liberatory
political situations) need to be included in theoretical accounts of
human agency and social action. Contemporary feminist theorizing
of the fluid and constructed dimensions of sexuality is especially
useful for this work.22And again, power is central to this process;
as Susan Krieger so movingly recounts, there is a cost in saying
"no" to a man.
Emotions, sexuality, and gender relations need to be considered,
then, as we examine the development of feminist sociology. Life
stories can, we believe, help in this process; essays like those in
this volume provide access to the personal and gendered
dimensions of our professional history in ways less easily seen
using other research strategies. Examining the relationship of
gender to the recent history of American sociology through the
prism of life histories also reveals the complexities of the
structuring process.
The authors of these essays do not all agree on which dimensions
of their individual social positions, personalities, or values and
beliefsgender, race, ethnicity, class background, sexuality, political
commitments and professional socialization, psychological security
and insecurities, alienation or
 Page 10
fearsare relevant to their participation in the building of
contemporary feminist sociology. Such variation is, in fact, one of
the contributions that individual life stories can make to the
sociology of knowledge. With minimal instructions (we asked
contributors to consider the development of feminist sociology
through their own autobiographies, with attention to the theoretical
underpinnings of their narratives), the authors went about
constructing personal meanings out of social experiences in
somewhat different ways. All of the authors consider individual,
institutional, and historical dimensions of their involvement with
feminist sociology, but some focus more than others on the
subjective dimensions of their experiences. Each essay reveals
working theories of the intersection of life histories with social
action and institutional forms. By tracing connections among
personal meanings, institutional locations, political opportunities,
and possibilities for organization, we can see numerous pathways
from personal location to social action and institutional change. 23

Contemporary U.S. Feminist Sociology: A Brief History

All of the life stories included in this collection intersect with the
emergence of the women's liberation movement in the United
States and Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time,
issues of gender were relatively invisible in sociological
knowledge. When survey researchers and demographers were
attentive at all, they used gender as an untheorized variable, and
there was some attention to women's lives and experiences in the
study of family and communities, arenas ideologically defined as
"women's place." Structural functionalism, which was gradually
losing theoretical hegemony in U.S. sociology, continued to be well
entrenched in the study of families. Talcott Parsons theorized
gender, but under the rubric of male and female "sex roles," a static
and complementary notion that reified 1950s family ideology by
assuming it was "dysfunctional" for marriage, family, and society
for women to enter public life.24The sociological literature on
work, organizations, stratification, social psychology, deviance and
criminology, education, religion, research methodology, and theory
included issues of gender and women's distinctive experiences, at
best, as a footnote. The steady entry of women into graduate
programs in the context of the second-wave feminist movement
began to change that pattern.25
In the early 1970s feminists began to build networks across
disciplines, often in women's studies programs, which sociologists
helped create on many college and university campuses. An array
of activist groupssome locally based, others more national, some
focused within
 Page 11
and others outside of academic disciplinesset out to enhance the
presence of women in higher education. One goal was to alter the
composition of college and university faculties by challenging
patterns of discrimination and pressing for affirmative action.
Women's caucuses and committees on the status of women sprang
up throughout the social sciences and humanities; the essays here
provide numerous examples of this process.
This demographic shift created a critical mass of women
sociologists, many of whose lives and outlooks were shaped by the
civil rights, student, and anti-Vietnam War movements and by the
women's liberation movement as it emerged in that activist milieu.
Lively feminist communities coalesced among mostly younger
women, many of them students in cities such as Berkeley, East
Lansing, Chicago, Gainesville, New York, Minneapolis, and
Cambridge. Several of the authors describe early convergence
between feminist activism and academic sociology in various local
contexts, such as Eugene, Oregon (Acker); Boston-Cambridge,
Massachusetts (Glenn, Thorne); Evanston-Chicago, Illinois (Sarah
Fenstermaker), and Los Angeles (Laslett). They describe a new
gender consciousness that began to develop out of structural
contradictions that weighed on women who were educated much
like men of their stratum but were expected to divert their energies
to becoming wives and mothers and, at best, marginally employed
professionals. 26
Feminist groups and networks altered the contours of colleagueship
for many women academics. SWS and the ASA Section on Sex
Roles (in 1976 the name was changed to the Sex and Gender
Section) altered the professional culture of sociology for many
women who attended the national meetings, giving those who had
felt isolated a sense of expanded presence and support.27 In the
early 1970s women predominated as presenters and audience in
sessions organized by the Sex Roles Section at the ASA meetings.
SWS set up a hospitality room and a parallel program with panels
on subjects such as "how to write a dissertation" or "mentoring
junior faculty," as well as substantive sessions of interest to
sociologists of gender. These new networks of self-conscious
colleagueship and support, which brought the ideas and activist
energy of the women's movement into higher education, provided
social contexts in which knowledge was produced and shared.
The ideas of the early years of the second wave of the women's
movementa critique of the "feminine mystique" embedded in 1950s
gender ideology, an understanding of women as an oppressed
"class" analogous to the proletariat in Marxism,28 a revaluing of
women and their experiences condensed in such slogans as "The
personal is political"at first consolidated
 Page 12
in small consciousness-raising groups and umbrella organizations
such as the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (described by
Fenstermaker) and Bread and Roses in Boston (described by
Thorne). The ideas spread through women's networks, the popular
media, books, pamphlets, demonstrations, conferences, and other
publicized events. 29The movement raised questions about
women's subordination in politics, work, religion, sexuality, and
personal and family relationships. Sociologists had studied all of
these institutional arenas, but they had rarely focused on gender
relations and women's oppression. The question "Where are the
women?" animated fresh lines of inquiry across the social sciences
and humanities.
The feminist sociological literature of the early 1970s reflects these
concerns. It includes critiques of the androcentrism of the field,
calls for the development of a sociology that would value and
accord more closely with women's lives and experiences, and
empirical studies that picked up that call, for example, in the study
of work and organizations, families, and mothering.30 However,
the movement to develop a sociology for women set out to do
much more than add new topics of study. It also set out to critique
the foundations of mainstream sociological knowledge itself, to
recognize that power relations in the academy have conceptual, as
well as material, consequences, as Dorothy Smith has made
clear.31 Feminists argued that sociological knowledge is deeply
androcentric, as in notions of social class that define women only
with reference to fathers or husbands (in her essay, Acker describes
the development of this critique) and frameworks that use gender to
explain women's patterns of work but not those of men (which
Glenn discusses).
Another challenge to conventional sociology was spurred by
analyses that focused on, as Sandra Harding phrases it, "the science
question in feminism."32Feminist theorists, many from outside of
sociology, criticized positivist epistemologies for neglecting the
experiences of women and the relevance of social contexts,
including gender, for processes of knowing. These critiques
appealed to feminist sociologists who were dissatisfied with the
hegemony of positivist epistemology and quantitative methods
within the discipline; many feminists found these approaches
inadequate or inappropriate for answering the questions that
interested them. Feminist writings on epistemology, some blending
into postmodern perspectives, continue to reverberate through the
disciplines.33
The essays by Glenn and by Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill detail
a critique that became influential in the 1980s as African-
American, Latina, Asian-American, and lesbian feminists asked,
"Which women's experiences?" They recognized the problematic
nature of "woman" as a category, and they
 Page 13
provided insight into complex relationships among gender, social
class, race/ ethnicity, and sexuality. 34In a movement that linked
the political and the intellectual, and that bridged to activism
around issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, scholars within and
outside of sociology laid out the ambitious goals of transforming
the conceptual foundations of knowledge.35Many of the essays in
this volume discuss the development of that vision.
The Process of Institutionalization
It is now over two decades since the women's liberation movement
began mobilizing in U.S. universities and within and across
academic disciplines. What have been the results in the field of
sociology? By some measures, the movement has been extremely
successful, both spurred by and contributing to the increasing
number of women sociologists. In 1970 women received 18
percent of Ph.D.s awarded in sociology in the United States. Over
the ensuing decades the proportion of women receiving sociology
Ph.D.s steadily increased, to a high of 53 percent in 1988; since
then, there has been some decline, to 47 percent in 1993.36 In
1988, 69 percent of sociology bachelor's degrees were awarded to
women.37The representation of women in tenure-line faculty
positions has increased, although less dramatically. In 1991 women
made up 29 percent of all tenured and tenure-track sociology
faculty in the United States (46 percent were assistant professors;
30 percent associate professors; and 20 percent, full professors).
Women continue to be underrepresented in more secure, well-paid,
and prestigious positions.38Unprecedented numbers of women now
hold offices in sociological societies, occasionally, if still rarely,
achieving the highest positions.
In fact, there are many more women sociologists than ever before,
and Sex and Gender is now the largest research section in the ASA.
In 1995 the Sex and Gender Section had 87 percent women
members and a larger proportion of graduate students than any
other section. In contrast, revealing some occupational segregation
by subfield, 28 percent of the members of the ASA Theory Section
were women.39Some sociologists believe that the field is
feminizing, and, knowing the iron law of patriarchy, they fear that
as the proportion of women increases, an occupation's prestige and
pay decline.40 Others, who feel threatened by changes in
professional culture and new sources of competition, also view this
trend with alarm. There is some indication of backlash in the
discipline of sociology, especially against women organizing as
women and as self-proclaimed feminists.
What about the goal of transforming sociological knowledge? Two
decades of mobilization have turned the sociology of gender into a
large
 Page 14
and flourishing specialty with the trappings of disciplinary
legitimacy: listing in directories and job postings, the topic of
Ph.D.-qualifying exams and specialized journals, structures of
evaluation and rewards, and a network of scholars with ''national
reputations" in the sociology of gender who are called on for peer
review. As Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill discuss, there has been
substantial progress in transforming curricula to include issues of
race, class, and gender. Indeed, the University of Memphis Center
for Research on Women is a major story of institutional success. As
several of the authors in this collection observe with a kind of
surprised recognition, feminist sociology has become
institutionalized, and some of its practitioners are now in positions
of prestige and power in their universities and professional
associations, as journal editors, and on committees that review
grant proposals.
But has all of this effort gone any further than the effort that went
into building other specialties, such as medical sociology or
criminology? Has feminist sociology, with its political critique,
become just another specialization in the ongoing division of labor
of a large and fragmented discipline? What about the 1970s claims
that starting with women's experiences and gender as a category of
analysis would transform the orienting frameworks of the entire
discipline, altering conceptions of institutions, organizations, the
social, the self, social class, work, culture, families, and even
methodologies of inquiry? Have these claims been realized?
In 1985 Judith Stacey and Thorne expressed disappointment that
such a "feminist revolution" of sociological knowledge had in
many ways been coopted and containedfor example, by
functionalist conceptions of gender and by the use of gender only
as a variable rather than a conceptually complex category of
analysis. 41This disappointment partly came from high
expectations; compared with other social sciences (with the notable
exception of anthropology), sociology seemed especially ripe for
feminist transformation. The discipline's subject matter covers the
whole of social life rather than one institutional domain, as does
political science or economics. Sociology's fragmentation into
many subfields and competing paradigms, compared with
disciplines such as economics in which one paradigm is
hegemonic, opens space for new ideas and knowledge-creating
networks to take hold.
A decade after this lament over "the missing feminist revolution in
sociology," there has been significant progress in challenging and
reworking sociological frameworks. For example, feminist
critiques of the gendered division between "public" and "private"
social spheres have reconstructed basic paradigms in the study of
families, sexuality, work, organizations, and
 Page 15
the state. 42Because of the equation of women with the "private"
and with gender itself (as members of the unmarked category, men
claimed both individual and generic status), it took longer to
theorize the gendered nature of public institutions such as the state
and organizations.43But this is well under way, along with
theorizing of intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality, and age;
attention to the historical, social, and discursive dynamics of
gender relations; and a reexamination of men and masculinities.44
These transformative insights appear unevenly in the research and
teaching of sociologists not directly engaged with feminist work.
Many sociologists either ignore or regard feminist ideas with
suspicion; many continue to treat gender, at best, as a variable or as
just another specialized topic of study and therefore not one to
which they need to be attentive. As Smith has recently written,
"The curricula of sociology departments preserve the problematics
of the past like DNA of flies preserved in amber."45 This is
especially true for courses, textbooks, and specialized journals in
sociological theory. The theory canon (Durkheim, Weber, and
Marx), which is often used to symbolically evoke coherence in a
fragmented discipline, embeds "problematics of the past." Joan
Alway has documented and analyzed the indifference and
resistance of sociological theorists to feminist theory46 Alway
traces this resistance not only to feminism's political origins and
suspect source of authority (women's experiences), but also to
feminists' questioning of dichotomies, such as public and private,
nature and culture, that define the boundaries and identity of the
field of sociology.
Feminism emerged from outside of the academy, and its originating
purposeto understand and end women's subordinationcuts across
disciplines. In Stacey's essay in this collection, she argues that the
most significant feminist breakthroughs in knowledge may take
place in the "borderlands" between disciplines, with the potential,
along with related critical movements, to transform the very
mapping of knowledge.47 The organization of sociology assumes
the very divisions, such as between families and the state, that
feminists have helped critique. Disciplines are not only intellectual
communities; they also regulate their members and defend existing
interests, using "boundary work" to sustain their differentiation.48
Feminist sociologists encounter moments of boundary work when
sociology colleagues tell them that their work is "not sociology."
Feminist sociologists often have strong personal and collegial ties
to scholars and literatures outside the field; they teach in women's
studies programs, and they read and publish in interdisciplinary
journals. All of this has given them perspective on the conventions
of the discipline; but as these essays make clear, interdisciplinarity
is also a source of difficulty,
 Page 16
especially for feminists seeking tenure in sociology departments.
The authors vary in their degree of attachment to and alienation
from conventional sociology; 49 some have found interdisciplinary
women's studies programs to be a more congenial academic
location.
Convergences and Tensions Between the Women's Movement
and the Discipline and Profession of Sociology
Sociological knowledge is sometimes depicted as freestanding and
pristine, the product of objective and cumulative scientific inquiry.
But the content and shifting contours of knowledge, including what
comes to be "counted" as sociology, are influenced by the social
and historical contexts within which knowledge is produced and
disseminated. New schools of thought enter disciplines, and
disciplines themselves become constituted and reconfigured
through processes of mobilization and persuasion. Collective bids
to alter disciplinary knowledge and practices have taken varied
forms. For example, medical sociology and the new, more
specialized ASA Section on Drugs and Alcohol emerged as
specialties in part because of the opening of jobs for sociologists in
medical schools and applied settings and the availability of funding
for research on the social dimensions of health.
Other areas of sociological inquiry have been catalyzed by political
movements, going back to social reformers, some of them
feminists, in the early part of this century.50 The civil rights,
student, anti-Vietnam War, women's liberation, and gay and lesbian
movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s left a strong
imprint on knowledge and on patterns of specialization and conflict
within U.S. sociology. Critical perspectives linked to questions of
justice and emancipation spread from movements into universities,
and new scholarly networks emerged. Several ASA
sectionsMarxist Sociology, Race and Ethnic Relations, and Sex and
Genderhave overt political origins and commitments. Long-
standing debates about whether value-free knowledge is possible or
desirable and about whether taking an overt political stance
contaminates or enriches the creation of knowledge have
surrounded the struggles of feminist sociologists for resources and
legitimation. Through what processes have feminist sociologists
developed new knowledge, claimed authority, and sought to make
their knowledge count within the discipline and profession? Like
other groups with such aspirations, feminists mobilized networks,
in this case drawing on the anger, elation, and bonding unleashed
by the women's movement, consciousness-raising, and political
commitments to social justice.
The authors describe their attraction to sociology as a mode of un-
 Page 17
derstanding: Fenstermaker initially was drawn to the investigative
mode, Laslett to structural approaches to social inequality, Acker to
Marxist frameworks and their concerns with justice. The authors
also describe feelings of estrangement and alienation from a field
that excluded them from full participation. The essays reveal the
patriarchal and racist layering of academic institutionsfor example,
admissions and hiring practices that favored white men and were
especially dismissive of married women with children and that
expected patterns of deference. Smith has theorized this process,
drawing on her experiences in an early consciousness-raising group
when she was a sociology graduate student in Berkeley. 51 She
describes the bifurcated consciousness of women who encountered
sociological knowledge that did not fit their experiences as women.
By trusting and sharing their experiences, for example, of
housework and mothering, they could explore fault lines in
conventional knowledge (which serves the interests of ruling) and
create an oppositional sociology "for women."
These essays show this process at work in the emergence, sense of
collective agency, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of feminist
sociology. The authors describe the process of attending to and
revaluing their own and other women's experiences as they helped
open up topics such as housework (Fenstermaker), caring work
(DeVault), paid domestic labor (Glenn), and relations of gender,
race, and class (Glenn; Weber, Higginbotham, Dill). They also
detail the rethinking of mainstream sociological topics such as
work and organizations (Acker, Glenn), families (Laslett, Stacey
Thorne), and persistent taboos against fully exploring the more
public implications of sexuality (Krieger, Deacon).
The autobiographies reveal mixed patterns of opportunity,
constraint, and possibility. The sheer number of women who are
undergraduate and graduate students, readers, and book buyers, and
the practical demand for knowledge about rape, sexual harassment,
wage gaps, and the feminization of poverty, among other subjects,
have opened opportunities for feminist sociologists. The essays
point to other resources that have enhanced some women
sociologist's opportunities (and sometimes confronted them with
double binds)for example, prodding from the state in the form of
affirmative action regulations, heterosexual and daughterlike ties to
powerful men, class privileges and elite educations that muted
gender disadvantage. The essays also describe experiences of
disenchantment when utopian notions of sisterhood came up
against the realities of competition, hierarchy, and unacknowledged
practices of exclusion among women and when female solidarity
felt at odds with other loyalties and interests (Acker).
 Page 18
Finally, the essays raise questions about the price of conventional
success. Feminist sociologists who came out of the more radical
wings of the movement articulated a vision of democratized
teaching and learning that would replace "power over" with
"empowerment" and develop knowledge that is socially, politically,
and emotionally engaged. But, as Connell describes, the forces of
disciplinary and institutional structures are strong, propelled by
individual and collective desires for recognition and resources.
Thriving in the conventional ways of the disciplinemeasured by
numbers of practitioners, student enrollments, job openings,
tenurings, outlets for publication, presence in positions of power
and prestigealso means that feminist sociology has developed its
own systems of ranking and control and even a canon of
knowledge. The authors discuss the process of institutionalization
with a mix of pride, irony, and criticism; they are concerned by the
increasing detachment of academic feminism from political
practice. 52They also observe that the bureaucratization and
absorption of feminism into the hierarchical structures of
universities and the profession are far from complete. Life histories
can make these emotional and political complexities visible and
available for discussion without the polarizing effects of more
polemical statements.53
Many feminist sociologists have sustained a commitment to
political activism and collective modes of work. They describe
themselves as "outsiders within" (Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill)
and "marginal insiders" (DeVault) and as experiencing tensions
between the heated-up mode of movement activism and the more
detached mode of the academic profession (Thorne). Connell
reflects upon the contradictory position of men who have feminist
politics and intellectual commitments. Glenn and Weber,
Higginbotham, and Dill describe practices of feminist, as well as
more mainstream, sociologists that excluded women of color, and
Krieger describes overt and subtle structures of heterosexual
privilege in the shaping of careers. Critical perspectives of this kind
have challenged the 1970s emphasis on commonality among
women and led to efforts to understand differences. They have also
been accompanied by forms of political action that take account of
multiple differences and complex structures of power. These
intersections have yet to be fully theorized, a challenge that partly
involves constructing alternatives to the statistical model of
causation so common in contemporary American sociological
analysis. Narrative forms, including personal narratives, may
provide one avenue for building such alternatives.
 Page 19

Conclusion
The life stories that follow describe historical conditions that
contributed to the rise of a feminist sociology in the United States
at the beginning of the 1970s. And as reflections by participants
who helped create this new area of knowledge, these essays offer
insight into individual and collective agency working within and
reshaping those conditions. This introduction has called attention to
the theoretical contributions of autobiographical writing to the
sociology of knowledge and to social theory, including the
contributions of feminism to the crafting and use of life histories as
a genre. We have also argued that personal narratives can
illuminate relationships between social structure and human
agency, between social circumstances and the changing
construction of knowledge. Feminist sociology, the case of
knowledge change that we have set out to understand, has provided
useful new tools for understanding its own history and dynamics.
By making gender a central category of analysis and exploring
connections between the "personal" (e.g., sexuality and emotions)
and the "public" (e.g., political and material resources and cultural
capital), feminists have enriched sociologists' usual, more limited
focus on economic, political, and cultural dimensions of knowledge
creation.
In view of these contributions, why has feminist work remained a
voluntary, rather than an integral, part of contemporary sociological
theory? Why have theorists interested in the sociology of
knowledge kept their distance from feminist sociology? As
discussed earlier, there are structural and organizational answers to
this question. In addition, because feminist scholarship is
interdisciplinary and often entails questioning the ruling
intellectual paradigms within the discipline, it has the potential to
threaten established boundaries around and relations of dominance
and deference within sociology. But if our analysis of the rise of
contemporary feminist sociology has more general implications, it
suggests that social structure provides a necessary but not sufficient
explanation for the uneven integration of academic feminism in the
field, particularly among sociological theorists.
New intellectual movements, especially successful ones, do not go
uncontested. They touch on and can threaten the interests,
identities, and self-regard of those who work and take comfort
from existing intellectual paradigms and professional norms and
practices. These movements threaten relations of dominance and
subordination within which both social and intellectual interests are
defined. Especially when there are fewer resources to go around,
respectful appreciation of alternatives seems at a minimum. 54
 Page 20
The boundary work by which sociology has established its identity
and legitimacy in the past comes once more into play. But
boundary work does not happen automatically; it requires human
agency. Our analysis and those in the life histories that follow
suggest some of the dynamics involved in this process. Both the
emergence of a feminist sociology and the resistance to it reflect
encounters between social possibilities and human agency.
There are several truths to be gathered from the materials presented
in this collection. We believe that women's capacities for self-
organization in higher education go a considerable way toward
explaining how and when feminist sociology emerged in the
United States. But the actions that developed from and with these
organizational resources have not eliminated the still existing and
gendered distribution of power within institutions of higher
learning. Just as feminist self-organization led to the development
and spread of feminist scholarship in sociology, so, too, those who
feel threatenedsocially and perhaps personallyby that development
are still in organizationally powerful positions to undermine and/or
halt the gains that have been made.
But why, we might ask, would that occur? Why, rather than join, do
those in dominant positions resist? 55 Here, too, we think lessons
for the sociology of knowledge can be learned from the life stories
included in this collection. The emergence of feminist sociology in
the United States can be explained, at least in part, by changes in
the organization, power, and meanings of gender relations,
particularly women's increasing economic and cultural resources
for resisting patriarchal authority throughout this century. The
emotions and energies associated with those changes andof
particular importance in relation to the feminist movementthe
challenges to heterosexuality associated with women's increasing
capacity (and desire) "to say no to a man" are involved. In addition,
we suggest that the incomplete institutionalization of these changes
can help explain why feminist theory and sociological theory
continue to travel along different intellectual and organizational
trajectories. Women's presence and power in the academy have,
without doubt, increased since 1970 but are not yet on a par with
those of the mostly white, mostly middle-class men who
established the norms, practices, and paradigms within institutions
of higher learning.
Yet as the life stories presented here also suggest, power aloneits
presence or absence or its institutional successes and failurescannot
account for the emergence of and resistance to the intellectual
approach of which feminist sociology is one manifestation.
Emotions, gender relations, and sexuality are also involved in the
acceptance of or resistance to feminist sociology and feminist
theory. The historical possibilities for women
 Page 21
opened by economic changes and political events intersected with
the energies, emotions, and analyses that the women's movement
and consciousness-raising provided in the late 1960s and early
1970s in the United States. Out of this intersection and the lessons
learned from earlier social movementsespecially the civil rights and
antiwar movementsthe second-wave feminist movement in the
United States grew. New ideas, lessened power differentials in
gender relations and divisions of labor, and changes in
understandings of masculinities, femininities, and sexualities were
all part of the historical conditions that energized women's self-
organization in second-wave feminism and in sociology. 56
Social theory and the sociology of knowledge are, like other
subjects of intellectual inquiry, the outcomes of particular historical
circumstances and organizational forms, as well as individual and
collective actions. Power, resources for organization, identity, and
feelings about them are key dimensions of the intellectual and
social processes from which new forms of scholarship emerge,
sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail. This is not an intellectual
process alone. It is a social one. And as this analysis of feminist
sociology suggests, gender relations, emotion, and sexuality are
part of these social processes. They join access to individual and
collective power and organizational, material, and symbolic
resources as analytically important elements of the intersections of
social structure and human agency from which new intellectual
movements emerge. Feminist sociology is a reality within
contemporary scholarly discourse in the United States, and it is
also a case from which we have much to learn about the sociology
of knowledge and social theory.
Notes
We wish to acknowledge, with thanks, the original encouragement
and involvement of Charles Lemert in the work that resulted in this
volume. Martha Heller, Marjorie DeVault, and Sarah Fenstermaker
offered helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Although
unable to submit essays for this volume, Dorothy Smith and Arlene
Daniels have inspired and supported many of the people whose
essays are included.
1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 241.
2. For historical examples, see John Dollard, Criteria for the Life
History, with Analysis of Six Notable Documents (New York: Peter
Smith, 1949); and W I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America (New York: Knopf, 1927). For
recent examples, see Charles C. Lemert, "Whole Life Social
Theory," Theory and Society 15 (1986): 431-442, Norman K.
Denzin, Interpretive Biography (Newbury
 Page 22
Park, Calif., Sage, 1989); "Biography and Autobiography in
Sociology," special issue of Sociology: The Journal of the British
Sociological Association 27, no. 1 (1995); Barbara Laslett,
"Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of
Sociology," Sociological Forum 5 (1990): 413-433; Barbara
Laslett, "Biography as Historical Sociology: The Case of William
Fielding Ogburn," Theory and Society 20 (1991): 511-538; Daniel
Bertaux, ed., Biography and Society (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage,
1981); Daniel Bertaux and Martin Kohli, "The Life Story
Approach: A Continental View,'' Annual Review of Sociology 10
(1984): 215-237; Bennett M. Berger, ed., Authors of Their Own
Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American
Sociologists (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1990); Ann Goetting and Sarah Fenstermaker, eds.,
Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in
Sociology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Judith
Long, Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text
(forthcoming); Kathryn P Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace,
eds., Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women
Sociologists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994);
Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women's Lives:
Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989); Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road:
Life Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in
the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); John H. Stanfield II, ed., A History of Race
Relations Research: First-Generation Recollections (Newbury
Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993); and Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a
Generation: Italy 1968 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press/University Press of New England, 1996). For a review essay
on some recent autobiographical works, see Robert Zussman,
"Autobiographical Occasions," Contemporary Sociology 25
(1996): 143-148.
3. For debates among feminists about "experience" as a category of
analysis, see Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as
Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1987); Joan W. Scott, "Experience," in Judith
Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political
(New York: Routledge), pp. 22-40; and Judith Grant, Fundamental
Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New
York: Routledge, 1993).
4. For a historical account of the development of scientism,
objectification, and quantification in American sociology at the end
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Robert
Bannister, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for
Objectivity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1987); and Laslett, "Unfeeling Knowledge."
5. Our focus on the United States, plus essays by two Australians,
sets aside an array of fascinating cross-country comparisons of
feminist sociology and feminism. We offer here a few brief
comparative ideas, enriched by suggestions from Bob Connell. In
the early 1970s in the United States, feminists encountered
Parsonian "sex roles" as a reigning sociological paradigm, but in
Britain and France, Marxism and structuralist psychoanalysis were
more influential intellectual frameworks and had a strong initial
shaping influence on feminist work in sociology. The U.S. women's
movement moved to issues of racism and the problematic of
diversity more quickly than did feminisms in Europe. Academic
sociology is much larger and more institutionalized in the United
States compared with Australia or Canada, which meant larger
aggregate resources for U.S. feminists but a longer struggle to
establish a major presence in the discipline. Finally the dominant
position of the United States in
 Page 23
global intellectual networks, for example, and the fact that
sociologists in many other countries read and seek to publish in
U.S. journals but not vice versa have made U.S. feminist sociology
more inward turning than elsewhere.
6. See Albert Hunter, ed., The Rhetoric of Social Research
Understood and Believed (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), esp. Kai Erikson, "On Sociological Prose,"
pp. 23-34; Joseph R. Gusfield, "Two Genres of Sociology: A
Literary Analysis of The American Occupational Structure and
Tally's Corner," pp. 62-96; and Marjorie L. DeVault, "Women
Write Sociology: Rhetorical Strategies," pp. 97-110.
7. For a relevant examination of reading, see Minrose Gwinn,
"Space Travels: The Connective Politics of Feminist Reading,"
Signs 21 (1996): 870-905. See also Ann Goetting, "Fictions of the
Self," in Goetting and Fenstermaker, eds., Individual Voices.
Collective Visions, pp. 3-10.
8. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1988).
9. Luisa Passerini, "Women's Personal Narratives: Myths,
Experiences, and Emotions," in Personal Narratives Group, ed.,
Interpreting Women's Lives, p. 196; Luisa Passerini, "A Memory
for Women's History: Problems of Method and Interpretation,"
Social Science History 16 (1992): 669-692. See also Mary Jo
Maynes, "Autobiography and Class Formation in Nineteenth-
century Europe: Methodological Considerations," Social Science
History 16 (1992): 517-537; and Gayle Greene, ''Feminist Fiction
and the Uses of Memory," Signs 16 (1991): 290-321.
10. Nancy K. Miller, "Representing Others: Gender and the
Subjects of Autobiography," Differences 6 (1994): 1-27.
11. Maynes, Taking the Hard Road.
12. Indeed, tales of loss are likely to be underrepresented because
they are too painful to document and to make public.
13. For additional information on and experiences of this history,
see Orlans and Wallace, eds., Gender and the Academic
Experience; Goetting and Fenstermaker, eds., Individual Voices;
Collective Visions; Martin Oppenheimer, Martin J. Murray, and
Rhonda F. Levine, eds., Radical Sociologists and the Movement:
Experiences, Lessons, and Legacies (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991); and Alice S. Rossi and Ann Calderwood,
eds., Academic Women on the Move (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1973).
14. Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1981), p. xiii. Abrams, of course, has not been
alone in discussing these issues; other theorists have done so in
important ways. See, for instance, Giddens' concept of structuration
in Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action,
Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); and Anthony
Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984). See also Bourdieu's concept of social reproduction in
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977). We identify Abrams in
particular because he was the original influence on Laslett's
formulation of these problems. See Laslett, "Biography as
Historical Sociology"
15. Abrams, Historical Sociology, p. 2.
16. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic.
17. As the autobiographical essays included in this collection make
clear, these choices
 Page 24
are not unconstrained. They reflect the opportunities available and
those withheld, as well as reigning intellectual paradigms.
18. See Barbara Laslett, "Gender in/and Social Science History,"
Social Science History 16 (1992): 177-195, for further elaboration
of this argument.
19. The absence of such networks, as described by Acker, is also
relevant to the making of intellectual choices. In these cases,
occasional male professors or colleagues provided some support
and intellectual validation. Many others didn't.
20. Laslett, "Biography as Historical Sociology."
21. Abrams, Historical Sociology, p. 199; see also chapter 7.
22. Many feminist theorists have addressed these issues. See, for
instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Judith
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"
(New York: Routledge, 1993).
23. See Nancy J. Chodorow, "Gender as a Personal and Cultural
Construction," Signs 20 (1995): 516-544.
24. Talcott Parsons, "The Social Structure of the Family," in Ruth
Anshen, ed., The Family: Its Function and Destiny (New York:
Harper and Row, 1959). For an overview of feminist critiques of
the functionalist view of the family, see Barrie Thorne, "Feminist
Rethinking of the Family: An Overview," in Barrie Thorne, with
Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist
Questions (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 1-24.
25. In 1970, 18 percent of new Ph.D.s in sociology were awarded
to women; by 1980 the figure was 38 percent; Data are from
Patricia A. Roos, "Occupational Feminization, Occupational
Decline? Sociology's Changing Sex Composition," American
Sociologist (forthcoming).
26. Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up
Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992); Grant, Fundamental
Feminism.
27. A detailed description of these changes can be found in Pamela
Roby, "Women and the ASA: Degendering Organizational
Structures and Processes, 1964-1974," American Sociologist 23
(1992): 18-48.
28. This argument, as we can now see, reflected the unnuanced
state of theories about women's oppression, which ignored
differences among women along lines of race, class, sexuality,
generation, and historical context. And it rarely considered women
as subjected to colonialism, imperialism, and the global expansion
of world capitalism. Women of color have been particularly central
in making white, middle-class, and western feminists aware of the
importance of these differences.
29. See Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New
York: Mackay, 1975).
30. Among the influential feminist sociological writings of the
1970s: Joan Huber, ed., Changing Women in a Changing Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Marcia Millman and
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, eds., Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives
on Social Life and Social Science (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Press, 1975); Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1978);
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New
York: Basic Books, 1977).
31. Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A
Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1990).
32. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).
 Page 25
33. Harding, ibid., reviews several lines of feminist epistemological
critique ("feminist empiricism," "standpoint theory," and
"postmodern" feminist positions). See also Sandra Harding and
Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives
on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of
Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983); Sandra Harding, ed., Feminism
and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987); Helen Longino, Science as Social
Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Shulamit Reinharz,
Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992); and Smith, The Everyday World as
Problematic. For a recent review of these issues and debates in
relationship to sociology, see Marjorie L. DeVault, ''Talking Back
to Sociology: Distinctive Contributions of Feminist Methodology,"
Annual Review of Sociology 22 (1996): 29-50.
34. Early and influential examples of this critique include the
Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," in
Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for
Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp.
362-372; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York:
Random House, 1981); Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Race, Class, and
Gender: Prospects for an All-inclusive Sisterhood," Feminist
Studies 9 (1983): 131-150; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldia,
eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); Patricia Hill
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and
Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence," Signs 5 (1980): 631-660.
35. Millman and Kanter, eds., Another Voice; Elizabeth Minnich,
Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990); Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic; Smith, The
Conceptual Practices of Power, and Dorothy E. Smith, Texts,
Facts, and Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
36. Roos, "Occupational Feminization," Table 1.
37. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education
Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1992 (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1992).
38. Roos, "Occupational Feminization," Table 4.
39. Ibid., Table 9.
40. Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos, Job Queues, Gender Queues
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Roos,
"Occupational Feminization."
41. Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, "The Missing Feminist
Revolution in Sociology," Social Problems 32 (1985): 301-316.
42. On this point, see also Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, "Is
Sociology Still Missing Its Feminist Revolution?" A.S.A. Theory
Section Newsletter 18 (summer 1996): 1-3. Examples of feminist
reconstruction of basic frameworks include Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three Generations of Japanese-American
Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1986); Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, "Gender and
Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives," Annual Review of
Sociology 15 (1989): 381-404; Judith Stacey, Brave New Families:
Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America
(New York: Basic Books, 1990); Jeff Hearn and Wendy Parkin,
"Sex" at "Work": The Power and Paradox of Organization
Sexuality (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987); and R. W. Connell,
Gender
 Page 26
and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).
43. Examples of such theorizing include Joan Acker, "Hierarchies,
Jobs, and Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations," Gender
& Society 4 (1990): 139-158; Jennifer Pierce, Gender Trials:
Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); and R. W Connell,
"The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal,"
Theory and Society 19 (1990): 507-544.
44. Examples of these lines of work include Collins, Black
Feminist Thought; Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins,
eds., Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (Belmont, Calif.:
Wadsworth, 1992); Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Barrie Thorne,
Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (New Brunswick N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1993); and R. W. Connell, Masculinities,
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
Sociologists have drawn many transformative ideas from the
interdisciplinary terrain of feminist theory
45. Dorothy E. Smith, "Response to Judith Stacey's and Barrie
Thorne's Essay." A.S.A. Theory Section Newsletter 18 (summer
1996): 4.
46. Joan Alway "The Trouble with Gender: Tales of the Still-
missing Feminist Revolution in Sociological Theory" Sociological
Theory 13 (1995): 209-228.
47. See also Stacey and Thorne, "Is Sociology Still Missing Its
Feminist Revolution?" including comments on the essay by
Dorothy Smith, Michael Burawoy, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, and Chris
Ingraham. Our vantage point comes from within sociology; other
issues emerge if one starts, instead, from women's studies as a self-
consciously interdisciplinary field. For example, Stanton and
Stewart discuss the "dialogic interaction" and "permeable and
changing" relation between women's studies and the disciplines.
Even though women's studies is idealized as "interdisciplinary,"
they argue that it is more a "pluridisciplinary landscape.'' See
Donna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, "Remodeling Relations:
Women's Studies and the Disciplines," in Donna C. Stanton and
Abigail J. Stewart, eds., Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 1-16. Burawoy cautions
that it is "in the disciplines that power resides, so it is in the
disciplines it has to be contested." See Michael Burawoy, "The
Power of Feminism," A.S.A. Theory Section Newsletter 18
(summer 1996): 5.
48. On boundary work in the construction of academic disciplines,
see Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary Work and the Demarcation of
Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional
Ideologies of Scientists," American Sociological Review 48 (1983):
781-795; and Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, and
David J. Sylvan, eds., Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies
in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1993).
49. See Barbara Laslett, "How Signs Ruined Me for Sociology: Or,
Feminist Scholarship, Interdisciplinarity, and Boundary
Maintenance in Sociology" (Paper presented at the 1996 meetings
of the Pacific Sociological Association, Seattle, Washington,
March).
50. See Desley Deacon's essay in this volume on Elsie Clews
Parsons; Laslett, "Genderin/and Social Science History"; Ellen
Fitzgerald, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and
Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
and Mary
 Page 27
Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School.
1892-1918 (New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Books, 1988).
51. Dorothy E. Smith, "A Berkeley Education," in Orlans and
Wallace, eds., Gender and the Academic Experience, pp. 45-56;
Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic. Smith continues to
affirm "starting from experience" as a foundation of inquiry, as in
"Sociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmation,''
Sociological Theory 10 (1992): 88-98. For a critique of experience
as a basis for theorizing, see Scott, "The Evidence of Experience";
and Grant, Fundamental Feminism.
52. For an insightful discussion of the deteriorating relationship
between feminist theory and practice, see Heidi Hartmann, Ellen
Bravo, Charlotte Bunch, Nancy Hartsock, Roberta Spalter-Roth,
Linda Williams, and Maria Blanco, "Bringing Together Feminist
Theory and Practice: A Collective Interview," Signs 21 (1996):
917-951. See also Stacey and Thorne, "Is Sociology Still Missing
Its Feminist Revolution?" and commentaries.
53. Marjorie DeVault offered this insight.
54. See Joan Huber, "Institutional Perspectives on Sociology,"
American Journal of Sociology 101 (1995): 194-216.
55. For a relevant analysis, see William Goode, "Why Men Resist,"
in Thorne with Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family, pp. 131-150.
56. For an expansion of the argument about successes and failures
in women's self-organization, see Johanna Brenner and Barbara
Laslett, "Gender, Social Reproduction, and Women's Self-
organization in the Development of the U.S. Welfare State."
Gender & Society 5 (1991): 311-333; and Johanna Brenner, "The
Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Feminism in the United States,"
in Monica Threlfall, ed., Mapping the Women's Movement:
Feminist Politics and Social Transformation in the North (London:
Verso, 1996), pp. 17-72.
 Page 28

My Life as a Feminist Sociologist; or, Getting the

Man out of My Head
Joan Acker
Inever intended to become an academic or a sociologist. But by
now I have spent over thirty years as both. This is one account of
how I came to do what I had not intended and of how being a
woman and a feminist has shaped my experiences of academia and
sociology and the work that I do. I am aware of the ambiguities of
autobiography so much discussed today, but I will ignore them.
This is a chronological tale, more or less the truth, or the truth for
today.
As a teenager, I wanted a life of adventure, preferably as a foreign
correspondent, traveling to strange places, doing daring deeds to
get the news. I was probably patterning my future on a dream of
what my father should have been. He was a writer, but not an
adventurer. My mother was a college graduate who came from an
impoverished upper-middle-class intellectual family. She always
worked and was a political activist: I saw both as what women
normally did. We did not suffer during the Depression because my
father had a good job with the American Legion. Both of my
parents clearly thought I was smart and encouraged me to become
anything I wanted to be.
Although I was an editor of my high school newspaper in
Indianapolis and my college literary magazine in New York, I
recognized before I was twenty that a life of exciting journalistic
travel did not fit with my other aspirationto be a wife and mother.
Logistically, those goals did not mesh. Moreover, I had already
learned from the other girls in the second grade that being an
assertive and enterprising person reduced a girl's attractiveness to
boys. Since assertiveness and enterprise were some of the qualities
required for becoming a world-class journalist, what would be my
chances of finding the right man if I was successful? I did not see
this dilemma as
Copyright © 1997 by Joan Acker.
 Page 29
any evidence of inequality between women and men and took it for
granted as indicating only difference, not disadvantage, the clear
evidence of gender discrimination around me.
I was aware of, and concerned about, race and class early in my
life. I began to question racism as a young teenager in Indianapolis,
where I grew up, when I was puzzled and hurt that the African-
American woman who took care of me, my sister, and our house
would not sit next to me on the streetcar. But I could not interpret
this until, at the age of nineteen, I moved to New York, entered
Hunter College, and began my political education. I had a new
stepfather who was a radical, and my mother agreed with him. In
addition, I met the most amazing radical people among my peers.
In my philosophy courses we studied dialectical and historical
materialism. Psychology courses were taught by people on the Left
who related individual experience to class and race. I supported
labor unions, went on demonstrations, and decided that whatever
work I might do, it should not contribute to capitalist domination. I
still feel that way but understand much better than I did then the
ambiguities and difficulties in attaining that laudable goal.
Thus, at Hunter I chose a combined major in sociology and social
work, which was preparatory for graduate education in social work.
My decision to become a social worker was determined both by my
wish to do something that could be done in most communities,
enhancing my ability to combine marriage and work, and by my
political commitment that I not pursue a career that would exploit
other people. My course was more sociology than social work, and
I must have been developing some awareness of "the woman
question": in one sociology course I wrote a paper comparing the
explanations of women's positions in the work of Thorsten Veblen
and Robert Park. I did an honor's thesis on the family court in
Manhattan, giving me a taste of the pleasures of research, and I
graduated Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude with honors in sociology.
In spite of the evidence to the contrary, I did not think of myself as
an intellectual. That was for the men in my groups of radical
friends. The men took care of the finer points of Marxist theory,
while we women concerned ourselves with such things as
organizing fund-raising events and door-to-door canvassing for the
American Labor Party. I recognize now that refusing to see myself
as a "thinker" was self-protective: the objects of my affection now
were Left intellectual/activist men, and one thing that made them
attractive was their intellectual exploits. I would not compete with
them on that ground and risk revealing myself either as stupid or
more competent than they. Either way I might be rejected. I
believe, as I look
 Page 30
back, that I was perfectly happy with this resolution of my dilemma
and totally unaware that such a resolution might be problematic.
Immediately after college graduation, I went off to the University
of Chicago to get a master's in the School of Social Service
Administration (SSA). Those were exciting times. World War II
had recently ended. The university was flooded with returning
veterans, and there was optimism about individual prospects and
the possibilities of solving the social problems of the Depression
era. SSA presented a progressive/liberal understanding of society
and social problems, not unlike a Scandinavian social democratic
approach. The Social Security Act was only ten years old, and the
energy and enthusiasm that had gone into shaping it were still
around. Edith Abbott and Sophenisba P. Breckenridge, founders of
the school when the social welfare teachers had been eased out of
the Department of Sociology at Chicago, were still alive, and
Abbott did some lecturing at the school. Our understanding of the
impact of poverty was informed by Charlotte Towle's Common
Human Needs, which emphasized respect and empathy. I studied
psychiatric social work, getting a thorough grounding in the work
of Freud. My friends and I spent a lot of time discussing how to
combine Marxism and psychoanalytic theory, with little success.
These intense encounters with Freud left me highly suspicious of
the value of a psychoanalytic perspective for most of the issues in
which I was interested, and I have never been convinced that I
should change this critical view.
Outside of class, I was active in founding, and the first chairperson
of, a student chapter of the United Office and Professional Workers
Union, which was later destroyed by McCarthy-era
anticommunism. We gathered signatures for Henry Wallace, wrote
and performed skits opposing the Taft-Hartley Act, and supported
antiracism efforts and community organizers such as Saul Alinsky.
Women's issues were nowhere to be seen. Since I was often a vocal
participant in both political and theory discussions, I was beginning
to see myself as a thinker, as well as a doer.
I received my M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, got
married, and soon got pregnant. I married an intellectual, New
York radical, graduate student in sociology, and we moved to
Manhattan, where we started confronting together the problems of
family and work. Our solutions were the only ones that seemed
possible at the time. He worked full-time and continued to a
doctorate in psychology, studying at night. I worked part-time as a
social worker and took care of the kids (soon there were three).
Although my husband was supportive, that did not change the
structural facts. Over the years, our solution became more and
more impossible for me. In the late 1950s Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex was translated into En-
 Page 31
glish, and I used it as I used Dr. Spockwhen some new problem
came up, I looked it up in de Beauvoir.
Combining work, politics, and family life was difficult but possible
in New York City, but not in Mountain View, California, where we
moved with my husbands career. There I spent a year or two out of
the labor force in a suburban tract house. I had a few part-time
jobs, but most of the time I was doing the laundry or gardening in
rubber thongs, jeans, and my husband's old shirts. It was there that
I fully faced what had happened to the superstudent, superorganizer
I had been. I had lost much of my self-confidence. This was clear
to me when I panicked after I had agreed to put out the two-page
PTA newsletter. I had no sense that I could do it. Then one day I
found myself in Sears, my youngest child in a stroller, staring at the
fabric counter for ten minutes, trying to decide what to buy for my
current sewing project, and realizing that whatever I bought, I
would have no place to wear the dress I would make.
I decided that I had to do something. I knew that my male
colleagues from graduate school were moving into important
administrative and policy jobs, while I was always starting over at
the bottom. In addition, I wanted to get out of social work because
the work I had done seemed to be hopeless battling against
impossible problems. Trying to help solve, individual by
individual, problems created by the maldistribution of economic
and social power became, for me, too depressing. The only way I
knew to make up the gap of twelve years of sporadic and part-time
work, and to do something in which I could feel some hope, was to
get more education. I had worked on a research project located in
the Stanford Department of Sociology; my background was in
sociology; this was the obvious answer. When I talked to the head
of the Stanford Sociology Department, however, he was decidedly
cool to the idea that I might apply there, indicating that I was the
wrong age and the wrong sex. At about that time, my husband had
a chance at a job at the University of Oregon, and when I applied, I
was immediately accepted as a doctoral student in the Department
of Sociology there.
So with my greatly reduced sense of intellectual efficacy, at the age
of thirty-seven I returned to academia, an instrumental move to try
to circumvent social structure. I and my husband and our three
children moved to Eugene in 1961, a decision made for both of us.
In that small town, combining work or school with parenthood was
much easier than in the other cities in which we had lived. Our
house was two blocks from campus, and the public schools were
almost as close. I never again had to drive the children anywhere. It
was easy to hire students to take care of the kids when necessary.
Altogether a good solution.
 Page 32
The Department of Sociology was both welcoming and not
welcoming. Two of the all-male faculty were particularly
supportive, Herb Bisno and Robert Ellis. Others, such as Robert
Dubin, seemed to have a dim view of women as graduate students
and sociologists. Dubin, as I recall, openly expressed his
disapproval in the classroom. I think that these attitudes were one
of the reasons that, although there were several women in my
cohort, I was the only one who survived. I tried to ignore these
verbal attacks on women and on the surface was successful,
probably because I had a very supportive husband and because I
saw no alternative to persevering. In addition, I was older than
most of the other women, with a certain success as a professional
to bolster me. Moreover, I had men friends among the students,
including John McCarthy and Scott McNall, who, as I saw it,
accepted me as one of them, their equal.
The intellectual world of the university and the Department of
Sociology at the University of Oregon was very different from the
world in which I had first experienced higher education. There was
no talk of Marx or of Freud. This was the era of Talcott Parsons,
Robert Merton, functionalism, and quantitative analysis. I had to
learn a new vocabulary and a new way of thinking. I knew nothing
about roles, statuses, and institutions or about consensus, a totally
new word for me. When Miriam Johnson asked me if I, too, was
interested in socialization, I didn't know what she was talking
about. Approaches to class that we had scornfully rejected as
bourgeois at Hunter were the only approaches discussed. Most
courses were rigorously nonhistorical, except for the "history of
social thought" in which students regularly fell asleep.
I still did not think of myself as really an intellectual. Although I
did very well in all my courses, I experienced a disconcerting
distance, even alienation, from the theoretical material. This I
interpreted as a lack of fit between my earlier Marxist perspective
and the Parsonian functionalism that was substantially the only
doctrine taught at that time. Now I would interpret at least part of
my disquiet in terms of what Dorothy Smith has called a bifurcated
consciousness. I had to insert myself into a way of thinking in
which I could not recognize myself. I did it, but the fit was
superficial; I never became a believer.
I continued during my graduate student years to be politically
active; I had no feelings of alienation in that arena. I was among
the faculty and students who organized one of the first teach-ins in
the United States to oppose the Vietnam War. The civil rights
movement was also expanding, and my husband and I were active
there. With the War on Poverty emerging after the assassination of
John Kennedy, great possibilities for reform
 Page 33
seemed to be suddenly present. I was by that time teaching courses
on social welfare as a graduate student, and I did a good bit to
involve women in the welfare rights movement in my courses and
to support them as I could. We did not at that time see welfare
rights as a woman's movement, but in retrospect it was clearly that.
As I approached the dissertation, I was unclear about what I wanted
to do. Dubin offered me dissertation support through a Ford
Foundation grant he had for research on organizations, and I
accepted. He made a few good suggestions about methods and
theory, but mostly he left me on my own, and I wrote an acceptable
thesis on the Department of Welfare's relationships with business
firms. I got a great deal of help in finishing my thesisone of my
male colleagues took over my classes, and my husband took over
child care and housework so that I could work without interruption.
I finished the Ph.D. in 1967. With all this accomplished, I still felt
like an outsider, not a real sociologist, whatever that might have
been.
With my degree in hand, I had nowhere to go, committed as I was
to being with my family in Eugene. Happily for me, the
Department of Sociology offered me a job, a tenure-track position.
The late 1960s were still a period of expansion in higher education,
and I was one of the many who benefited. I think that I was hired
partly because I could teach the social welfare courses. I was the
first woman to have a regular, tenure-track position in the
Department of Sociology at Oregon. In spite of some new
supportive male colleagues, also recently hired and on the Left
politically, I did not feel myself a part of the group. Moreover, I
still felt estranged from the discipline. Its problems were only
peripherally interesting to me; its ways of thinking were still
foreign.
In retrospect I can also see that I was intimidated by "science."
Although structural functionalism did not really sink into my brain,
the idea that we were building a science did. I soaked up notions
that science was built through hypothesis testing and the use of
rigorous standards of evidence that could be met by a researcher
following carefully set procedures and quantitative analysis. This
rigor was paralyzingly extreme, but also mysterious, I see in
looking back. It was so extreme that I never even considered
publishing anything from my first independent research, a study of
doctor-patient contact based on meticulously recorded
observational data. Somewhere in my thinking was a sociologist-
judge (a distillation of all the old boys who had been my teachers,
perhaps) who would find me lacking in precision, having too small
a sample, or showing some other defect.
The beginning of the women's movement and my divorce in the
late
 Page 34
1960s changed my life and my thinking. Feminism had been
creeping into my consciousness since the late 1950s, and by 1969 I
was ready for the explosion of the movement in Oregon. I think it
was in 1969 that there was a large feminist conference on the
University of Oregon campus, carefully monitored by the FBI, we
later learned. The same year I taught my first course on women, a
seminar with graduate students. This was very exciting, and the
next term I followed it with a large course in the sociology of
women, with the graduate students as discussion leaders. That was
the best course I ever taught. There was practically no literature,
certainly little critical feminist literature. I scoured the library and
made up the course content as I went along. Both the students and I
were charged with energy and interest. Often there was standing
room only in the classroom. It was an evening class, and
sometimes we had to be evicted by the cleaning crew that came in
at 11:00 P.M.
I began to do critiques of mainstream theory as I taught this first
course. Since I had been teaching courses on class and stratification
and on organizations, these were the areas in which I began to see
inconsistencies, contradictions, and absences of women. Women, it
was perfectly obvious, were absent or were treated inconsistently in
all class and stratification studies, including those by Marxists.
Almost all mobility studies were done with samples of men. In
other kinds of studies, women were presumed to take the class
positions of their husbands, but if women had no husbands and
were employed, they had their own class positions. A woman's
class position could change for no other reason than that she had
married, but marital status was not a primary determinant of class
in any theoretical tradition. Class theories could not account for the
subordination of married women to their husbands' class positions
or for women's secondary status in the labor force. Class and
stratification analyses were blind to one of the most pervasive and
systematic inequalities, that based on sex. How, then, could these
theories pretend to conceptualize societywide economic and status
structuring?
In spite of excitement about such new feminist ideas and feminist
organizing, I still felt uneasy in academia, an odd person, still the
only woman in the department. I seriously considered leaving the
university world and took a year away, working in a large mental
health agency, to see what it would be like. I made a lot more
money as a management person, but sociology had spoiled me for
the world of those who deal only with individual troubles. I
returned to Oregon, with assurances from one of the male faculty
that it was great to have me back because I had the best-looking
legs in the department. Commitment to feminist work prevailed
over such
 Page 35
reassurances, and I stayed in the discipline, finally thinking that I
might yet be a real sociologist.
The women's movement made the difference, led me to decide to
stay Feminism helped me to begin to make some order in my
theoretical thinking and to understand why sociology had been so
alienating and confusing to me. As for so many of us, the effort to
understand why I felt like an outsider, perpetually uncomfortable,
perhaps just not getting it, was extremely stimulating. Finally I was
asking myself questions that made sense to me, that were
interesting. They were my questions, not questions dredged from
some "body of literature" and couched in the concepts of some
bodiless "theorist." These questions were about the discipline (why
was sociology so unreceptive to questions about women?) and
about particular theoretical issues (what was it about the internal
structures of theories of class or formal organization, for example,
that either marginalized women or made them invisible?).
The 1970s were exhilarating. When I returned to Eugene, many
things started to happen. I and some of my friends on the faculty
began a research group on women. The first project was a study of
the status of women at the University of Oregon, a process going
on at many universities. We found, of course, few women either
tenured or in tenure-track positions and a large gender wage gap.
With this as ammunition, some of us started a campaign for
affirmative action by the university After an investigation by the
federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the
university was forced to move on the issue, and the battleground
turned to the department.
Richard Hill was by that time, 1972, the department head. He
opposed affirmative action on the grounds that he was against
quotas of any kind. However, after late hours of argument, he
changed his mind and became the strongest male supporter of
women and of feminist research on the campus.
Dick's support was critical in the establishment of our women's
research center as a recognized part of the institution. With his
help, I and two others put together a proposal to the graduate
school for such an interdisciplinary center. When all other
department heads could see no sense in the proposal and it was
turned down, Dick suggested that we establish it in the Department
of Sociology. This proposal was approved, and we got a small
amount of money per year, enough to pay a graduate assistant to do
some research and keep things going. This Center for the
Sociological Study of Women was the reason that a man named
William Harris decided in 1975 to make the University of Oregon
the sole beneficiary of his estate. The rest of that story comes later.
 Page 36
Also in the early 1970s, another woman, Miriam Johnson, joined
the faculty, and we began to have Ph.D. students doing
dissertations on women. These were heady days of sisterhood and
cooperation, at least in my perception. We began to hire more
women, and the feminist presence in the department became
obvious. Sociology was the first department to reach its affirmative
action goals. Some of us cooperated on research proposals. We
developed a feminism scale and carried out another study of the
status of women at the university. This time a human subjects
review was required, and we had difficulty getting approval on the
grounds that findings might embarrass the university. We also
developed a series of new courses about women and revised other
courses, such as the family course, to reflect the new feminist
research and theory. These courses were an important part of the
women's studies program we were also developing. In all of this,
there was nothing but support from the male members of the
sociology faculty. Even so, there were rumors that the men were
worried and possibly envious and thought that we were plotting
and acting as a bloc in the department. This was true, of course.
During the same years, the early 1970s, I began to publish and to
get rid of some of the inner prohibitions that said that my work was
never perfect or scientific enough. I submitted my first article, on
women and stratification, in 1970 to the American Journal of
Sociology, thanks to the urging of my colleague Steven Deutsch. 1 I
argued that invisibility of women in class analyses could be
rectified by scholars taking the individual, not the family, as the
unit. In this way, women could be seen as having their own class
positions, which might or might not be the same as those of the
men, if any, in their lives. The article was published in 1973, but I
soon saw that the problem could not be so easily solved by the
assigning of women to their own class positions, that only a
fundamental rethinking of the conceptualization of class could
produce theories that would include both women and men. I have
worked sporadically on this problem, now called gender and class,
ever since.
My second article, a feminist critique of the Hawthorne Studies and
of Michael Crozier's work published in the Administrative Science
Quarterly in 1974, was coauthored with Don Van Houten, one of
the most congenial coauthors I have ever had.2 I cotaught a
seminar on race and sexwe weren't talking about gender thenwith
David Wellman. I participated in student-initiated seminars on the
Frankfurt School and went dancing on Saturday nights with other
Left faculty and graduate students. I was never close to the
doctrinaire Marxists in the department because they seemed to be
full of their own brilliance and I couldn't be just a listener to their
pontifications.
 Page 37
However, other male colleagues who were progressive but critical
of orthodoxy were closer to my emerging perspective than were my
women colleagues. I did not see this at the time, in the euphoric
days of ''early" academic feminism.
My intellectual interests joined those who were working to reclaim
Marxist theory for the feminist project. I joined them primarily
through journals and books, as I had no colleagues, other than
some very good graduate students, at Oregon with this perspective.
Somewhat later I found Nona Glazer in Portland, and still later
Sally Hacker in Corvallis, Oregon, both of whom shared my point
of view. Marxist theory was very difficult to reclaim when it came
to class analysis. Marxist feminist arguments that domestic labor
produces value broke new ground but finally were not successful in
producing a gendered theory of class. I thought that other efforts
were also unsatisfactory.
Socialist feminism, in contrast to Marxist feminism, seemed by the
early 1970s to offer a feminist critical stance toward Marxism,
while not rejecting the overall critique of capitalism or the
commitment to emancipation and democracy. Theories of
capitalism and patriarchy seemed a solution but also had
limitations. Those were pre-postmodemist times, so the criticisms
did not attack patriarchy/capitalism theories as totalizing grand
narratives that silence the voices of numerous others. However, to
my mind the criticisms were serious. Dual systems theories were
flawed, as Iris Young pointed out, in the way that they constructed
a theory of women's oppression as a corrective to the theory of
class oppression, leaving class theory, which had already been
analyzed as sorely deficient, essentially unaltered. 3 This was the
fundamental defect that made me reject this solution to the
problem. Yet I still wanted, intellectually and politically needed, a
theoretical approach that would allow me to think about myself and
other women as located within large, historical processes that had
something to do with our different fates.
Getting articles accepted by the American Journal of Sociology and
the Administrative Science Quarterly and having the support of
men and women colleagues were not enough to give me complete
confidence in my ideas and my capacities. I had contraindications.
For one thing, I could never get my research funded; eventually I
gave up writing research proposals.
Another problem was that I, along with many others, was in
uncharted territory. The critique of knowledge both from the
Frankfurt School perspective and emerging feminist work was
most persuasive, but there was still a huge distance between those
critiques and a feminist sociology grounded in women's
experiences. Dorothy Smith's theoretical and methodological
 Page 38
work on a sociology for women opened new ways of thinking for
me. 4Dorothy came to Eugene in 1972 or 1973 to present a paper at
the western meetings of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. Dorothys analysis gave clarity and form
to the estrangement, even disassociation, I felt as a woman in a still
almost totally male academic world. The idea of a bifurcated
consciousnessthat women going into an academic discipline have
to learn to think in ways that have already erased their presence,
that there are no words in the conceptual vocabularies of the
academic disciplines that accurately express the experiences of
womenrang absolutely true for me. And the implications were
daunting: everything had to be rethought; nothing, no work, no
theory, could simply be uncritically accepted. Dorothy also
proposed an approach, a place to beginin the everyday experiences
of women. Our explorations should only start there, she said; our
aims should be to comprehend how those experiences come about,
how they are, in practice, tied into the social relations that
constitute the larger society Applying these ideas in actual research
was not easy, as two of my then-graduate students, Kate Barry and
Joke Esseveld, and I found out in research on the lives of middle-
aged women that we started in 1976. The process of trying to do
nonexploitative, possibly emancipatory research was fraught with
contradictions. Analysis of masses of interview material on
individual lives was even more difficult. The construction of
categories or types based on some sort of conceptual scheme was a
common strategy at that time. This we rejected on the ground that
it violated the complexities of the women's livesto force them into
categories meant stripping away content that was essential to
understanding lives as experience extending through time.
Moreover, we had rejected all conceptual frameworks, such as role
or socialization theory, that seemed to be available. At the same
time, we did not want to present unanalyzed life histories, for we
had theoretical interests and the women with whom we were
working wanted and expected interpretations. The result of our
endless discussions about how to do feminist analysis was that we
published only two articles from this research.5Perhaps another
reason that we never produced a book from this research was that I
had not completely escaped from my doubts about being a scholar.
In retrospect, I see a review article I published in Current
Sociology in 1980 as the culminating example of my inhibiting
inner strictures.6 I worked on that tenpage article for a year,
reading, analyzing, and assessing everything that could possibly
relate to theoretical and empirical issues about women and
class/stratification. I believe that the article was good but that the
amount of work involved could have produced a book instead of an
 Page 39
article in which every sentence was a tightly packed condensation
of days and weeks of work.
My interpretation of what was going on in my thinking has
developed as I have thought about another incident that occurred
somewhat later. This was known in my department as the Sex and
Work Discussion. In the Sociology Department there were, most of
us believed, several male faculty members who regularly had
affairs with women graduate students. Not just once or twice, but
in succession. The women so favored often benefited, or appeared
to benefit, from the relationships, with easy teaching assistant
assignments from their lovers, and even, some said, with special
consideration in evaluations. Some of the women students who
were not so entangled came to me with the complaint that such
benefits were not fair. I agreed to take the matter up in the
department and put "sex and work" on the next agenda. My
intention was just to get the department to affirm the same policies
for such couples that we had for married couples on the faculty. For
example, Ben Johnson would never sit on a committee deciding on
the promotion of his wife, Miriam Johnson.
However, the discussion immediately took off into indignant
charges that I was trying to police the private lives of faculty and
students and was interfering with their civil rights. I and others
retorted that it was not a matter of civil rights but fairnesspeople
should not get special favors because of their intimate ties. One
woman graduate student talked about the devastating consequences
to her self-esteem after she broke off a relationship with a faculty
member at another university. She, who had been the intellectual
star of her cohort, was suddenly attacked by her rejected lover as
academically incompetent. Suddenly, I found myself quoting Jessie
Bernard to the effect that if a woman wants to become a productive
scholar, "you've got to get the man out of your head." And, I went
on, "you've got to get the man out of your bed." This, of course, did
nothing to dampen the controversy or endear me to those with such
relationships. Most of the men involved, including leading
Marxists in the department, and the women who were their
followers were decidedly cool toward me for a number of years.
However, we did go on to establish a policy about faculty serving
on committees evaluating students with whom they have an
intimate relationship and suggesting that they not ask that such
students be assigned to them as teaching or research assistants.
Later, such a policy was established for the university as a whole.
But the point of this story is in the insight about the importance of
the man in your head and the man in your bed. I think that
remnants of
 Page 40
the man in my headin my case the guardians of science and the
representatives of theoretical sophisticationlasted much longer than
I had thought. The work of many feminists, Dorothy Smith in
particular, helped me to unclutter my brain and start thinking
differently. Ultimately, I had to confront the problem on my own
because part of the solution for me was to be willing to take
chances, to commit myself fully to my own position, unconstrained
by any lingering questions about what "they" might think. That
came slowly, but, on the whole, it happened.
As to the man in your bedfortunately I never had an enduring
relationship with a sociologist (my ex-husband began transforming
himself into a psychologist soon after we married). I think that my
problems might have been more difficult had this been the case
because the man in my head and the man in my bed might have
been the same person, multiplying the negative effects of relative
powerlessness. Although I am talking about heterosexual
relationships, I think it is possible that similar processes operate in
nonheterosexual situations. I was lucky (or wise) enough to never
live with anyone after my divorce. I love to live alone, and I doubt
that I could have done what I have done in the last twenty-five
years if my living arrangements had been different. I have
sometimes lived with one or more of my children, all of them male,
but they were never a problem.
The era of feminist togetherness was drawing to a close in my
department by the last years of the 1970s. Our collaboration on
research had been precariously held together by enthusiasm.
However, there were deep divisions among us. I was a socialist
feminist concerned with transforming Marxism and developing
research from women's perspectives. The others were functionalists
and/or committed to positivist models of science that, to my mind,
were marred most severely by their faith that the researcher
occupies a space outside the phenomenon under investigation. I
had no direct disagreements with my women colleagues that I can
remember, but we slowly stopped our collaboration; we were
interested in different issues. I was also much more an activist, and
more radical in my activism, than they were.
These differences developed into open conflict when the benefactor
of our research center died and we found out that the center would
get more than $3 million. The issues were about whether the center
should be exclusively devoted to research or should have some
connection to women's studies and some ties to feminist activism
in the community. We arrived at a truce, the reorganized center
began to function in fall 1983, and I became the director.
Unfortunately, disagreements about the direction of the center
continued, and it became evident to all of us that the two sides
could not
 Page 41
come together. I and a number of others did not want to replicate a
traditional university research center; on the other side there was a
refusal to involve the center in anything but traditional academic
research. There were other differences. I was convinced about the
feminist critique of science and was working on various criticisms
of sociology that went far beyond the positions of those who
disagreed with me. I worked on reform effortssuch as the
comparable worth task force in Oregon and saw this as the
opportunity for research, as well as action. Some of those on the
other side couldn't see this, believing that such research was, at
best, only applied work.
The conflict was resolved for me when in late 1986 I left to work in
Stockholm. In a long-term perspective, the center conflict had a
most positive outcome for me as a scholar and a person. I was
invited to work at the Swedish Center for Working Life, where I
spent three years. At this Swedish Center I had the most supportive
work environment I had ever had, including a marvelous library,
great colleagues, and plenty of time. As an outsider, I was free
from the organizational conflict in which I had always been
enmeshed. I had the time and the emotional space to develop my
ideas rapidly and to do, for me, a lot of writing. Living in a new
country where I was not controversial, I was able to finally become
the arbiter of my own work. This made me much more comfortable
with outside criticism. Now, most of the time, I welcome, rather
than dread, it. And I have benefited tremendously from criticisms
and suggestions from many colleagues, including Nona Glazer,
Dorothy Smith, Harriet Holter, Sally Hacker, Don Van Houten,
Ronnie Steinberg, Arlene Daniels, Judith Lorber, Joke Esseveld,
Kate Barry, Annika Baude, Wuokko Knocke, Lena Gonãs, Hildur
Ve, Arnlaug Leira, and Cynthia Cockburn.
In Sweden I completed yet another paper on gender and class,
which had its beginnings in my efforts to interpret in class terms
the experiences of the middle-aged women in our study of the late
1970s. 7 Instead of trying to locate them in a preordered class
scheme, I tried to start from what was most problematic for them
and to ask how that came about, as Dorothy Smith suggests. For
many of the women, economic, social, and emotional dependence
was most problematic. Interpreting dependence as an aspect of the
way they were situated in the social relations of our society, I
argued that their locations within relations of distribution, which
include the wage, personal or family relations, and welfare,
produced their dependence. To understand capitalist societies, it
was necessary, I thought, to theorize distribution as well as
productionthat women, children, and men not gainfully employed
participate in capitalist societies and that failure to
 Page 42
include all of these people in understandings of class structure
constitutes a failure of adequate comprehension.
I also began to argue, along with others, that social relations are
gendered, that relations that constitute class also constitute gender
and race/ ethnicity as well. Thus, we have to talk about one system,
or complex of relations, not dual or multiple systems. I also began
to see that to avoid the dangers of dual or multiple systems
theories, we would have to study social relations as concrete
practices and processes occurring under specific historical
conditions. In other words, the highest-level abstractions were
useless, except perhaps as general, orienting guides. I argued with
friends who were still structural Marxists about level of
analysismode of production, social formation, conjunctureand I
worried (but not much) about what happened to Marxism if we
totally abandoned the labor theory of value. I finally concluded that
Marxism as usually interpreted could not be pushed or pulled into a
feminist version because it was constructed with abstractions
within which gender could not appear. I think that Dorothy Smith is
right when she argues that women and gender cannot be
satisfactorily brought into Marxist political economy because "the
very presuppositions of discourse have already denied them
presence." 8 Political economy, she suggests, takes its topics,
relevances, and boundaries from "the main business," the
organization, management, planning, and ruling of the capitalist
economy, arenas in which women are absent and gender is present
but invisible.
In trying to set down this chronology, I realize that I cannot
remember exactly when I began to think in certain ways. I am also
not sure whose work I have appropriated, so I have probably come
to believe that ideas that came from others were somehow mine. In
any case, by the time of publication, I had decided that my article
on class, gender, and the relations of distribution had not
satisfactorily solved the problem of women and class and that I
would stop ruminating about Marxism. Perhaps my way of putting
the issuewomen and classonly revealed that I was still caught in a
paradigm I was trying to reject. Moreover, women of color were
showing that white feminist theory reproduced relations of power
and domination among women. Postmodern feminist criticism was
making similar charges, and socialist feminist theorizing seemed to
have few openings toward solutions.
Still in my Swedish period of peace and productivity, I dealt with
this conceptual impasse by turning to empirical work to try to
figure out what I meant when I said that all social relations are
gendered. I started with class and gender in the concrete practices
of doing comparable worth in Or-
 Page 43
egon, writing a book about gender/class processes that became
visible in the process of organizational change. 9 Comparable
worth projects attempted to achieve pay equity between women's
and men's jobs by first evaluating those jobs on the same criteria,
then by comparing the salaries of women's and men's jobs with
similar evaluation scores, and finally by adjusting pay levels so that
jobs with comparable scores would have comparable pay Most
projects used the services of job evaluation consultants with
experience and methods to sell. In my research on the Oregon
project, I was able to observe the Hay Associates method of job
evaluation. Analyzing the data from that project, I realized that I
had seen, as Hay Associates consultants explained job evaluation,
the discursive creation of ostensibly gender-neutral categories
whose gendered nature is hidden by the denial of the existence of
human bodies in the categories. The consultants told us
emphatically that in order to evaluate jobs, we had to think of them
as abstract, hierarchically ordered sets of "job demands,"
unconnected to actual people, thus containing no bodies and no
gender. These were "gender-neutral" concepts, positions, and
hierarchies, central to notions of structure, that make it so difficult
to insert women into most theoretical discourse, and they were
being actively produced as a real organization was being
reconstructed. This recognition led me to try to think more about
bodies and sexuality, their absence in organizational theory, and
how all this might be linked to women's relative subordination in
organizations. Of course, my reading Michel Foucault and feminist
discussions of bodies and sexuality must have had a lot to do with
this line of thinking.10
Another attempt to deal with the conceptual dead end of socialist
feminism through empirical work was a study of Swedish banks. I
tried to help women in the bank workers' union discover why the
gender wage gap was increasing after having shrank for ten years.
The answer to the question was that the trend toward equality
halted when individually set wage increases became more frequent;
managers saw men as more deserving than women of extra
increases. Small decisions made possible by particular economic
and political conditionsderegulation of banks, a booming economy,
a tight labor market, and wage restraint on the part of
unionsresulted in a growing gender wage gap.11
In this study I learned again how unstable is the reality underlying
such a simple concept as a job. In Swedish banks, as well as in the
state of Oregon, a "job" is something that is in a constant process of
definition and redefinition, a process sometimes manipulated to
preserve sex segregation. Macrostructural and quantitative analyses
reify jobs as things that exist independently of the (gendered)
processes of their construction, as well as
 Page 44
independently of the sex of incumbents. This reification hides the
ongoing structuring of gender.
The study of banks also took me back to questions about power and
high finance and away from abstractions of class and gender. I
could not understand what was happening to bank tellers without
understanding Swedish banks' situations in a changing world of
finance capital. For a long time, having rejected "levels of analysis"
in some of its meanings, I had also been uneasy with notions of
micro and macro and with the way that sociologists in general
think "structure." People, all men in this case, made decisions
about Swedish banks as a whole in response to ideology and to
decisions other people made in Sweden and other countries. The
effects of their decisions could, if one wanted to tag them so, be
seen as macrostructures or macroforces, but that is mystifying,
erasing gender, bodies and sexuality. Sally Hacker, before she died
in 1988, had started to explore connections among technology,
forms of masculinity, sexuality, and power, suggesting that working
with technology is pleasurable, even erotically pleasurable, and that
these pleasures may be linked to pleasures of power. 12 think that
Sally's work should be extended, although I am not suggesting a
return to Freud or even a rereading of Herbert Marcuse. She was
onto something different, I think, grounded in her own bodily
experiences and her empirical research.
I had, and still have, another, continuing project in Swedento
understand the contradiction between the Swedes' belief that theirs
is a sex-equal society and the most evident, to me and my Swedish
feminist friends, subordination of women. How is this
contradiction maintained and made invisible to so many? How is it
that Sweden has made so much and so little progress toward gender
equality? One way or another, I have been working on this question
since I began spending considerable time in Sweden in 1981. This
is another way of looking at gender and class, but this time in the
context of debates about the welfare state. I have been influenced
by feminist discussions of culture and language and have been
interested by the ways that women's issues have been phrased to fit
into male-defined political agendas. Now my question is changing
as the Swedish welfare state is threatened in this era of the
renaissance of predatory capitalism. Since 1992 I have been
studying how politically active women in Sweden are responding
to threats to the welfare state and how the discourses of reform are
changing in Sweden.13
So where am I now, in 1996? The man in my head is, I hope, dead,
and I have not replaced him with a feminist authority. I cannot find
a label for my theoretical position. Socialist feminism no longer
exactly fits; but it
 Page 45
never had an exact meaning. Marxism can't be made over, yet we
still need it in these days of a totalizing and globalizing capitalism.
Perhaps feminists will still find a way to transform it. Adequate
theory, for me, must attend to the criticisms from women of color,
women from postcolonial countries, and from at least some of the
postmodernist and poststructuralist feminists. Language, images,
identity, texts, are important, but they are not everything;
capitalism is still there, and its effects become more, not less,
alarming.
I think there is a pressing need for a new feminist analysis of
economy that breaks out of the boundaries of "the economic" as
represented by both neoclassical and Marxist political economy.
(Rational choice theory frightens me.) I understood that a new
feminist economics is a practical, political necessity when I
interviewed activist Swedish women who were talking about a
women's party. They realized that they could not successfully
engage in the political process unless they could present an
economic program that would make possible their other policy
goals. Such an economics would privilege people over profits and
encompass environmental issues; its standpoints would be located
outside the "main business," in the daily struggles of women
around the world. Of course, such efforts are being made by some
feminist scholars already. Perhaps the new Marx of the twenty-first
century will be a feminist collective.
To prepare the ground for that collective, there is still a lot of
deconstruction and reconstruction to do. Our ways of
conceptualizing are deeply implicated in the relations of ruling. As
a consequence, we may be reproducing the ideological forms of the
relations we oppose even as we are criticizing them. But there is no
easy solution. For example, I recently was asked to write a short
piece on gendered institutions and did so. 14However, I should
have questioned the concept of institution, which is firmly rooted
in a theoretical tradition of which I have been critical. Instead, I
used the concept because it does stand for something we can
recognize. Many of the concepts that enter into the objectifying,
mystifying practices of theory, contributing to the invisibility of
women and gender, represent the organization of social relations
that still exists and that feminists often oppose. To the extent that
institution implies a universal normative form, it obscures or
renders deviant many different ways that people construct their
lives. The use of such a concept is part of the process of embedding
it and its normative assumptions in the taken-for-granted of
sociological talk. Yet sometimes not to use this concept as a
convenient shorthand is awkward, even distorting. Similar
dilemmas exist in many other efforts to move beyond the
conceptual practices we have criticized.
All of this is interesting, even exciting, but in the absence of a
vibrant
 Page 46
social movement, I miss the 1970s. I also feel insulated now by age
and, possibly, retirement from teaching, from the sorts of
exhilarating battles that used to take a lot of my time and energy. I
have received some awards for my work, which are affirmations
for me but also signal that critical feminist sociology now has a
legitimate place in the discipline in the United States. This is due to
the work of many, many feminist scholars. I only hope that we
don't lose our critical edge as we start to get such mainstream
rewards. The attenuation of the links between academic feminism
and the women's movement means that our primary source of
creativity and vitality is much weaker, making it easier to forget
that critical edge has to do with feminist action, as well as
academic politics.
I feel satisfied, even though theoretical problems seem more
difficult now than twenty-five years ago. My work has evidently
had some impact. I think I am a better, more productive scholar
today than I ever was. I am doing new research on gender and
organizational restructuring with Don Van Houten. I return
frequently for long periods of time to Sweden, Finland, and
Norway, where I have many coworkers and friends. I do research
in Scandinavia, and my work is sometimes published in Nordic
languages. My political commitments have not changed, and I still
think it is possible to do research that has both theoretical and
practical implications. Feminist sociology has been an adventure
worth doing.

Notes
1. Joan Acker, "Women and Social Stratification: A Case of
Intellectual Sexism." American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973):
174-183.
2. Joan Acker and Donald Van Houten, "Differential Recruitment
and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations," Administrative
Science Quarterly 19 (June 1974):152-163.
3. Iris Young, "Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the
Dual Systems Theory," in Heidi Hartmann et al.. Women and
Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1981).
4. Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A
Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).
5. Joan Acker, Kate Barry, and Joke Esseveld, "Feminism, Female
Friends, and the Reconstruction of Intimacy," in Helena Lopata,
ed., The Interweave of Social Roles: Men and Women, vol. 2
(Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1981); Joan Acker, Joke Esseveld,
and Kate Barry, "Objectivity and Truth: Problems in Doing
Feminist Research," Women's Studies International Forum 6
(1983): 423-435.
6. Joan Acker, "Women and Stratification: A Review of Recent
Literature," Contemporary Sociology 9 (1980): 25-34.
7. Joan Acker, "Gender, Class, and the Relations of Distribution,"
Signs 13 (1988):473-497.
 Page 47
8. Dorothy E. Smith, ''Feminist Reflections on Political Economy,"
Studies in Political Economy 30 (1989): 52.
9. Joan Acker, Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class, and Pay
Equity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
10. Joan Acker, "Hierarchies, Jobs, and Bodies: A Theory of
Gendered Organizations," Gender and Society 4 (1990): 139-158;
Joan Acker, "Gendering Organizational Theory," in Albert J. Mills
and Peta Tancred, ed., Gendering Organizational Analysis
(London: Sage, 1992).
11. Joan Acker, "Thinking About Wages: The Gendered Wage Gap
in Swedish Banks," Gender and Society 5 (1991): 390-407; Joan
Acker, "The Gender Regime of Swedish Banks," Scandinavian
Journal of Management 10 (June 1994): 117-130.
12. Sally Hacker, Pleasure, Power, and Technology (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1989); Sally Hacker, "Doing It the Hard Way"
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
13. Joan Acker, "Reformer och kvinnor i den framtida
valfardstaten" (Reforms and women in the future welfare state), in
Joan Acker et al., Kvinnors och mans liv och arbete (Women's and
men's life and work) (Stockholm: SNS Forlag, 1992).
14. Joan Acker, "From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions,"
Contemporary Sociology 21 (1992): 565-569.
 Page 48

On Finding a Feminist Voice: Emotion in a

Sociological Life Story
Barbara Laslett
Emotions. This is a life story about emotions. About doubts and
uncertainties, passions and commitments, risk-taking and
resistance. For me, as for many intellectuals, confronting feelings
has been especially marked in the context of my work. Emotions
have shaped my intellectual choices and fueled the energy with
which I have pursued them. This story is about that processabout
how feelings affected my professional life, about how I came to
recognize their sociological importance, and about how I have
come to think about them theoretically. The various experiences
that make up this personal narrative describe the journey that got
me from where I started to where I am nowand the voice I found
along the way. My narrative also provides a theoretical argument
about the importance of emotions in the development of feminist
sociology.

In 1965 I entered the doctoral program in sociology at the

University of Chicago. I was thirty-two years old, the mother of a
one-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son, and a faculty wife.
I hadn't been a student since 1959, when I had received an
interdisciplinary master's degree in social science from the
University of Chicago. I was very nervous and very uncertain
about my abilities. My undergraduate career had not been a
distinguished one, and I wasn't at all sure about how I would fare in
the highly competitive atmosphere into which I was entering,
especially given my family responsibilities. Would I be able to do
it? As it turns out, I wasn't the only one who was uncertain. From
stories that reached me after the fact, the department had been
resistant to admitting me. (A faculty wife! A mother! Surely not a
good investment!) And throughout my graduate student career,
whenever I met a certain eminent sociologist in the hallways of the
social sciences building, he would look at me with a puzzled
expression on
Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Laslett.
 Page 49
his face and say, "Oh, yes, you're Mrs. Laslett. Your husband
teaches in the History Department. Are you really serious about
this?"
I didn't really need other people's doubts; I had quite enough of my
own. In 1950 1 had entered the College at the University of
Chicago as an undergraduate. My parents had supported an
expectation that I would go to college but surprised me by saying
that I could go out of town. I had just assumed that I would go to
one of the city colleges in New York City, where I had grown up.
To the extent that I had thought about my future at all, it was to do
a fine arts degree at Brooklyn College. 1 My choice of the
University of Chicago was based on very little knowledge. I had a
friend who was there, and I didn't really know about many other
places. At the time I chose Chicago, I had no idea that a radical
experiment in undergraduate education was in place or that
Chicago was a great university.
Both of my parents were raised in poor, Orthodox Jewish families,
and to my knowledge neither of them had finished more than about
a tenth-grade education. During my lifetime, my father was a self-
employed salesman of commercial refrigeration; he had
immigrated to the United States from what was then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. My mother,
who had been born in the United States, achieved a relatively high-
level job for a woman in the 1920s. She had managed to get to and
through secretarial school and had ended up as private secretary to
the chief lawyer at Paramount Films when its offices were located
in New York. I had one brother, five years older than myself, and
although the story is a bit murky, I think my mother returned to
work after my brother's birth. She did the office work in my father's
business from the time I was five years old until they both retired
in the late 1950s. I grew up in a mainly lower-middle-class
environment in the Bronx, where I went to quite ordinary public
schools.
After two not very lustrous years in the undergraduate program at
the University of Chicago, I dropped out of collegenot quite
knowing why I was there or where I was going. Although I had
done well as a high school student, I wasn't that outstanding that I
could tell whether my poor performance as an undergraduate was
because I wasn't smart enough or because I spent too much time
fooling around and singing folk songs. I worked at various clerical
jobs in New York for the next four years and, after a romance gone
awry, returned to Chicago in 1956 to finish my undergraduate
degree. I continued on for an M.A. in social science (finally, my
college grades began to indicate that I might have some intellectual
ability), although I didn't have any clearly formulated career plans
at the time. I thought vaguely about being a left-wing political
journalistan odd
 Page 50
goal given that I suffered quite badly from writer's block. But I
didn't have to figure out that future quite yet.
I was married in 1959 and emigrated to England with my husband
at the beginning of 1960; there I had a variety of jobs (including
some teaching and research at the University of Liverpool) until we
moved back to Chicago in August 1962, where my husband had a
faculty appointment. Our son, Michael, was born in October of that
year. After one year of full-time motherhood, I began looking
around for a job and was fortunate enough to find part-time work
as research assistant to Alice S. Rossi. I worked for her between
1963 and 1965. As part of the job interview, Alice asked what I
thought I would be doing in ten years. I answered that I expected to
be working at a job but I had no clearly formed professional
ambitions. That was to change substantially over the next two
years.
What was not to change for a very long time was the question
about my intellectual abilities. I carried those doubts with me for
most of my career. Only within the past few years have I found a
voice in which I have some confidence. Without the women's
movement, I don't think it would have been possible. I especially
don't think I could have come to understand, honor, and celebrate
the pleasures and commitments that fuel and foster the voice I have
found. Without the energy and directions that my feelings
encouraged, I also would not have been as likely to participate in
the political and intellectual work that has fostered feminist
scholarship in sociology and within the academy in general. Those
actions are part of the story that follows.
William Fielding . . . Who?
Like many stories, however, I have to begin closer to the end of my
narrative than the beginningwith a research project I started to
work on in the early 1980s. It was a study of the life and work of
the Chicago/Columbia sociologist William Fielding Ogburn (1886-
1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology.
Throughout most of his careerfrom 1919, when he joined the
faculty at Barnard College/Columbia University until 1951, when
he retired from the University of Chicago, where he had moved in
1927Ogburn was an outspoken advocate of objectivism and
quantification in sociology. For him, the goal of sociology was to
become more scientific, and it was this goal, as well as his
definition of science, that I wanted to understand sociologically.
But why did I choose this topic? Why did I choose this man's life
to study? Why did I choose a life history approach at all? In one
way, I didn't know the answer to these questions when
 Page 51
I began this work. In another way, however, like any family tree,
there are traceable connections.
Although I never met Ogburn, I was socialized into the discipline
of sociology at the University of Chicago, where he spent many
years of his career and where he left his imprint on the faculty and
on the graduate training program. My thesis supervisor, the late
Robert W Hodge, was trained by one of Ogburn's most prominent
students, Otis Dudley Duncan. Hodge was therefore an Ogburn
"grandchild," and I was a "great-grandchild"; the language of
kinship was actually used to describe relations between the
generations of Duncan and Hodge progeny. The women's
movement and an emerging feminist discourse within the academy
affected how I thought about the work I had been trained to do. I
began to question the positivist tenets that had been so central to
my graduate education. Given the family connections, it is not too
surprising that Ogburn should come to my mind as one of the
founding fathers of scientism in American sociology. Given his
often outspoken beliefs on the proper conduct of sociology,
however, my choice was based on more than the fictive kinship
between us.
William Fielding Ogburn is perhaps best known in sociology for
his theory of social change and the place of "cultural lag"a concept
he createdin that process. Equally important, however (perhaps
even more so), were Ogburn's articulation and advocacy of
sociology as a science. He believed that the social sciences had to
be radically differentiated from social philosophy and from social
action, each of which had been part of the discipline's history. For
Ogburn, sociology as a science should be concerned only with the
discovery of new knowledge, generating empirical facts that are
reliable, precise, and enduring. But he also believed there are
psychological barriers to obtaining exact scientific knowledge.
Throughout his career, Ogburn was concerned about the impact of
emotion on science. As a young man, he had read widely in
psychoanalytic theory; the theory of the unconscious particularly
impressed him. The unconscious nature of our desires, he thought,
posed problems for the objective, scientific sociologist. For
Ogburn, emotion was an enemy of science because it selected some
factors for attention while blinding us to others. Statistics, however,
offered a solution, he believed, because of the attention given to
selection and representativeness and because techniques such as
partial correlation (which he was among the first to use in social
research) could, he thought, control the distorting effects of
emotion. 2
But Ogburn's views about science and emotion only became clear
to me once my research was well advanced. When I began, I
thought the answer to my question of how and why scientism in
U.S. sociology had
 Page 52
developed as it had would lie in the political arena. I expected the
explanation to be found in the increasing demand for social
scientists in government from World War I onward, particularly
during the New Deal, which served the social interests of the
mostly white, mostly middle-class men who responded to this
demand. After working on the project for some time, however, I
realized that the biographical research design to which I was
committed could not adequately address the interest-based theory
of social action that had shaped my early expectations. Yet, I did
not want to abandon the design I was using. I didn't really have a
good reason for my stubbornness. I hadn't yet figured out how to
make sociological use of what biographical research could provide.
I was certainly pressed to justify my choice as sociological (versus
psychological, individual, and/or just plain perverse) many times
over the years to follow. It was an intellectual challenge that
engaged my thoughts and feelings for a long time. But despite my
inability to respond in a satisfying way to the challenges that even
the friendliest of my critics raised, I wouldn't give up the study.
Somehow, it just felt right, although it took me a very long time to
figure out why. And the answerabout the importance of emotions to
a life storycame from Ogburn himself.
A Political Past, Sort of . . .
I came to sociology with a strong commitment to progressive
politics, although not much in the way either of political
knowledge or political sophistication. My politics was a loose
leftism that reflected post-World War II progressivism in the
United States and was closer to the Old Left of the 1930s than the
New Left of the 1960s; central to my politics were antiracism and
folk music. My parents were liberal Democrats, and although there
were some radicals in my familyone uncle was a union organizer; a
couple of aunts and uncles were socialistsmy immediate family
environment was not very political at all. But my parents made a
decision that, like sending me to the University of Chicago, was
fateful for my future: they sent me to an interracial summer camp
in upstate New York in 1946, when I was thirteen years old, and I
went there through summer 1948 as well. 3I think my parents'
decision was an unselfconscious onethe camp fees were affordable
for a lower-middle-class family, the camp has been advertised in
the New York Times Magazine and therefore had to be respectable,
and they had some vague ideas, I am sure, about racial
discrimination and social inequality as wrong. For me, however,
the experience was of enormous emotional importance because it
connected antiracism with personal freedom and
 Page 53
autonomyand with being able to get away from my family. (My
lifelong love of folk and political music began there as well.) From
that point on, opposition to racism and opposition to social
injustice were central parts of my identity. Indeed, in an important
way they gave me an identity. They made me different from most
of the people I knew. And they were infused with powerful
feelings. I now had justifiable grounds to rebel against the
conventional lower-middle-class environment in which I lived. My
political activism (as well as numerous confrontations with the
more conservative members of my family) was a very satisfying
part of that rebellion.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, having antiracist commitments
automatically connected me to left-wing political groups and
projects. My sense that these projects were important, and that
being left wing was special, was reinforced during the postwar Red
scare and the McCarthy period. Although usually characterized as a
time of political quiescence and social conformity, this was a
politically active period for me, sometimes as a folk music
advocate, sometimes in more directly political ways. 4Friends were
being investigated by the FBI about their politics as they were
drafted into the army during the Korean War. My sense of the
importance and value of being a leftist in American society was
again reinforced.
These political commitments had attracted me to sociology in the
first place, but in the course of professional socialization and a
personal trajectory shaped by Ogburnian standards, I had begun to
be uncertain about their legitimacy as a basis for my work. It was
only with the intellectual developments that grew out of the
political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the growth
of Marxist and feminist sociologies, that I began to recover a sense
that it was appropriate to try to connect my intellectual interests
and my political commitments. But a tension between them still
existed for me. How could I combine the powerful feelings
associated with my politics with the highly rationalist practice of
sociology that I was learning? I think the discomfort that tension
produced, and a rebelliousness that somehow seemed like a
precious aspect of myself, partly explains why I chose to study
Ogburn's life and why I kept at it despite my difficulty in
articulating the project in recognizably sociological terms. But it
was in the confrontation with Ogburn's life, work, and ideas that I
began to develop my own voice.
Chicago SociologyMy Version
Now I can start my story closer to the beginning of my life as a
sociologistwith an account of the sociological heritage to which I
was exposed
 Page 54
as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-
1960s. When I speak here of "Chicago sociology," I do not mean
what has come to be called the Chicago Schoolparticularly the case
study and fieldwork methods associated with Robert Park, Ernest
Burgess, and Everett Hughes or the symbolic interactionism of
George Herbert Mead and Anselm Strauss. 5For me, Chicago
sociology was social demography and survey research; it was these
"factions" that had begun to dominate the department in, I think,
the late 1950s and early 1960s.
When I had returned to college in 1956 to complete my B.A., I
took my first course in sociology; it was on research methods and
was taught jointly by Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan. Duncan
was soon to leave Chicago, but he returned (I think it was in 1966
or 1967) when I was a doctoral student taking a course with Peter
Blau on social stratification. Duncan's guest lecture was on the
status attainment model, which was to dominate so much
sociological discourse about social stratification, a field that had a
natural attraction for me, in the years to follow. The lecture was
also about the uses of path analysis in sociology. It was very heady
stuffI was impressed by the analytic possibilities that this statistical
technique seemed to offer, but I was also thrilled at having a
glimpse of the "cutting edge" in sociology by the men who were
honing it.6
Less directly Ogburnian, Peter Blau, Peter Rossi, and Jim (James
A.) Davis were also important intellectual influences on me. These
were the people who encouraged me to think I might actually
become a sociologist, and given discouragements from other
departmental quarters, I have always been grateful for their
support. Their ideas strongly influenced me.7 I was particularly
attracted to the kind of structuralist thinking that was being
developed at Chicago by people such as Peter Blau and Jim Davis.
The attraction lay, in part, I think, in the capacity of structural
analysis to explain people's behavior independent of their wills and
intentions. And their feelings. To me, that was the lure and power
of a sociological imaginationto see structural problems in place of
personal troubles. This would, in time, be one major reason that I
found Marxism intellectually attractive.
But there is a particular hindsight to storytellingwhen you know the
end before you startthat makes this account a great deal more linear
and focused than I experienced it. I was also having my share of
personal troubleskids' ear infections, strep throats, and sleeping
problems; my constantly interrupted sleep and studies; worries
about child care; an intellectual insecurity that got worse, rather
than better, over time; the juggling of my roles as mother, faculty
wife and hostess, and a graduate student; and a marriage that was
beginning to unravel. So mainly I spent my time
 Page 55
studying and just trying to keep it all together. There were, of
course, important events that punctuated my graduate student
career. After my first year, Pete Rossi offered me a National
Opinion Research Center (NORC) training fellowship. His good
opinion of me boosted my confidence and paid for child care as
well. But the fellowship was not renewed for the following year,
and I had to go begging for financial support from men who neither
encouraged my studies nor thought my fellowship request
legitimate. 8(After all, I had a husband to support me, didn't I?) I
was given another fellowship,9 grudgingly, but my minimal
confidence had been badly shaken. I felt a little better about
myself, however, when, a couple of months after I was turned
down for the NORC fellowship, I was the only one in my cohort to
get honors in our Ph.D. written examinations.10 That was a high, a
sense of achievement, of validation, right up there with having
babies!!!
Two aspects of my Chicago heritage are, I think, important to my
story: (1) the strong empirical emphasis of Chicago sociology and,
with it, a focus on research methodology, especially, in my
experience, statisticswhich I found attractive but embarrassingly
difficult. And (2) a superrationalism, a positioning of one's self in
the world of sociology based on a belief in the power of the
intellect alone to uncover sociological truths. Part of this belief,
although not explicitly articulated as such, was the Ogburnian idea
that to be truly objective, one had to maintain an emotional
distance from one's intellectual work. I carried these influences
with me as I began my career as a sociologist. What I didn't see at
the time was how much this position denied the connection
between feelings and intellect and that such a connection fosters
one's sociological imagination. It was only later still that I realized
that this denial was part of the legacy that I had inherited at
Chicago.
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to ask why these parts of the
Chicago heritage affected me so stronglybecause there were others
that I did not adopt: Morris Janowitz's concern with civic
responsibility, Peter Blau's concern with theory building. I think
now that the inattention to emotionsor, more accurately, an
ideological and rhetorical commitment to such inattentionhelped
me concentrate on work under very difficult personal
circumstances. Had I dared open myself to the feelings that were so
much a part of those yearsworries about my children, about my
marriage, about my intellectual abilitiesI think I would have been
sunk. Of course, given the distorting effects of my efforts at
emotional control (unsuccessful, I am sure, as often as they were
successful), I was sunk anyway. Fortunately, feminism and William
Fielding Ogburn came along to help me out of my dilemma.
 Page 56

The Beginning of My Life as a Feminist

I had not thought much about feminism one way or the other until I
began working as a research assistant for Alice Rossi in 1963. In
my political circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, "male
chauvinism" certainly was not politically correct, but I don't
remember anything happening because of it. 11 Nor was much
thought given to what feminism might mean for our politics or for
our personal lives. But when I began to work for Alice, she gave
me a manuscript copy of her soon to be published Daedalus article
"Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal," and I was
very inspired by itintellectually and personally.12 Even so, I didn't
realize that feminism was a response to women's oppression or that
it had anything to do with me. I was to do so soon enough.
My first full-time job as a sociologist was as a lecturer in the
Department of Sociology at UCLA.13 I didn't fully understand that
to be a lecturer meant that I could not work up through the
academic ranks from this non-tenure-track position. I found out
quickly enough, however, that of the six or seven young faculty
members hired by the UCLA department in 1968, I was the only
woman and the only lecturer. All the rest were men. All of them
had tenure-track appointments. Even if I didn't yet have a feminist
consciousness fully available to me, I knew there was something
wrong with that situation!
I went to my first professional meetings in 1969 in San Francisco.
That was quite a time. Ralph Turner, one of the luminaries in the
UCLA department, was president of the American Sociological
Association; it was the formal beginning of radical sociology, with
its separate sessions at Glide Memorial Church; and there were
disruptions at several regular sessions at the San Francisco Hilton. I
did not identify as part of the sociological liberation movement that
was being built then.14 Indeed, I did not see myself as a radical
sociologist at all. I was a radical person but definitely a
conventional sociologist.
For me, however, those meetings were important for other reasons.
First, the oral defense of my dissertation (a secondary analysis of
survey data on work satisfaction among a sample of American
men) was, for reasons of convenience, held at the convention hotel.
In attendance were Bill Hodge, Morris Janowitz, Peter Blau, David
Street, and Robert K. Merton. I felt that I was really traveling in the
big time. The previous evening at a session in which Bill had been
on a panel, he and a group of his students, including myself, left the
meeting room together. On the way out, Bill stopped to say hello to
Robert Merton, introduced me as one of his stu-
 Page 57
dents, and invited Merton to the oral. I was thrilled and petrified.
Out of sheer nervousness, I carried myself with characteristic
Chicago arrogance during the oral, and my dissertation was
approved without changes. Second, and immediately afterward, I
went down to the meeting of the first ASA Women's Caucus
session, which had been organized by Alice Rossi. The room was
bursting at the seams.
Alice had organized the panel from a life course perspective,
asking women who were at different points in their sociology
careers to make presentations. I was to speak as a graduate
student/junior faculty person. I had told Alice when she invited me
to be on the panel that I wasn't sure I could make it because my
oral was scheduled for the immediately preceding time slot and I
didn't know how long it would last. I got there in time, however.
Alice greeted me, asked how the exam had gone, and when my turn
came to speak, introduced me as the newest Ph.D. in the room.
It is perhaps not surprising that I can remember the feelings I had at
the event but not much else. I was so dazed that I don't even
remember who else was on the panel, except for Marlene Dixon (a
leading figure among radical sociologists), who came up to me at
some point and offered congratulations for getting my union card.
At any rate, when I got up to the microphone I began to speak
about the sexist wayI had learned the language by thenI had been
treated at UCLA: the only woman, the only lecturer. And I
remember ending my presentation with a rousing cry that went
something like ''And I'm not going to let them get away with it!"
God, did I feel powerful!
Feeling powerful and being powerful, however, are two different
things, and after two years as a lecturer at UCLA, I accepted a
tenure-track position at San Fernando Valley State College (now
California State University, Northridge). While I was there, my
first American Journal of Sociology paper was published and my
first historical paper on the family was accepted for publication in
the Journal of Marriage and the Family. 15 About a year after I
moved out to Valley State, I heard that a tenure-track job was open
in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern
California. I applied for and got it.
Sometime in there, I became involved with the political action part
of feminism in sociology. (Of course, I joined Sociologists for
Women in Society as soon as it was founded.) I don't recall why I
was approached, but in the early 1970s I was asked by Gertrude
Seiznick, then president of the Pacific Sociological Association, to
serve on a committee, with Arlene Daniels and Sol Kobrin (a
colleague at USC), to investigate a sex discrimination case in the
region. It was a fascinating experienceas well as providing me
 Page 58
with the first opportunity to meet and work with Arlene Daniels,
who has remained a sociological colleague and personal friend. 16
Arlene and I spent some time serving on the Committee on
Discrimination Against Women in the Pacific Sociological
Association, and soon after I also served on the American
Sociological Association's Committee on Freedom of Research and
Teaching. Both of these appointments gave me opportunities to
participate in investigations of discrimination charges, and I
learned much about university governance and grievance
procedures. Unfortunately, I soon had personal reasons to
appreciate the knowledge that these investigations had provided.
I became an assistant professor at the University of Southern
California in 1972. In the 1973-1974 academic year, my husband
had a visiting appointment at the University of Warwick in
England, and we spent the year living in London. In fall 1973, after
I got back to Los Angeles, I was told by the chairman of my
department, Malcolm Klein, that my contract would not be
renewed. I was astounded. My publication record was quite
respectable and seemed likely to continue that way. So the action
wasn't professional. It wasn't even personal. It was just, I was told,
that the Department of Sociology had a budgetary problem. Mac
explained the problem and informed me of his decision not to
renew my contract.17 To my knowledge, he made the decision
without having my work evaluated and without consulting other
department members. I appealed the decision through the
university grievance system. And won. I then immediately went up
for my tenure review.
Those were hard times. For two and a half years, I didn't know
where my future lay or if I had one in sociology. At first I went on
the national job market and began to think seriously about what it
would mean to be part of a commuter family. But when I won my
appeal, I decided that if I didn't get tenure, I would find a
nonacademic job in Los Angeles. Fortunately, I didn't have to put
that decision to the test. I was promoted in 1975, and I thought that
I could relax a bit, that the rest of my career in sociology would run
along the familiar lines that I had developed at the University of
Southern California. Of course, I was wrong!

An Important Moveinto Marxism

Early in my time at USC, I began working on a quantitative study
of family structure in nineteenth-century Los Angeles using data
from the individual federal census schedules. This was a trendy
thing to do in historical scholarship if one worked on the family
and had quantitative skills. Both were
 Page 59
true of me. Intellectually, I was moving away from the fields I had
focused on as a graduate student: the sociology of work and social
stratification. I had quantitative skills, and I wasn't quite ready to
give up the professional legitimation they gave me. There was little
support in my department for the historical family project I was
working on. Nevertheless, the fact that I tried to get grantsand
sometimes was successfulseemed to satisfy some of my senior
colleagues that I really was a sociologist.
Nevertheless, I had tenure, and I was ready to branch out
intellectually. I knew that I needed more training in statistics. But I
had come to realize that I needed more training in social theory as
well, especially Marxist theory. I knew I would not have time to
study both statistics and Marxism while teaching, doing research
and writing, being active in professional and feminist
organizations, and, of course, being a mother and a wife. 18 I chose
Marxism and spent the following two years taking courses on
Marxist theory with Robert Brenner in the Department of History
at UCLA.
My story is still in the mid-1970s, when Marxism had begun to
gain some academic respectability in the United States. For me, it
was the first time that I was able to connect my political and
intellectual identities. To be a Chicago-trained, quantitative
sociologist no longer required that I disassociate myself from my
politics. That hope was encouraged by Erik Olin Wright's
quantitative work on class structure, which was just beginning to
appear in print.19 But I still wasn't clear about how to apply the
broader conceptions of historical materialism to my research on
nineteenth-century families in Los Angeles. I tried to do so in my
first American Sociological Review article and was quite
embarrassed to be told afterward that I had incorrectly understood
Marx's ideas about "The So-Called Primitive Accumulation" in
Capital.20But, it was a first step in trying to bring together my
intellectual and political interests.
The rise of Marxist sociology gave me something to identify with
that legitimated a connection between my intellectual interests in
structural analysis and my feelings about social justice. Although
by then I had a feminist personal and political identity firmly in
place, I hadn't yet figured out how to combine all these parts of
myself intellectually. William Fielding Ogburn was to help me do
so.
Back to Ogburn . . . and Emotion
I spent most of the 1980-1981 academic year as a Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford,
California. It was the best of times and the worst of times. I loved
the intellectual stimulation
 Page 60
and companionship, the marvelous working conditions, the sense
of having been chosen, the new people I was meeting, the (mostly
illusory) sense of community and common enterprise. My son, who
began as an undergraduate at Berkeley that same year, seemed to
be doing fine; the same could not be said either of my daughter or
of my marriage. I was living alone for the first time in many years;
my husband and Sarah, who was in her junior year of high school,
remained in Los Angeles. I traveled backor they came up to
meabout every other weekend. It was a reasonable arrangement
theoretically; in practice it was a disaster.
I was beside myself with worry and guilt. I could no longer ignore
my emotions. They were blocking everything else out. So early in
that year I turned to Nancy Chodorow, who was also a fellow at the
Center. I did not know Nancy well then. We had met only once,
briefly, at the 1980 American Sociological Association meetings a
few weeks before our Center year began, at a dinner celebrating the
tenth anniversary of the founding of Sociologists for Women in
Society But I remember walking into her office at the Center one
day early in fall, bursting into tears, and saying that feminism had
made us sisters and I needed her help. She was wonderfully
supportive throughout the year, and we have been close friends
ever since. But she was not supportive of what I was doing
intellectually.
One of the rituals at the Center is the Wednesday night seminar at
which fellows make presentations from the work they are doing.
Nancy was the commentator on my paper (on changes in
nineteenth-century Los Angeles family structure), and although
appreciative of some of the things I was trying to do, she criticized
me for not being enough of a feminist sociologist, for not
incorporating gender relations into my analysis. I was shocked.
How could I not be a feminist sociologist when I had devoted so
much time and energy to women's issues in the profession? Wasn't
my insistence on the importance of the family for understanding
social change feminist enough? I didn't really understand the
criticism, but it stayed with me. It wouldn't be until I moved to the
University of Minnesota and was among a group of wonderful
women's historians and other feminist scholars that I began to
understand what it might mean to do a gendered historical analysis
of the family.
I don't remember exactly when different things happened after my
Center year was over. My life got pretty chaotic. My marriage
ended; I got a visiting teaching appointment at the University of
Chicago that allowed me to do archival work on Ogburn; my
daughter graduated from high school, started college at the
University of California, Berkeley, quickly dropped out, and
moved to Arco Santi in Arizona to raise herbs and live a commu-
 Page 61
nal life; and my son went off for a junior year in France. I was
offered the editorship of Contemporary Sociology, which I
accepted. I had enjoyed a similar, if smaller, job as book review
editor for Sociology and Social Research, the sociological journal
published out of USC. But in addition, I knew that I would
probably be unable to concentrate on my intellectual concerns
given the chaos of my life at the time and that the editorship might
give me some cover for not publishing much. 21I got a job offer
from the University of Minnesota in spring 1983 and moved myself
and Contemporary Sociology there that summer.
The Warming Breeze of Feminism in the Upper Midwest
The focus of my intellectual interests began to change again as I
edited Contemporary Sociology during my first three years at
Minnesota. The job made it possible for me to see and learn from
broader intellectual developments in the social sciences, especially
in historical and feminist scholarship. Of particular importance, I
think, was that Minnesota provided an intellectual community in
which biography and life histories were seen as a legitimate genre
of social research.22Mary Jo Maynes, in the Department of History
at Minnesota, who has become a treasured friend, as well as
colleague, was particularly important to me in this regard. During
this time, I began to write up the results of the Ogburn research, but
I hadn't found the right voice yet. I was still making the political
argument (expansion of the state, increased demand for social
scientists in government, etc.), but the fit between the theory and
the data was not comfortable for me; a single life history wasn't
enough to sustain the argument. There's nothing like a little free
time to concentrate, however, and that became available to me in
1986 after I had finished being editor of Contemporary Sociology
and had a sabbatical leave from Minnesota.
I spent most of the 1986-1987 academic year as a visiting scholar
at the Center for the Social Sciences at Columbia University. For
much of that time, I read in feminist sociology/philosophy of
science and in social studies of science. I was especially influenced
by the writings of Evelyn Fox Keller and Susan Bordo, whose
work I had become familiar with as part of my general reading in
feminist scholarship and my reading of the debates in the sociology
of scientific knowledge.23I came to see those fields as the
appropriate frame for what I was learning from Ogburn's life story.
I was finally able to see the sociological importance of emotion.
William Fielding Ogburn gave me the insight, and the University
of Minnesota gave me the time and money to pursue it.
 Page 62
At some point during my years working on the Ogburn project, I
interviewed Ogburn's surviving son, Fielding. It wasn't an
especially illuminating interview, but it was nevertheless a
breakthrough for me because he gave me, among other personal
documents that proved helpful, a copy of a single, undated page of
typescript that his father had written. The relevant passage reads:
"My father, planter and merchant, died in 1890 when I was four.
Then began my long struggle to resist a dear mother's beautiful but
excessive love. To the successful outcome, I attribute my strong
devotion to objective reality, my antipathy to the distorting
influence of emotion."
Ogburn had found a way to distance himself from "the distorting
influence of emotion"the creation of scientism in the culture and
practice of academic sociology. He spent a great deal of time and
energy creating the kind of intellectual standards and working
conditions that he found emotionally comfortable. Of course, he
was not alone in these preferences and activities. Despite
opponents, Ogburn's views were shared by many academic men,
and their collective energies helped institutionalize a positivist
analytic vision in the world of American sociology. Ogburn told
me that I had to locate his professional actions in his family
relationships. As a historical sociologist, I realized that both the
professional and the personal dimensions of that life had to be seen
within their historically specific context.
But what had seemed to work for Ogburn wasn't working for me. I
had, wisely or not, tried to follow his explicit dictum to "crush out
emotion and . . . discipline the mind so strongly" that my beliefs
and commitments, and my feelings, did not carry over into my
sociological work. 24It had been a mostly unconscious strategy for
getting on with my work under difficult circumstances. Yet I had
not been able to use my own, largely alienated, experienceas
Dorothy Smith recommends we doto understand the world of
American sociology.25I now found myself able to do so and to
make intellectual connections between the two fields in which I
had done most of my workthe history of the American family and
the history of American sociologyby recognizing the relationship
of gender, sexuality, and emotion to them both.26The story goes
like this.
Ogburn identified his early family relationships as key to
understanding his "devotion to objective reality." Although he
mentioned his relationship with his mother as particularly
important and did not make much of his absent father, I saw them
both as relevant, historically, as well as individually. Ogburn's
family relationships were not just those of an individual life story;
they reflected changes in the social organization of gender relations
in nineteenth-century North America and their reorganization at the
 Page 63
beginning of the twentieth, as well as changes in economic,
political, and cultural life. I had finally come to see the theoretical
importance of historical changes in the organization of social
reproduction and of the gender relations that were central to itif
variable social reproduction and gender relations could have
potential theoretical power in historical sociology. 27

Ogburn's Voice and Mine

As I've already said, the answer I expected when I began my
Ogburn research was that scientism in American sociology
reflected the expanded demand for social scientists by the
government. In this context, which included the post-World War I
Red scare and anticommunism in American politics and higher
education in general, I thought that sociologists, whose early
history was connected to social reform, might see the need to make
claims about their objectivity. This was certainly true for Ogburn,
who was conscious of the dangers of appearing too radical and, by
the end of his career, called political action in academia, especially
left-wing activism by professors, "unfair" to his academic
employers because it could bring public criticism down on them.28
The growth of government interest in the social sciences, as well as
faith in planning for social change, was part of the expansion of the
state from World War I onward.29The demand for people to put
this faith into practice was constructed, in part, by the very men
who would be called on to satisfy it; men like Ogburn not only met
the demand but also created it partly through the rhetoric of science
they were constructing for the social sciences. In addition, the
occupational opportunities available to American menespecially
white, Protestant men whose family origins had led them to expect
social deference and authoritywere changing as the economy
moved away from its more local and agrarian past and into a more
national, urban, and international capitalist market economy.30 The
occupations and professions that had previously supported their
social positionsfarming, small business, law, medicine, the
clergywere changing. Salaried work was increasingly replacing
self-employment, and some professions, such as the clergy, were
declining in status, while others, medicine, for instance, were
raising standards and limiting entry. The opportunities for middle-
class men to ensure their social standing were in flux.31
In the course of my Ogburn work, however, I came to see that
explanations that emphasized the traditional markers of social
positionclass, status, and powerwere necessary but not sufficient. A
focus on social structure and the individual's location within
itusually occupation, education,
 Page 64
income, and the lifestyle to which the person was
connectedneglected important and socially relevant social
characteristics such as race and gender. 32 For instance, the
increasing importance of men's labor market characteristics for the
meaning of masculinity had not been considered important, even
though gender relations were central elements of the social changes
that were occurring.
For the most part, theories of action have been neglected in these
accounts. Interest-based models are implicit in many historical
studies of the social sciences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
America but are not often made explicit.33 The master trope in
much contemporary social theory for talking about action, rational
choice models, often explains behavior as an unmediated and direct
outcome of social position. To the extent that emotions enter into
conceptions of rationality, they are transformed into a metric of
calculation and/or are treated as sources of irrationality.34
The conclusion I drew about why scientism in American sociology
emerged how and when it did was that however much political
developments, professional aspirations, and social interests had
affected the history of the discipline, gender relations, sexuality,
and personal life were also important parts of that history. In my
study of Ogburn's life, I had come to see that the growth and spread
of scientism in the social sciences in the early decades of the
twentieth century were connected to the gendered character of
social organization in the nineteenth. Of particular importance was
the organization of family, economic, and political life around the
rhetoric and practice of separate spheres for women and men in the
earlier time period and their reorganization during the later one.
According to this model, emotion was part of women's sphere in
the domestic setting, while rationality was masculine and a feature
of the marketplace.35 But I had also come see that the rhetoric of
emotional specialization encoded in the doctrine of separate
spheres needed to be viewed not as part of the natural order, as
many nineteenth-century authors claimed, but as historical
outcomes whose emergence and institutionalization could be
known. Most important, perhaps, I came to see the sociological
relevance of emotion, gender, and sexuality to theories of human
agency and social action. Furthermore, I saw a need to move away
from explanations that favored structural forces or human agency
and to be more attentive to their intersections.36
If we are to examine human agency at particular historical
intersections, we must have a better way to theorize agency, to
understand why people do what they do under concrete historical
conditions. My Ogburn research allowed me to begin that project
and to see sex, gender, and emotions as central to the theoretical
task. Family relationships, sexual identity,
 Page 65
and cultures of sexuality can provide powerful motives for human
actions, and gender relations are central to understanding them.
Furthermore, sexual energy and meaning can be attached to social
phenomena in ways that are not obviously related to sexuality or
gender at all, as in the meaning of occupational activity and success
for men's gendered sense of masculinity. Furthermore, the sexual
nature of that energy gives some actions, but not others, a particular
charge, a particular emotional power.
Ogburn's categories of emotion versus objectivity and his rhetorical
insistence that the former be excluded from the realm of scientific
sociology were not, in the final analysis, of much use to me. It
would not, I think, have taken me so long to find a feminist voice,
nor would it have been as much of a struggle if I hadn't accepted
the categories of my Ogburnian heritage. Of course, Ogburn didn't
create these categories; he, as I after him, had inherited them from
our individual pasts and from the intellectual discourses that were
part of them. But he was part of my past as someone who was
influential in changing the meanings of science in twentieth-
century sociology and in institutionalizing these new meanings in
the academy His successes were, perhaps, especially relevant to me
given that I was trained to be a sociologist in the same department
in which he (and his students) had been influential. I wonder if it
would have taken me so long to find a feminist voice if the
dichotomous thinking that Ogburn employedemotion versus
objectivityhad not been so widely accepted and perpetuated within
the discipline.
Feminist scholars have documented historical variation in the
meanings and organization of masculinity, femininity, and
sexuality, but it is not sufficient to stop there. It is also important to
ask how and why the gendered meanings of cultural forms and
social institutions develop as they do. In the case of U.S. sociology,
I have suggested that part of the answer is to be found in the
changing economic and political life during the early history of
sociology's growth, particularly in the period after World War I.
But the answer is also to be found in changing family and gender
relations and in the ideologies associated with them. One of the
conclusions I drew from my research on William Fielding Ogburn
was that, consciously or unconsciously, achieving a gendered
identityindeed, creating new meanings for masculinitywas part of
the intellectual agendas of the mostly white, mostly middle-class
male social scientists of the time. And creating "masculinized"
settings in the colleges and universities, research centers and
government agencies, in which these men worked was also part of
the agenda. The development and gendering of ideas about hard
and soft science, hard and soft methods, hard and soft fields of
inquiry have charged these dichotomized
 Page 66
categories of thought with an emotional power that can obscure
their gendering power. The other conclusion was about the
sociological significance of emotionin Ogburn's life and in my
own.

Finding My Voice
The years between 1990 and 1995 were especially satisfying and
demanding ones for me. As the editor (with Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres)
of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society during that
time, I was able to bring together the two pieces of my identitythe
political and the academicthat had so often been at war with each
other. The stimulation and struggle of putting together a journal
that satisfied standards from both realms of experience helped me
find the theoretical voice that is now central to my intellectual
work. In the process I also began to recognize that the efforts to
separate my intellectual and political values that one part of me
had, misguidedly, internalized from my graduate training had done
more harm than good. And that recognition also helped me better
understand the problems that the Ogburn and Los Angeles projects
had posed for me.
There were emotional components, albeit contradictory ones, to the
work I was doingand the way I was doing itthat go some way
toward explaining the tenacity with which I kept to my Chicago
habits. My contradictory commitmentsto objectivism, to social
justiceand the intellectual and personal discomfort those
contradictions aroused led me to a more conscious critique of
positivism and ultimately helped me overcome what were, for me,
limitations of the sociology I had learned as a graduate student and
had practiced throughout the early years of my career. They also
were part of what led me to the Ogburn project. Of particular
importance was a recognition of the positive uses of emotion in my
intellectual work.
Emotionsdoubts, fears, commitments, identity, self-concept, anger,
and pleasurenot only make particular subjects and methods
interesting to us, but they also provide the energy to pursue them
even when the way to do so is not clear. Feelings, including the
ambivalences and contradictions that are often present, also help us
make use of our own experience as a basis for questioning how
particular social conditions might affect others. Through
recognition of our own feelings, reflexivitya key tenet of feminist
research methodologycan become a powerful tool in our pursuit of
knowledge. Reflexivity need not be simply (or simplistically) a
form of self-referencing that results in thinking that others
experience the world in the same ways that we do. But recognizing
the role of feelings in our own lives can lead us to ask how they
affect the lives of others.
 Page 67
Perhaps I can now say why I stuck with the Ogburn and the LA
projects. Emotions that derived from my commitments and
interests carried me along and fostered my continued work on these
studies despite the intellectual troubles I was having with them. It
was only when I understood the power of feelings in Ogburn's life
that I became able to construct a theoretical account that made
sociological sense of his lifeand mine. Had I not incorporated the
Ogburnian (and Chicago) dictum about the need to separate
emotions from my sociological research and writing, perhaps it
would not have taken me so long to recognize emotions'
importance. Had I not had reasons of my own for sticking to the
objectivist model of sociology, I might not have been so hesitant to
acknowledge the relation of emotions to sociological practice and
sociological theory.
Feelings are part of our professional norms and practices, however
much they have been rhetorically proscribed. The coolness of tone,
the definition of emotion as unprofessional and unscientific, the
insistence that we eschew our feelings, limit our abilities to see and
value the emotional components in our professional lives and the
theoretical importance of emotion in the social life we study
Without further thought, emotionsand their gendered characterare
assumed to be separable from our actions, capable of being
'''eschewed." The recognition of emotions will not benefit the work
we do, howeveror the professional environment in which we do itif
such recognition is used only to establish better control over them.
In exploring the positive values of engagement and commitment in
this essay, I do not mean to suggest that analytic distance, and the
skills and emotions that achieving such distance entail, cannot also
be powerful tools in sociological analysis. But they cannot be the
only ones.

An Afterthought
I have learned many thingsabout myself and about social theoryin
writing this essay And the work I have done here has also led me to
rethink some of the ideas I had when I began it. I have seen more
clearly than at the outset the theoretical importance of emotion in
debates about social structure, human agency, and their
intersections. I have also learned more about the usefulness of
personal narratives in sociological study and their contributions to
social theory. 37We need to consider further how social actors as
thinking, feeling selves in relations with others can be most
fruitfully integrated into sociological theory and practice and how
the historical context, which includes such actors, as well as
structures, institutions, and cultures, both constructs and is
constructed by them. Ogburn
 Page 68
wanted to control emotions so that they would not bias sociological
observations and interpretations. In some ways, feminist
methodology, with its emphasis on recognizing the researcher's
place in the research process, has also called attention to how
researchers create, rather than uncover, knowledge. There is,
however, an important difference. Ogburn wanted to "crush out
emotions," to control them statistically and normatively. For the
most part, contemporary feminists in the social sciences do not.
Rather, as scholars we want to study emotions and use them as a
way to learn about the world, perhaps even to change it.
But I have also come to understand that having a good idea is no
guarantee that anything will flow from it without advocacy and
organization. I learned this from being a feminist in the academy
and now am using that knowledge outside of it as well. So in my
sixties, I have returned to the political activism of my younger
years as a founding and active member of Progressive Minnesota,
an affiliate of the New Party, a national political party dedicated to
democratic politics and social justice. I have also returned to
another love of my youth and have become a student of jewelry
making at the Minneapolis Technical College.
A final word. My daughter, Sarah, pointed out after she read an
early draft of this essay that in it I left her in Arizona and my son,
Michael, in France. As I write this, however, Sarah is in graduate
school and sings with a local jazz band, and Michael works in the
reform wing of the U.S. trade union movement and continues our
tradition of political music as well as political activism. And when
we can, the three of us still sing together. As for myself, I am
looking toward retiring and being able to focus on my intellectual
interests more than the responsibilities of a university professor
allow. I look forward to continuing the personal relationships that
have so enriched my life, of course; to carrying on with my
political activities; and to making jewelry. Maybe I'll even find new
things to explore, new places to go, new people to know.
Notes
I want to thank, as always, the personal and intellectual
comradeship of Johanna Brenner and Mary Jo Maynes.
1. My fantasy was to have a little shop on West 4th Street in
Greenwich Village where I would make and sell copper jewelry.
Somehow I thought a fine arts degree was the way to get there.
2. For a more detailed account of Ogburn's views and life story, see
my "Unfeeling
 Page 69
Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology,"
Sociological Forum 5 (1990): 413-433; and my "Biography as
Historical Sociology," Theory and Society 20 (1991): 511-538.
3. In contrast to some of the better known interracial summer
camps in the Northeast, the one I attended was not part of the
existing left-wing culture and institutions. The camp owner and
director was an African-American doctor who was also a
Republican, and when counselors arrived wearing Henry Wallace
for President buttons in 1948, they were told to take them off. I had
my first crush while at this camp and usually had a different one
each year.
4. The music to which I was especially committed was connected
to the labor movement and African-American blues. In the groups I
was in, it was definitely political to support and be interested in
these cultural forms.
5. For a discussion of the Chicago School, see Martin Bulmer, The
Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and
the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984). When I entered the doctoral program in 1965,
Hughes, Strauss, and David Reisman had all left Chicago, although
I had taken courses with Hughes and Reisman in my earlier student
days there. I became affiliated with the more quantitative and
positivist segment of the department, largely because I was
explicitly not welcomed by a faculty member who had organized
another group to which my political values and intellectual
interests drew me. In my experience, the "quants" were a lot more
meritocratic than those who explicitly professed liberal values.
6. In my memory, I recall Duncan calling path analysis a "heuristic
device," a phrase that I have always found helpful in thinking about
sociological modelseven if Duncan didn't say it.
7. Alice Rossi was not a faculty member in the Department of
Sociology (or in any other department of the universityto the
institution's impoverishment), and although our friendship
continued after I began my doctoral training, she no longer played
a mentoring role in my intellectual development. She had already
done so, however, as a model of sociological excellence and
intellectual passion during the two years I had worked for her.
8. A newly appointed young faculty person was in charge of the
fellowship committee at NORC. He didn't think I was smart
enough to merit a renewal of my fellowship and told me so when I
inquired about the decision of nonrenewal. Maybe all "quants" are
not so meritocratic after all.
9. Thanks to the efforts of Pete Rossi.
10. While the young faculty member who had denied the renewal
of my fellowship never acknowledged that perhaps he had made a
mistake about my abilitiesan unrealistic hope on my part, I
guessmy performance on these exams did bring me to the notice of
Robert W. Hodge. He was a wonderful thesis supervisor and a
highly supportive colleague after graduate school, even though my
intellectual interests soon began to diverge from the quantitative
analysis of survey data that had been the basis of my dissertation.
11. "Male chauvinist pig" was not a phrase available to us then; we
did have the term "male chauvinism," however.
12. Alice S. Rossi, "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest
Proposal," Daedalus 93 (1964): 607-652.
 Page 70
13. My husband had got a tenured job in the Department of History
there in 1968; for neither of us were my career possibilities a
prominent part of our decision to move to Los Angeles, nor did we
consider job hunting as a couple.
14. For some accounts of the radical sociology movement and its
activities at the 1969 ASA, see Martin Oppenheimer, Martin J.
Murray, and Rhonda E Levine, eds., Radical Sociologists and the
Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
15. See Barbara Laslett, "Mobility and Work Satisfaction: A
Discussion of the Use and Interpretation of Mobility Models,"
American Journal of Sociology 77 (1971): 19-35; and Barbara
Laslett, "The Family as a Public and Private Institution: An
Historical Perspective, Journal of Marriage and the Family 35
(1973): 480-492. As a graduate student, I had never taken a course
in the sociology of the family But when I began working at UCLA.
a large undergraduate course on the subject was part of my
teaching assignment. I found the field at that time not very
interesting, and having a historian husband, John Laslett,
undoubtedly influenced my move into the historical study of the
family and later into historical sociology more generally
16. See the wonderful essay by Arlene Kaplan Daniels, "When We
Were All Boys Together: Graduate School in the Fifties and
Beyond," in Kathryn P Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, eds.,
Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women
Sociologists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 27-
43, for an autobiographical account of her place in the growth of
feminist sociology, as well her importance to many of the authors
in this volume.
17. A senior faculty member who for the preceding several years
had been working in a different unit of the university decided that
he wanted to return to the departmenta right that he had been
guaranteed. During his absence, I had been hired in a tenure-track
position. When the senior member chose to exercise his "retreat
rights," there were not sufficient funds to pay us both. That was the
problem.
18. While in Los Angeles, I had been instrumental in founding a
local chapter of SWS. In addition, I was part of a groupwe called
ourselves Red Wednesday (because sometimes we met on
Wednesday)of women Marxist sociologists that included Edna
Bonacich, Johanna Brenner, Norma Chincilla, Nora Hamilton, and
Julia Wrigley Not everyone in this group would have self-identified
as a "feminist," although gender inequality would be criticized by
us all. We met monthly for supper, gossip, and critique of our
writings in progress.
19. Erik Olin Wright and Lucca Perone, "Marxist Class Categories
and Income Inequality," American Sociological Review 42 (1977):
32-55. Barbara Heyns, part of the group of Hodge students with me
at Chicago, was a major influence in teaching Erik Wright the
quantitative skills that have been central to his work. I guess that
makes Erik my nephew.
20. Barbara Laslett, "Social Change and the Family: Los Angeles,
California, 1850-1870," American Sociological Review 42 (1977):
268-291. That my error was not caught by the people who
reviewed the paper for the American Sociological Review indicates
that I was not alone in needing to understand Marx better.
21. I had ended my year at the Center without much to show for it
in terms of published work. My feelings over that lack of
productivity were so connected with the breakup of my marriage
that it took me quite a few years to recognize that the problems
were intellectual, as well as personal. I hadn't yet seen how to
connect feminist theory and gender relations to the historical
family work I was doing. I
 Page 71
was to do so in the context of a series of papers that Johanna
Brenner and I wrote together from the mid-1980s onward. See
Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett, "Social Reproduction and the
Family," in Ulf Hismelstrand, ed., The Social Reproduction of
Organization and Culture (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 116-131;
Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, "Gender and Social
Reproduction," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 381-404;
and Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett, "Gender, Social
Reproduction, and Women's Political Self-organization in the
Development of the U.S. Welfare State," Gender and Society 5
(1991): 311-333. But it was really in the context of the Ogburn
research, which I was doing simultaneously, that these various lines
of thought came together for me.
22. See Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women's
Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), which emerged from a conference
at the University of Minnesota in 1986.
23. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Susan Bordo, "The
Cartesian Masculinization of Thought," Signs 11 (1986): 439-456.
24. William Fielding Ogburn, "The Folkways of a Scientific
Sociology," Scientific Monthly 30 (1930): 300-306.
25. She does so brilliantly in, among other writings, Dorothy E.
Smith, "A Berkeley Education," in Orlans and Wallace, eds.,
Gender and the Academic Experience. pp. 45-56. See also Dorothy
E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist
Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987); and
Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist
Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1990).
26. Perhaps another one of the reasons it took me so long to
recognize these connections was the state of macrohistorical
sociology itself. Family history was treated primarily as a
demographic subject and rarely connected to the growing field of
historical sociology or women's history. I had to figure out how to
make such connections in the absence of an existing intellectual
debate or community
27. See Laslett and Brenner, "Gender and Social Reproduction";
and Brenner and Laslett, "Gender, Social Reproduction."
28. He hadn't thought that way as a younger scholar. See William
Fielding Ogburn, "A Few Words by Professor Ogburn" (Address to
the annual Institute and Banquet of the Society for Social Research,
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, June 8-9. 1951).
29. See Barry Karl, "Presidential Planning and Social Research:
Mr. Hoover's Experts," Perspectives in American History 3 (1969):
347-409. See also William A. Tobin, "Studying Society: The
Making of Recent Social Trends in the United States, 1929-1933,"
Theory and Society 24 (1995): 537-565.
30. In relation to the social sciences, see Dorothy Ross, "Socialism
and American Liberalism," Perspectives in American History 11
(1978): 7-79; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social
Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Thomas
Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1984); and Lewis A. Coser, "American
Trends," in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of
Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 287-
320.
 Page 72
31. I make this argument more fully in Barbara Laslett, "Gender
in/and Social Science History," Social Science History 16(1992):
177-195.
32. People who have studied the history of the social sciences have
not often asked whether it made a difference that most of that
history was constructed primarily by white males. For exceptions,
see John H. Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow in American
Social Science (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); Alford
A. Young Jr., "The 'Negro Problem' and the Character of the Black
Community: Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, and the
Constitution of a Black Sociological Tradition, 1920-1935,"
National Journal of Sociology 7 (1993): 95-133; and Charles
Lemert, Sociology After the Crisis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1995), esp. chaps. 6, 8. I seem to have fallen into the same
trap in my workespecially problematic, perhaps, given Ogburn's
southern roots. For an example of how the autobiographical mode
can be used to capture this history, see John H. Stanfield II, ed., A
History of Race Relations Research: First-generation Recollections
(Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993).
33. For some exceptions, see Robert Bannister, Sociology and
Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Ross, "Socialism"; and
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and
the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988). Although these authors do consider why
the actors about whom they write behaved as they did, they do not
engage explicitly with the relevant theoretical discourses.
34. For a critique of these limitations from within the discourse
about these models, see Margaret Mooney Marini, "The Role of
Purposive Action in Sociology," in James S. Coleman and Thomas
J. Fararo, eds., Rational Choice Theory: Advocacy and Critique
(Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992), pp. 21-48.
35. See, among others, Laslett and Brenner, "Gender and Social
Reproduction"; Lenore Davidoff, "'Adam Spoke First and Named
the Order of the World': Masculine and Feminine Domains in
History and Sociology," in Helen Corr and Lynn Jamieson, eds.,
Politics of Everday Life: Continuity and Change in World and
Family (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 229-255; and
Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women's
Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American
History 75 (1988): 9-39.
36. For a discussion of such intersections, see Philip Abrams,
Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).
37. And, indeed, these lessons have led to my newest research
projecton the uses of personal narratives in the social scienceson
which I am collaborating with Mary Jo Maynes and my
sociological colleague Jennifer Pierce.
 Page 73

Looking Back in Anger? Re-remembering My

Sociological Career
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Graduate Training and Its Irrelevance
I came into sociology without a past and without a memory. I
obtained my first job in 1972 as an assistant professor of sociology
having taken no sociology courses as an undergraduate and only a
few as a graduate student. My intellectual journey in sociology
began at a point when I had already been installed as a
"sociologist." This odd situation came about because, after getting
an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology at Berkeley, I
did my doctoral work in the old Social Relations Department at
Harvard. "Soc Rel" offered interdisciplinary training in social
anthropology, clinical psychology, and social psychology, as well
as sociology. Although I had a first-year proseminar with Talcott
Parsons and took several seminars taught by other sociologists,
most of my course work was in social and cognitive psychology,
and my dissertation was in experimental social psychology.
My experience at Harvard in the 1960s was alienating, for reasons
that I did not at the time understand. Only later did I label my
feelings as anger. At the time I merely thought I felt out of place
and isolated. I was aware that women were there on sufferance, for
although we were admitted on an "equal basis" as men, we were
not accorded equal treatment. An example: the readings for our
courses were on reserve in two places, the Social Relations and
Lamont libraries. The latter permitted entry only to men and was
the only one open on Sundays. This was in the days before
photocopying, so we had to spend large blocks of time taking notes
from reserved readings. There was intense competition to get two-
hour and overnight materials that were due to be discussed in class
that week and before exams. In effect, the men students had twice
as much opportunity during the week and an extra day on the
weekend to do the reserve reading. Having
Copyright © 1997 by Evelyn Nakano Glenn.
 Page 74
no analysis, let alone a label to characterize sexist practices, none
of the women students, myself included, directly challenged this
arrangement. To cope, I adopted a strategy that has sometimes been
used by groups that are denied rights of adult citizenship, which is
to get around a restriction by enlisting a member of the privileged
group to act as a proxy. Asian immigrants barred from owning land
in California gained access to land by engaging white middlemen
to purchase and hold it in their names. White women have always
gained access to privileges through their relations with men rather
than as independent actors. When everything I needed was checked
out of the Social Relations library, my husband, Gary, would go to
Lamont and, using my identification card (which had no picture),
would check out reserve reading for me. On the one occasion he
was challenged, he claimed his name was pronounced Eve-lin (as
in Evelyn Waugh) and was allowed to take out the material. He
also played in my stead on the (non-coed) social relations softball
team and became "one of the boys." We socialized with other
graduate student couples, all of whom were made up of a male
student and his wife. I felt odd as the one crossing gender and
student-spouse lines, though in fact Gary was in a more awkward
position as the male spouse. Women were supposed to be in an
adjunct position. However, he dealt well with the situation,
showing an interest in school gossip, as well as discussing politics,
sports, and other issues with everyone. I became friends with
several of my classmates' wives, and over the years most of them
have become professionals in their own right (sometimes after
divorce). One of them recently lauded me and Gary for having
been ahead of our time as a "liberated" couple. However, an
incident a few years ago reminded me of the strength of "old-boy"
ties in graduate school and the exclusion of women from them. The
marriage of the daughter of one of our cohort became the occasion
for a minireunion. Afterward when some of us looked at the
wedding photographs, we noticed one taken of the old ''Harvard
Soc Rel gang." In the photo were my male classmates and my
husband. The bride, Beth Ogilvie, her feminist sensibilities
outraged, had a huge blowup of the photo reproduced with a
superimposed picture of my face floating over the men's heads,
which she gave me as a thank-you gift.
Out of forty or so first-year graduate students in Social Relations, I
was one of only two people of color and in all the years of my
graduate training, the only Asian American. Of eighteen or so
seminars I took, none was taught by a person of color and only one
was taught by a woman, an assistant professor who left after two
years. This continued a pattern from my undergraduate days at
Berkeley. In four years there I had only one fe-
 Page 75
male graduate student instructor in French and no teacher of color.
Given the lack of "role models," it might seem unlikely that I
would feel I could or should have an academic career.
I suspect my ambition was a form of rebellion against my family
and the gender strictures of Japanese American culture. My parents
were second-generation Japanese Americans who had grown up in
working-class immigrant families in northern California. Married
in 1939, they had their first child (me) in 1940. My father was the
most ambitious in his family of eight siblings. He managed two
years of business college after high school and moved up to a
white-collar position as a manager in an "Oriental" import store in
San Francisco's Chinatown. This promising start was cut short in
1942 with the commencement of World War II and the forced
evacuation and imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in
remote concentration camps. My parents, I, and all of our relatives
were incarcerated. The three of us were sent to Gila, Arizona, and I
later lived with relatives in the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, camp. I
was in the concentration camps from ages one-and-a-half to five.
My earliest memories are of playing with marbles in our barracks
quarters, walking down to communal bathrooms, and eating meals
at large tables in our block dining hall. Later, I recall playing with
other children (depending on the season) in the dust or mud around
our barracks. In 1944 my father was able to leave the Gila camp to
take a factory job in Chicago. My mother and I remained
incarcerated until the war was over. Because my mother was ill, we
didn't leave until October 1945, when we departed to join my
father.
The loss of my father's career just as he was getting established and
beginning a family must have been devastating. Always quiet, he
became completely uncommunicative and absorbed in working.
My mother, unlike her two sisters and five sisters-in law, was never
employed outside the home. She was never idle, however. She
sewed most of her own clothes and mine (something I felt
mortified by when I was a teenager), prepared elaborate meals,
baked, kept house, and shopped for bargains. All major decisions
were made by my father, and although my mother worried, she was
happy to cede the responsibility to him. My mother has always
been a "cheerful pessimist." She expects the worst but is sanguine
about it. She took out her powerlessness by nagging. However,
since my father seldom responded to anything she said, she
confided her complaints to me. My reaction to this was resentment
toward my father and a determination not to be in a position like
my mother, which meant that I would have a job or career. 1
The circumstances of my parents' life left little time or energy for
 Page 76
contemplation or thinking about larger world events. They both
kept busy every moment and seemed to be occupied with the
quotidian. 2The lesson of being uprooted from their homes and the
trauma of the concentration camp experiencethat you are not in
control of your futureundoubtedly made thinking too deeply
frightening. In all the time I was growing up, my parents took only
one vacation, a four-day trip to Wisconsin. Neither explicitly
stressed education or discussed vocational plans with me. Later on,
they seemed to assume that my younger brother would go to
college, but here, too, they never pushed him in any direction. My
father remained indifferent about my going to college and graduate
school. My mother was more supportive, but her concerns,
understandably, were of a practical nature. The only advice I ever
recall her giving me about college was a suggestion that I study
dental hygiene because she had a Japanese American woman
hygienist who made $7 an hour.
Before my junior year in high school, we left Chicago and moved
to Oakland, California. My father bought a motel, using all of his
savings and money from the sale of our six-plex in Chicago for the
downpayment. We lived in the little owner's unit, and my parents
did almost all of the labor, from maintenance to cleaning the
rooms. They got up early to start cleaning, stayed up late, and got
up in the middle of the night to register latecomers. They were tied
to the business 365 days a year. Meals and conversations were
constantly interrupted by calls on the switchboard or people
coming into the office. Although I was sometimes recruited to
clean rooms, my parents were often dissatisfied with the careless
work I did and would redo the job. The first few years were touch
and go financially Several times my father had to hock his car to
make the mortgage payment.
I was eager to get away to go to college, but I couldn't do so.
Although I was accepted at Stanford, USC, UCLA, and Berkeley, I
went to Berkeley, my last choice, for financial reasons: it was
cheap and close to home, so I could commute. I liked the bigness
and the anonymity, which made me feel free rather than alienated. I
started out in premed (a good Asian American major) with the idea
of going into psychiatry, but I switched to psychology after my
sophomore year. I was converted by a large introductory class of
eight hundred students taught by David Krech and Richard
Crutchfield. I loved the class and was convinced that the best life in
the world would be as a psychology professor like the two guys up
on the stage, teaching and doing research. Luckily or unluckily, I
managed to avoid thinking too much about a major obstacle: my
shyness, manifested in utter fear of speaking in class, let alone
standing up and talking in front of a group. I
 Page 77
was also naively unaware of the significance of another big
difference between me and those two guys on the stage. The first
hint was given me by a professor in another class, who when I
asked him to write a letter of recommendation for graduate school
said, "I'm glad to write a letter, but you should know you'll have a
hard time as a woman in the university." I was shocked since I
knew his own wife was a professor. When I asked him what he
meant by this, he gave me a rather vague response but noted that
his wife had difficulty combining career and family.
Going as far away as possible to graduate school, all the way to
New England, was a way to escape the parochialism of my family
and the racism still experienced by Asians on the West Coast. In
the early 1960s, Chinese and Japanese American students were still
excluded from many aspects of student life, barred from many
social organizations, and could expect to face severe restrictions in
the job market. One reason I felt "free" as a Japanese American in
Cambridge was because there weren't enough of us to discriminate
against. The surrounding area of Boston and New England had no
significant Asian American presence, except for a small run-down
Chinatown in Boston. I found that my race/ethnicity made me
hypervisible at times and invisible at other times. During my
second summer at Harvard, my major professor invited a group of
his students to stay at a house he rented in New Hampshire. Local
residents would stop and stare at meI was an exotic novelty in
northern New England. In downtown Boston, where we sometimes
went clubbing, I would be approached by servicemen who assumed
I was a prostitute or bar girl. During these encounters, I felt angry
and helpless at being unable to express my anger. Yet at other
times, my ethnicity made me invisible. At Harvard, in particular,
because I was not black, my ethnicity didn't count. 3
I did not connect these experiences as a woman of color to my life
in the university, nor did I relate my own life to what I studied or to
my alienation. For the first time, I developed doubts about my
intellectual ability. Once launched in graduate school, I soldiered
on out of fear of failureI was terrified of being annihilated if I did
not complete the degree. My husband, who was not a student and
had no desire to be one, was totally supportive and understood that
I needed to get through somehow.
Nevertheless, despite the tribulations, the fact of having a Harvard
degree has stood me in good stead. For someone with a devalued
gender/race status, the imprimatur of a "first-class" institution
provides potential employers and grant-givers with external
confirmation of intellectual competence. The irony is that none of
my Harvard connectionswhether faculty or other studentshas ever
been even slightly useful professionally I
 Page 78
value the graduate school friendships I made and maintained over
the years, but they simply are not professional relationships.
When I applied for my first academic jobs out of graduate school,
my search was restricted to the Boston area. My husband was
settled in a good job, and we had two children, the younger only a
few months old. Having no mentor to advise me about the "proper"
way to job-hunt, I simply mailed my résumé to all sociology and
psychology departments within a one-hour radius of Cambridge.
This was 1972, during the boom years in sociology. Despite my
lack of qualifications, I was interviewed by seven schools and
offered jobs at five of them. My decision to accept the offer from
Boston University proved an unfortunate choice, one that
eventually exacted a huge toll, personally and professionally. But
that became evident only later.
I have sometimes joked that my lack of formal training in
sociology probably saved me a lot of hassle; had I fully absorbed
the structural functional paradigm then prevalent, I would have had
to struggle to break out of that mind-set. Instead my brain was a
tabula rasa. The disadvantages of not having gone through formal
training were the lack of connection to senior sponsors and a circle
of peers with whom I had gone to graduate school. I had to acquire
a working knowledge of the field while also teaching and moving
toward tenure. Because my dissertation was in a different
fieldexperimental social psychologyI didn't have a dissertation to
turn into articles or a book. I had to develop a research agenda from
scratch. I was like my immigrant grandparents: having to make a
living while learning a new language and culture.
Gender and the Sociology of Work
My real training in sociology came through simply doing it, with
support from feminist sociologists. Happily for me, my entrance as
a faculty member coincided with two developments: the beginnings
of the "feminist revolution" in sociology and the rise of Marxist
studies of the labor process. I learned a lot by teaching courses on
the family, on work, and on women. In 1973 Chandra Mukerjee
and I designed the first "women's studies" course at Boston
University It had the quaint title "Changing Sex Roles." We used a
few of the handful of books available (e.g, The Second Sex, The
Diary of Anais Nin), 4magazine articles, and mimeographed pieces
from various women's liberation publications. Chandra was
something of a prodigywith a Ph.D. from Northwestern at age
twenty-fourand much more sophisticated than me in analyzing and
explicating the texts. I learned a lot from her. Barbara Melber, a
lecturer in our department, cotaught the course with me the
following year. Barbara had a strong comparative background,
 Page 79
having written a dissertation at the University of Chicago on
women in Sweden. We focused on the new feminist anthropology,
using the now classic Woman, Culture, and Society as a text.
5Barbara's lecture on the theory of how women's universal
oppression stemmed from a public-private dichotomy stood out as
a model of clarity.6I also helped design and cotaught "Women and
Work" a number of times with Roz Feldberg, who joined the BU
faculty at the same time I did. Roz introduced me to Marxist
feminist thought and to the work of feminist historians. Our weekly
meetings to discuss readings and topics before each class became
miniseminars, from which we generated many research questions
that we later pursued. In the mid-1970s, faculty and graduate
students interested in feminist issues formed a gender task force in
the department. For several years the task force was a beehive of
activity, holding colloquia and workshops and designing new
courses for a specialization in gender sociology.
Of many issues raised by feminist activists and scholars, the one
that most intrigued me had to do with women's paid and unpaid
labor: British and American Marxist analyses of housework were
focusing attention on the extent of women's direct and indirect
exploitation and on the relation of the "private" household to the
larger political economy. Historians and social scientists were
starting to focus again on women's paid employment, a topic
neglected since the 1920s. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s the
existence of separate men's jobs and women's jobs was so taken for
granted as to be invisible, by the 1970s some scholars were
beginning to problematize occupational segregation by showing
that the gender composition of occupations changed over time. My
stint as a student-cum-housewife made "women's work" a natural
interest. It was a topic outside the sociological mainstream and in
that sense ripe for development.
Roz Feldberg had taught in Scotland for a year and was plugged
into the network of Marxist feminists who were doing much of the
writing on women's work. She was interested in doing research on
clerical work, and I was interested in studying secretaries, so we
began to collaborate by conducting interviews with thirty office
workers in a variety of settings. The publication in 1974 of Harry
Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital stimulated a spate of
research on changes in the labor process and the use of technology
to increase managerial control through deskilling.7Influenced by
his approach, we began exploring the impacts of office automation,
which was then just beginning to spread. Braverman overlooked
the gendered aspects of labor degradation; we explicitly looked at
how women's jobs were affected in distinct ways and at how the
gender composition of particular jobs affected the way technology
was applied.
 Page 80
Over the next few years, we wrote and obtained two major grants
from the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems of the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study the impacts of
office automation on clerical workers. The center, headed by Elliot
Liebow, funded quite a few studies of work and workers in the
1970s. Under the grant we conducted extensive interviews in two
large companies. We also published a number of articles on clerical
work and on the sociology of work, which combined analysis of
large-scale economic transformation and examination of workers'
concrete day-to-day experiences in the workplace. 8
During this time, I became increasingly plugged into feminist and
Marxist circles in sociology through professional meetings and
associations. This was important considering my lack of graduate
school associations. Someone recruited me to join the
Massachusetts Sociological Association (MSA) and run for office,
which I wonI think unopposed; over the next few years I held other
offices and became president in 1976. The biannual conferences of
MSA initiated me into professional meetings. Pam Roby, a rising
star at Brandeis and an energetic organizer, started the Boston Area
Women Social Scientists. Through that organization, Helen
MacGill Hughes, who lived down the street from me in Cambridge,
recruited me to assist in editing the newsletter of the Sociologists
for Women in Society. Helen, who was married to well-known
sociologist Everett Hughes, was of that early generation of women
sociologists who never had a full-time academic position. She
worked on the periphery, managing the American Journal of
Sociology, doing other editing work, and publishing some of her
own research. During the 1970s, she was hired by several Boston
area colleges to teach courses on women. I succeeded Helen as
editor of the SWS Newsletter and in that way got involved in SWS.
I admired and was inspired by the confidence, wit, and political
savvy of the founding mothers and activists, such as Arlene, Pam,
Joan Huber, Doris Wilkinson, and Nona Glazer, but truthfully I did
not feel that I could be one of them. I pretty much stayed quiet and
listened. Getting involved in SWS activities at the annual meetings
of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and the
American Sociological Association eased my entry into these
larger organizations. I suspect my conspicuous status as one of the
few Asian American women led to my being nominated to
committees of both organizations almost from my first year of
membership. I circulated through a succession of "status"
committees having to do with the situation of women and racial
minorities and eventually was elected to the Board of Directors of
SSSP and to the Council of the ASA.
The research on clerical work connected Roz and me to a
developing
 Page 81
network of Marxist scholars in labor studies. This was the only
primarily male network in which I developed ties. I recall prefacing
my paper at the first Labor Process Conference at SUNY
Binghamton by noting that I was the only woman speaker and
criticizing the organizers for male bias. Jim Geschwender, the
coorganizer with Phil Kraft, told me years later that this made a
favorable impression on him; later he was instrumental, along with
Joan Smith and other folks in sociology and women's studies, in
getting a position for me at Binghamton. A second labor process
conference at UC Santa Cruz had at least a handful of women
participating.
Having a network of scholars reading and responding to our
clerical work studies was gratifying. The most impressive aspect of
the new labor studies was that researchers such as Michael
Buroway and Louise Lamphere were observing and participating
on the shop floor and centering their analyses on the actual
experiences of workers. However, some of the theoretical debates
seemed to reveal serious gaps and limitations in Marxist labor
theory for understanding women's work and underlined for me the
importance of remaining grounded in women's experiences. For
example, listening to arguments about whether someone's analysis
was consistent with Karl Marx's categories, my reaction was, "Who
cares?" Prior to hearing these discussions, I had briefly immersed
myself in the ongoing debate over how to determine women's class
position. Hearing these debates led me to give up this project as a
largely futile exercise that involved starting with accepted
categories and trying to fit women into them.
A second, and at times overlapping, network that developed in the
late 1970s was an interdisciplinary group of women doing studies
of women and work. Made up for the most part of Marxist feminist
anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, different groupings
formed to hold working conferences and retreats. Karen Sacks was
one of the "centerwomen" (to use her own term) in the network.
9As director of research for the Business and Professional Women
in Washington, D.C., and later director of women's studies at
UCLA, she organized numerous conferences and panels. By
including me in these activities, she was the instigator of several
papers of mine that were later published.
One particular group within this network has been vitally important
to me. In 1979 twelve of us formed a women and work group.
Initially, we had a grant from the American Sociological
Association, but we found our gatherings so fruitful that we
continued to meet at our own expense, alternating spring meetings
in New York and fall meetings in Cambridge. Several members
taught at small non-research-oriented schools. Those of us at larger
institutions usually were the only members of our departments
doing
 Page 82
research in this area. The group thus provided intellectual support
that was unavailable in our institutions. We felt excited because our
scholarship was breaking new ground. Subsequently, interest in
"women and work" grew apace with the general rise in gender
studies. By the late 1980s, it seemed that everybody was studying
women and work. As the interest of some members shifted and
others dropped out and new people joined, we redefined the group's
focus to studies of gender and race. 10
Prior to each meeting, those wanting feedback send copies of work
in progress to the members. At the meeting, the group devotes two
to three hours to discussing each paper. What makes the process
effective is that we trust each other enough to present drafts that are
still confused or disorganized. We have also developed group
rituals involving bagels, Chinese food, and time for sharing
personal news. Over the years we have contributed immensely to
each other's work. Individual members have published numerous
monographs and articles, drafts of which were discussed, vetted,
and reread by the group. In 1987 we published a collection of our
papers in a volume, Hidden Aspects of Women's Work.11
Sociology has turned out to be a better field for me than social
psychology. Because it is open to virtually any topic and to a
variety of methods, it allowed me to explore issues that were
meaningful in terms of my own experiences and to develop a
distinctive voice. Sociology has provided a way to apprehend the
"big picture": I like being able to see the connections between what
people experience in their daily lives and larger historical and
contemporary developments. Sociology also allows me to be
creative.
In graduate school, my knowledge seemed both fragmented and
unconnected to my life. I was interested in materials taught in my
courses, but I never constructed a picture of how the social world
fit together. I enjoyed reading and critiquing social psychology
studies, but I did not come up with clever experimental designs of
my own. I mastered quantitative methods by working for two years
as research assistant on a project that developed a computerized
content analysis program and taking advanced quantitative
methods. Experience with the programs did not inspire me to
formulate interesting questions to explore through analysis of large
data sets. The end result of all this training was that I doubted my
ability to do innovative research. In contrast, though I never took a
course in or received any systematic training in interviewing or
ethnography, each came easily to me. Starting with the small
concrete details of people's accounts, I spun out lines of inquiry
into large-scale social structures and processes, such as the labor
market, technological change, and geographic and social
movements of populations. I delighted in immersing myself in
archival research, por-
 Page 83
ing over census data, and creating new tables. I enjoyed
constructing a sociological story by piecing together bits of
evidence. I have concluded that the most important thing about my
choice of methods was that qualitative and historical methods
engaged me and inspired creative uses of data. I wonder if other
sociologists find a kind of "natural" fit between particular methods
and creativity. 12
While I was becoming increasingly comfortable and productive as
a sociologist, the situation of my department at Boston
Universityand of the junior faculty in itwas deteriorating. The
sociology boom of the 1960s and 1970s was rapidly receding in the
wake of increasing political conservatism. Roz Feldberg and I
submitted a third grant proposal to NIMH, which was approved but
not funded because of a shift in government support away from
"social" research (that is, research that focuses on institutional and
social sources of difficulties) and toward "psychological" research
(that is, research that focuses on individual adjustment and mental
health.) Indeed, the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems,
our first funding source, was eliminated. At Boston University, it
was becoming apparent to us that sociology was viewed with
hostility and suspicion by BU president John Silber and his
administrators.13 Our department chair advised junior faculty to
delay tenure review as long as possible in order to build up our
publications. However, the situation deteriorated to the point where
our accomplishments were largely irrelevant. The administration
frequently ignored the recommendation of departmental and
faculty review committees. The increasingly hostile environment
and the arbitrary and vindictive use of power by the Silber
administration spurred the faculty to vote for collective
representation by an American Association of University
Professors-affiliated union in 1981. When the administration
refused to negotiate a contract, the faculty elected to strike. The
level of faculty support for the strike was remarkably high,
including virtually all of Liberal Arts, the School of Management,
and the Law School. Sociology faculty members, along with those
in political science and psychology, were among the most visible
on the picket line and as public spokespeople. The strike was
successful. We got a contract. The bitterness continued, however,
as the university administration pursued appeals in court and a
policy of retribution. S. M. Miller, our former chair, and three other
prominent faculty organized a movement to have John Silber
removed as president. I signed a petition to the trustees demanding
his dismissal, though I doubted its effectiveness. The movement
failed, and sociology appeared to be targeted for reprisal. After the
strike, virtually no one in sociology got tenure, regardless of
positive department and college peer reviews. Terry Freiberg, a
well-regarded young
 Page 84
Marxist theorist and a popular teacher, was denied renewal of his
contract even before he reached the stage of tenure review. The
department shrank as people were fired, took jobs elsewhere, or
retired early to escape the hostile and demoralizing environment. In
the peak years of the mid-1970s, the department had about twenty-
seven members; by the late 1980s that number had shrunk to
fifteen. 14
While these events were unfolding, Roz and I managed to continue
our clerical work study. Our NIMH grants allowed us to set up a
small ''island" of feminist teaching and research. For several years
we had a project office with a secretary, Roz Geffen, and several
graduate assistants. In our joint research we tried to work in a
feminist way that involved sharing ideas and writing rather than
parceling out individual credit. Our presence made some difference
for women graduate students. Over the years I directed some
wonderful graduate students working on feminist topics. But one of
our research assistants left graduate school after two years, saying
that she did not want to go through the kind of stress Roz and I
were undergoing just to survive in academia.
Prophetically, my long and fruitful collaboration with Roz did not
survive the stresses of the final stages of our troubles at Boston
University. The end of our collaboration was as painful as the end
of a marriage. Roz was and is a brilliant thinker, a gifted researcher,
and an inspired teacher. She would easily have been granted tenure
and achieved eminence in any normal university. After leaving BU,
Roz began vital work as a researcher and administrator for the
Massachusetts Nurse's Association. Nevertheless, the fact that she
was driven out of the university was not only unjust but was also a
loss for feminism in the academy. The attack on sociology at BU
and other universitiesand our inability to mobilize more support
against such attacksreflects the field's low prestige and exposes the
illusory nature of faculty governance.15 Protective legal
mechanisms are ineffective in the face of arbitrary disregard of
peer review. I am concerned about this and other recent attacks on
sociology because since the mid-1970s white women and men and
women of color have become better represented in sociology than
in most other disciplines. Because of the recency of our entry, we
make up a higher proportion of those "last hired." Cutting or
eliminating sociology departments will therefore hurt us
disproportionately. I am also concerned that the response of the
more prestigious (or upwardly striving) sociology departments may
be to try to shed the "low-status" image by emphasizing topics and
approaches that are most comfortable and appealing to the white
men who still dominate the academy and by turning away from the
con-
 Page 85
cerns of the marginal, oppressed, and powerlessby definition the
"low status."

Japanese American Women

During my early years at BU, I began a second stream of research
that grew out of my family and personal roots. My study of
Japanese American women domestic workers very much ties in
with an emotional ambivalence in my life: Japanese American
culture/community simultaneously draws me in (comfort,
belonging, connectedness) and drives me away (stifling, limited,
parochial). My relationship to the community has been cyclical.
My earliest memories are from the concentration camp in Gila,
Arizona, where my family and I were incarcerated during World
War II. At first my father and mother were always around, and
other extended kin were housed in nearby barracks. The communal
bathrooms and mess hall led to an enforced closeness with the
larger community. In 1944 after my father was allowed to leave the
camp to work in the Midwest, my mother became ill with
tuberculosis and was hospitalized for a year. After that I lived with
my mother's parents, who were in the Heart Mountain, Wyoming,
concentration camp. They were also raising my eldest cousin,
Betty, so I suddenly had a sibling, an older sister, for the first time.
Ba-chan (grandmother) was an amusing storyteller and somewhat
of a scold. Ji-chan (grandfather) had been a tenant farmer and then
a foreman at a fruit ranch in the Sacramento delta. I was afraid of
him, for he was strict and upright. He did not, however, mind a bit
of earthy peasant humor. We all must have communicated in
Japanese since neither spoke much English.
In October 1945, four months after the war ended, my mother was
released from the hospital, and we joined my father in Chicago. We
lived in two rooms of a three-story tenement building that had been
carved up into small apartments. My father's parents, my aunt and
her husband, an uncle, his wife and kids, and assorted single aunts
also lived in the building. Gradually all the uncles, aunts, and
cousins left to go back to California, and my paternal grandparents
died, leaving my parents and my new baby brother and me alone in
Chicago. I lived a double life, one in public school and the
neighborhood, which was largely Jewish, and another revolving
around Buddhist church, Japanese school, and Japanese American
basketball. I never spoke Japanese again, and when I visited my
maternal grandparents or they visited us, I was unable to
communicate much with them.
 Page 86
In my freshman year at Senn High School, the factory where my
father worked moved downstate. My father commuted for about a
year, but it was grueling. He decided that the time had come to pull
up stakes. We moved back to the Bay Area. We rejoined the
Alameda Buddhist temple that my fathers father had helped found
in 1915. I went to my two last years of high school in Oakland and
spent four years at Berkeley. In 1962 1 left for Cambridge with my
husband-to-be and lived there for the next twenty-eight years. We
returned to California for visits once or twice a year, and I retained
an unresolved longing eventually to return, much as my parents
had longed to return to California from Chicago. My husband once
remarked that Japanese Americans have an "elephant's graveyard"
instinct: we all have to go back to our homeland to deposit our
bones with those of our ancestors.
In 1974 when I was coteaching the course "Women and Work," I
found a little material on African American women, but none on
Asian American women. On one of my summer visits to
California, I interviewed a half-dozen immigrant (issei) and
American born (nisei) women engaged in paid housework. I was
aware that domestic service was a line of work in which many
Japanese American women had engaged and that this experience
had never been documented or even mentioned in histories of
Japanese Americans. Like a lot of women's work, it was outside the
formal economy and therefore overlooked. What I wanted to do
was treat their work seriously as real work: I wanted to know how
they got jobs, how they planned and carried out their work, how
they managed relationships with employers, and what the work
meant to them.
I located the women through my mothers friendship networks and
family connections. My mother accompanied me on many of the
interviews as go-between and translator. I really enjoyed the
interviewing. I was enthralled especially by the older women's
spunk and humor, moved by the stories of hardships and tragedies,
and uplifted by these women's eventual triumph. A surgeon friend
from Ellsworth, Maine, Eji Suyama, read my book and remarked,
"You really liked those old ladies, didn't you?" I hadn't thought
about it in those terms, but he was right.
As I tried to make sense of what the "old ladies" were telling me,
many questions arose: Why did Japanese American women in the
Bay Area get involved in domestic service? What did this have to
do with immigration? What were the consequences of immigrant
occupations for mobility in subsequent generations? How did the
women's experiences compare with those of other immigrant
women and of other women of color? How did social structure and
personal agency intersect in shaping their experience?
 Page 87
What started out as a small project tangential to my main research
grew larger and larger as it connected up to broader questions about
the intersection of social history and individual lives and the
dialectics of structural determinacy and human agency. 16Seeking a
larger context for the interview material, I began to read a wide
array of literature, ranging from studies of Japanese Americans,
domestic workers, and women workers, to economic models of the
labor market, to the new family history.
I initially wrote two articles, one on immigrant labor markets and
the other on pre-World War II issei women.17I soon realized that
there was ample material for a book. The writing went quickly, and
I finished the first draft of the book in about two months in 1981. I
have detailed this sequence of events because there was a certain
"seat of the pants" quality to my modus operandi. I started with the
interviews and sought ways of making sense of the material. A
reading of my book Issei, Nisei, Warbride, which begins with
conceptual frameworks for looking at women, labor migration, and
domestic service, gives a misleading impression of the analytic
process.18 In actuality, the theoretical framework came about after,
not before, the data.
Between the first draft and the final manuscript, four years elapsed.
An important source of intellectual support during the revision
stage was my involvement with a group of women of color
scholars, the InterUniversity Group Studying the Intersection of
Race and Gender. The members, Bonnie Dill, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, Cheryl Gilkes, Ruth Zambrana, and I, each had
done original research on a particular group. We were dissatisfied
with "white feminist analysis," which ignored how race/ethnicity
interacted with gender in shaping the lives of women of color. We
felt that comparative analysis across groups would get at this
interaction. Reading with this group fostered in me a better
understanding of connections between the histories of African
American, Latina, and Asian American women, an understanding
that I tried to incorporate in the final draft of my book manuscript.
The comentoring within this group and within the Women and
Work Group provided continuity that was sorely lacking in my
employment.
My intellectual work was disrupted by a series of personal and
professional dislocations that eventuated from the nasty situation at
BU. When I came up for tenure in 1981-1982, I was turned down
after a grueling one-year process, despite the strong support of my
department. Filing a grievance on the grounds of gross distortion of
my record by a university committee, I won the right to a second
review.19 I took a visiting position in Hawaii in 1983 to recuperate
and give birth to my third child. On my
 Page 88
return, I went through a second tenure review, only to be denied
again by the administration, despite positive reviews by all faculty
committees. The administration's intent was telegraphed early in
the process when, after several years of giving me merit raises, it
refused to give me the raise recommended by a faculty merit
committee for that year. Obviously the whole process was a sham
and a waste of time and effort. 20
Throughout this period my feminist and labor studies networks
really came through for me. Over twenty senior women and men
wrote detailed and thoughtful evaluations for the two rounds of my
tenure review. Their succor buoyed me emotionally, even as their
evaluations were being judged irrelevant by the Boston University
administration. The support was the one positive aspect of this
trying period. It is the one reason I am still in academia today
When I finally had to go on the job market, some of these same
people, having read and vetted my entire oeuvre, were able to write
lengthy letters of recommendation.
Having reached the end of the road at BU, I was faced with the
crisis of whether I would take a job outside of Boston/New
England in order to remain in academia. Was it fair to ask Gary and
the children to pull up roots and disrupt their lives for the sake of
my career? If I left academia, would I always feel that John Silber
had driven me out? Perhaps it was another expression of the
rebellious streak that had set me on a "nontraditional" path in the
first place or perhaps it was the same fear of annihilation that had
led me to soldier on in graduate school that caused me to continue.
Gary always stressed the importance of my intellectual work and
remained flexible and optimistic. He felt and continues to feel that
we can do anything and make any arrangement work. He argued
for relocating the whole family to wherever the best job for me
appeared. He was running a small consulting business and felt he
could move. By late fall of my last year at BU, I had an offer from
Florida State University in Tallahassee, which I accepted. As
spring approached, however, we reluctantly concluded that Gary
should remain in Cambridge with our daughters, Sara and Antonia,
so that they could finish high school there. I would move down to
Tallahassee with one-year-old Patrick, and we would make regular
visits back and forth.
We had been impressed by the humanity and empathy of the
sociology faculty at FSU: I brought a six-month-old baby to the job
interview, and Mike Armer, the chair, and other faculty and spouses
provided child care help so that I could go to interviews and give a
colloquium. The people at FSU were wonderful colleagues, and the
pace of life in Tallahassee was relaxing. However, the lack of
ethnic diversity was a shock. In a black-white
 Page 89
societyCubans were not in this part of the stateI was truly an
anomaly. This was brought home to me when I went to the
Department of Motor Vehicles to register my car. The young
African American clerk who was filling out my form came to the
section on race, glanced at me, and typed in "white." She knew for
sure that I was not "black," and in her mind there was only one
alternative. The two years I spent at Florida State helped me regain
my perspective. I learned just how abnormal the situation at BU
was and that life in academia was rewarding in a normal place. I
discovered that the strain of commuting was less draining than the
stress of working in a hostile environment. At the same time,
however, Patrick missed his father and sisters and was always upset
when Gary left Tallahassee or we left Cambridge. Long-distance
commuting clearly was not viable as a long-term arrangement.
Also, rather than preparing for relocation, my family seemed to be
getting more entrenched in Cambridge. Gary had been able to use
his connections to get a desirable position with the state; Sara and
Annie planned to attend college in New England. I began looking
for a job in the Northeast. Two good offers came through, and I
accepted a position at the State University of New York,
Binghamton. I respected the work of the sociologists there, and the
women's studies group was active and supportive. Although I still
had to commute, it was a much easier one that could be done on a
weekly basis as a five-hour drive or a one-hour flight. I also loved
the undergraduate and graduate students, who were bright and
interested, unspoiled and appreciative of our efforts. The sociology
department was extremely generous in accommodating my
schedule.
Issei, Nisei, Warbride finally appeared in 1986, at the end of my
second year at FSU. 21 It was two books really, one that told the
women's stories in their own words and another that was a
historical/structural analysis. This dual aspect reflected the fact that
I had had two audiences in mind in writing the book: sociologists
and members of the Japanese American community. I had tried to
write as accessibly as possible, although the first three chapters,
which were historical and analytic, were heavy going for
nonspecialist readers. Nonetheless, many people in the community
struggled through the difficult parts and read the whole book. I was
invited to give talks and lectures in churches and community
venues. The most gratifying part of these presentations was having
people say that the book was true to their own experience or those
of their sisters or mothers. Members of the audience frequently
related incidents in their own lives that were as dramatic or telling
as any told in the book.
Readers have told me they found the stories and voices of the
women personally engaging. I know that writing the book was
personally fulfilling.
 Page 90
It brought together in one project personal emotional issues and
intellectual ones: the desire to connect and bond with my Japanese
grandmothers in ways I couldn't when they were alive and my need
to understand the workings of women's (and my own) oppression
and resistance. I was able to creatively use the tension I mentioned
earlier between wanting to merge my identity in the group and
wanting to maintain independence and analytic distance.

Comparative Work on Women of Color

Since the mid-1980s, my research has increasingly turned to
comparative historical research on African American, Latina, and
Asian American women's work. My initial interest in comparative
study grew out of my writing and teaching about Asian Americans
in the late 1970s. I became dissatisfied with the cultural
frameworks that seemed to pervade the literature: Japanese and
Chinese American family, economic practices, and community
formation were explained as extensions or adaptations of
Chinese/Japanese values and cultural forms, such as Confucianism
and familialism. The cultural bias I felt stemmed from the Euro-
American's conception of Asian Americans as "perpetual
foreigners." Asian Americans and Asians were lumped together
and (in current terminology) viewed as "other." Like the
essentialized woman, Asians and Asian culture were seen as eternal
and unchanging. Interpreting the social patterns of Japanese and
Chinese Americans in cultural terms emphasized their
''uniqueness," denied their commonalties with other people of
color, and obscured the impacts of racist legal, political, and
economic structures on their lives in the United States.
The usefulness of comparative analysis for getting at underlying
structural factors that were obscured by cultural explanations first
became clear to me when I worked on a paper on the Chinese
American family in 1980. A dean at Boston University had asked
me to give a public lecture on the Chinese American Family in a
series addressed to various communities in Boston. Desperate to
get a handle on something interesting to say, I talked to a number
of people in the Chinese American community about their families.
One of my students who had immigrated from Hong Kong as a ten-
year-old and been caught up in school busing mentioned that she
had attended a different school every year and then remarked that
she had felt most comfortable in the schools that were
predominately black. Startled, I asked her why, and she replied,
"Oh, blacks are more similar to the Chinese. They both emphasize
family a lot." This casual remark jolted a needle out of its track and
got me thinking along new lines. I felt intuitively that
 Page 91
she was right: there were important similarities between the black
family and the Chinese family that were, however, obscured by the
contrasting stereotypes of the former as pathological and
disorganized and the latter as close-knit and cohesive. I began
applying the institutional framework used for analyzing black
families to Chinese Americans, looking at how family formation
and strategies might have been affected by immigration
restrictions, denial of citizenship, and color bars in employment.
Working out an institutional analysis turned on three kinds of
evidence: first, that Chinese Americans displayed different family
formations in different historical periods marked by shifts in
immigration law and other political/legal constraints; second, that
Chinese immigrants in other societies, such as the Philippines,
displayed dissimilar patterns of family formation; and third, that
other groups with very different cultures displayed patterns similar
to those of Chinese Americans under similar circumstances. I
worked out these ideas in an article on the Chinese American
family, and I have carried over this strategy of using comparative
analysis to get at underlying structural factors to other projects. 22
Similarly, my study of Japanese American domestic workers had
led me to the realization that they were not unique. Relegation to
domestic service and other "degraded" forms of women's work was
something they shared with black women in the South and
Mexican women in the Southwest. Studying these groups'
involvement in domestic work showed the reasons for their
concentration in domestic service to be similar, stemming from
their position as women members of a subordinated racial caste
within a dual-race labor system. Their relations with employers
were also similar despite divergent cultural backgrounds. This is
important because racial/ ethnic women's subordination is often
attributed to their personal or cultural characteristics. Because they
do work that is degraded, that places them in positions of
subordination, African American, Latina, and Japanese American
women are seen as naturally subservient and in need of white
guidance. In this way race and gender ideologies are created and
affirmed in everyday life.
I began systematic comparisons of the labor histories of African
American women in the South, Mexican American women in the
Southwest, and Chinese American women in the West while
working with the Inter-University Group on Race and Gender. The
group had decided to prepare a monograph on the work, family,
and community lives of African American, Latina, and Asian
American women. Our central argument, based on the internal
colonialism model, was that racial, ethnic women were subject to
distinct forms of labor exploitation and political/legal restrictions
that
 Page 92
differentiated their experiences from those of European American
women. 23 This focus reflected the politics of the era when African
American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women
were attempting to forge alliances and to place the experience of
women of color at the center of analyses of society and culture.
Getting our ideas accepted proved difficult. Our draft manuscript
was rejected by a university press editor. In retrospect, the criticism
that accompanied the rejection was overly harsh. It became
difficult to regroup, given everyone's busy schedule. Although we
did not produce the hoped-for synthetic history, we did important
intellectual groundwork. Concepts developed collectively
influenced our individual research and the work of the Center for
Research on Women at Memphis State, which was organized by
Bonnie Dill, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Lynn Cannon.24The
center's summer institutes, working paper series, and social science
bibliography were crucial elements in the flowering of social
science scholarship on women of color in the 1980s.25
The center also fostered connections among scholars with similar
interests. I met historian Elsa Barkley Brown through the institute.
After I got to Binghamton, I recruited her there.26Elsa became an
important sounding board and influence on me. In her study of the
postbellum African American community of Richmond, Virginia,
she explicates the multirhythmic, nonlinear, nondualistic nature of
African American culture and shows how the African American
community drew strength from economic, class, and gender
diversity She has frequently helped me sort out my thinking about
interdependence and difference and encouraged my comparative
work on women of color.27
My current research builds on the burgeoning literature in women's
history and feminist sociology that documents the historical
specificity and variability of womanhood among different groups.
Women's history has become more inclusive, its narrative
multistranded, multivoiced. Similarly, feminist sociology is paying
attention to race/ethnicity/class differences among women. Yet I
am troubled by the concept of "multiculturalism." This concept in
women's history has taken the form of seeing all women as having
fractured identities, as being oppressed in different ways, and as
having partial and incomplete perspectives. It is an attempt to be
inclusive without acknowledging the fact that differences among
women are not random but systematically connected. I am
attempting in my current work to unravel those connections. I am
working out in a variety of ways how the racial division of labor
among different groups of women creates hierarchical,
interdependent relations among them, to show (paraphrasing Elsa
 Page 93
Barkley Brown) that white women lead the lives they do precisely
because of the lives that women of color lead.

Up and out of Sociology?

In 1990 I made an enormous change in my family's life and in my
personal and professional life when I accepted a position at the
University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment in the
Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies Departments. I turned down
an offer of a professorship in sociology and a center directorship at
an Ivy League university to do so. My reasons were primarily
personal: a desire to be closer to my aging parents and mother-in-
law and perhaps also the pull of the Japanese American
community. Happily, my two grown daughters, Sara and Annie,
have opted to live in California, at least for now. My eleven-year-
old son, Patrick, is playing basketball and baseball in a Japanese
American league. This takes family history full circle: my father
was the "Babe Ruth" of the Japanese American baseball league of
the 1920s, according to a recent article in the vernacular press. My
husband, who runs a nonprofit foundation in Boston, is bearing the
brunt of the move by having to commute between coasts on a
biweekly basis.
My main professional unease comes from not being part of a
sociology department. Even though most of my interests in gender
and race can be accommodated within the Ethnic Studies and
Women's Studies Departments, I would like to have the broader
disciplinary home: as long as I was in sociology, any substantive
interest I might develop could be accommodated. It is not clear
what will happen now if my interests shift. Although it is
theoretically possible to interact with sociologists at Berkeley,
practically it rarely occurs, given institutional arrangements and
demands to be involved in departmental business. Once again I
find supportive relationships with feminist sociologists occurring
outside my employment, through professional meetings, informal
groups, and long-distance phone calls.
When I taught in sociology departments, I was located at the
margins and struggled to integrate the perspectives of women and
people of color. Today I am housed in two interdisciplinary
departments that center precisely on the perspectives and
experiences of these groups. However, these departments are
themselves marginalized within the academy. Furthermore, I have
found that each department tends to emphasize commonalties
among the groups it studies (e.g., Asian Americans, women) as the
basis for shared identity and pushes to the periphery what the other
sees as central. I find
 Page 94
myself in the subgroup within ethnic studies that is struggling to
bring gender in as a central analytic concept in understanding
ethnic immigration, politics, and education. Similarly, I am in the
subgroup within women's studies attempting to incorporate the
perspectives of women of color into feminist theory building.
Being in a kind of straddling position, trying to integrate gender
into the study of ethnic communities and race/ethnic diversity into
women's studies, is contributing to my own efforts to develop a
framework that incorporates race and gender not as additive but as
interlocking systems. There seems to be an enrichment that takes
place when ideas/concepts from one field are introduced into
another field. Ethnic studies colleagues in literature are introducing
me to developments in postmodern and postcolonial discourse
theory; I have found particularly useful the notion of positionality
and the questioning of oppositional categories. The racial
formation model of my colleague Michael Omi has shown me how
to problematize race in the same way that gender has been
problematized by feminist sociologists. By examining race and
gender as interlocking, historically variable, and contested
constructions, I hope to move toward integrated theory.
Both departments are in the process of changing themselves. Ethnic
Studies is working on revamping the curriculum to be more truly
interdisciplinary and to draw on developments in cultural studies
and postcolonial theory Women's Studies was granted departmental
status two years ago. Our faculty, who have all had joint
appointments with a disciplinary "home," need to define
themselves more centrally as women's studies scholars and
teachers. We are beginning to recruit a younger generation of
scholars who have interdisciplinary backgrounds and who are
committed to transnational, transdisciplinary, and multicultural
feminisms. By participating in these changes, perhaps I will
transform myself once again. It occurs to me that this shift to ethnic
studies and women's studies is not unlike the shift I experienced
when I entered sociology from social psychology. I expect my
transformation will come about by my doing whatever it is that
needs doing and working with others on the process of change.
Once again, I am an immigrant.

Epilogue: A Response to a Query as to Whether I Am Still Angry

Some colleagues, including the editors of this volume, after reading
an earlier draft of the present essay, asked me, now that I am a
tenured full professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
whether I am still angry. They say I need to acknowledge and
appreciate my success. They are, of course,
 Page 95
right. My career has turned out well after all, through some luck
and the help of many, many people. I have also been fortunate in
my personal life; my partner for thirty-two years has been
unwavering in his love and support, and we have three healthy and
accomplished children. I have little reason to be bitter. But, I
confess, there is anger. I don't like feeling angry, but I have come to
accept that it will probably always be there, simmering below the
surface and easily inflamed by daily reminders of the continued
injustices that women of color suffer in academia. My anger may
be somewhat inexplicable to colleagues who, despite the best
intentions, have difficulty understanding at a gut level the injuries
inflicted through large and small acts of arrogance by white men as
they go about their business.
Most of us "successful" women of color in academia have had to
endure numerous assaults on our worth and dignity in the process
of getting our professional training and in being hired, retained, and
promoted. We've had to fight our colleagues to make space for
people like us in "their" departments. In most places, once we get
in, we remain tokens, suffering both invisibility and hypervisibility.
My experience as a woman of color knocking at the door of
predominately white male departments and as the sole Asian
American within predominately white male departments has made
me an eyewitness to how racism and sexism operate at the informal
level to keep departments white male bastions. I have been on both
sides of the fence, as a member of a department that purports to be
recruiting minority women faculty, yet manages not to make an
appointment, and as an applicant, usually having been invited to
apply, who did not get the appointment. I am not talking about
cases where someone else is appointedsomeone who might be
better or equally qualified. Rather, I am talking about cases where
no one is appointed at allwhich can only imply that they think we
are so bad that they'd rather leave the position vacant than give it to
any of us. Over the years I have seen some rather bizarre posturing
by colleagues and potential colleagues to explain these outcomes.
I make two assumptions at the outset. First, I assume that I and the
other minority women academics whose experiences I draw on for
this account are qualified for the positions for which we were being
considered. Most of us have managed to maintain careers, and
some have gone on to success in institutions better than the ones
that rejected us. Second, I assume that most of the white males who
dominate departments do not see themselves as racist and sexist
and would probably pass a lie detector test if questioned outright.
Nonetheless, their worldviews, habits, and collective actions lead
to outcomes that are racist and sexist.
The discrimination I am talking about is often difficult to pinpoint
 Page 96
because it is cloaked within a complicated process of "peer
evaluation" that too often magically produces rather predictable
outcomes. The evaluation process for candidates for academic
positions and for promotion to tenure is indeed rigorous. In
addition to vitae, letters of recommendation, teaching evaluations,
and extensive personal interviews with other faculty, students,
deans, and administrators, the candidate is required to submit all
scholarly publications and present a research-based colloquium.
The plethora of material reviewed implies a grueling but fair
process in which one's peers read and evaluate the material and
then come together as a group to discuss the candidates and reach a
group consensus. The actual process hardly ever resembles this
ideal. Many of those making the judgment do not read much of
anything in the candidate's file, least of all her writing. It is too
time consuming and difficult to do so if the candidate's area is
outside of their field of interest. Most white male academics are not
familiar with or interested in scholarship on gender, race, or
ethnicity, especially if it focuses on the experiences of men and
women of color. Thus, in most cases the majority of those making
decisions will either not have read all the material or, if they have
read it, not appreciate its significance.
How, then, do those making up the majority, who have not read the
material or are not expert in the subfield, form a judgment? Quite
simply, they rely on the judgment of those who do have a firm
opinion, and those with the firmest opinions are likely to be those
most invested in excluding work that doesn't agree with their
conceptions. They don't necessarily have to be experts in the
subfield to have a firm opinion about it, but they have to care
enough about excluding it. Thus, peer judgments turn out not to be
all that independently arrived at. Rather, the group consensus
coalesces around a few facile characterizations, generally of the ilk
that the candidate's scholarship is "weak," methodologically
"sloppy," and/or "lacks theoretical significance." These terms were
used by some senior faculty members to derogate the scholarship
of a minority candidate for an assistant professorship in one
department. Surprised because I knew how influential this
candidate's work was in the field of race and ethnicity, I asked an
acquaintance in the department what had happened. He said he
hadn't looked at the work himself, but he had heard that it wasn't
very good, and besides the candidate had not published much.
When I said, "What about his book?" which had been widely
praised in scholarly reviews, my acquaintance obviously hadn't
heard about the book but added triumphantly, ''Besides, he took a
long time to finish his degree." I am sure this acquaintance will
continue to believe the rejection was justified because the
candidate was unproductive, despite clear evidence in the file to the
contrary. I was reminded
 Page 97
of the technique of the "big lie" in the McCarthy era: a
characterization repeated often and loudly enough takes on
credibility. I was a member of a department where a minority
candidate gave a talk based on work in progress; the research was
dismissed as of limited significance by faculty opposed to the
candidate. The full paper on which the talk was based was
subsequently published in a major disciplinary journal.
Disconfirmation of judgment never chastens those who participate
in derogating a candidate's work. They develop a convenient
amnesia.
The dynamics of peer evaluation also help explain why race
exclusion and gender exclusion occur even when a majority of
faculty favor "diversifying" and developing gender and/or race
studies in the department. I used to be puzzled by this, having
encountered situations where the majority of faculty in the
department are in favor of an appointment, and yet it doesn't
happen. It is not unlike the question of why the National Rifle
Association can prevent the passage of gun control laws even
though the majority of Americans favor control. In departmental
politics, as in national-level politics, a small group can prevail over
an unorganized majority by the vociferousness of its views and its
willingness to put a lot of effort into carrying the day.
Even the most liberal and enlightened white men are not willing to
stir up conflict and dissent or risk their relations with white male
colleagues for the sake of race and gender justice. They are not
unlike the personally tolerant "liberals" in the 1950s who, when
confronted by intransigent white supremacists, would not support
"forced" integration on the grounds that it would foment unrest.
These "friends" are the most aggravating because they'll let you
down when you most need their support. They rationalize and
excuse their colleagues' behavior; they "understand" and have
compassion for racist/sexist sentiments because they identify more
with their colleagues than with those who are excluded. They are
intellectually supportive, but they have no emotional stake in race
and gender justice, and they are unwilling to give up their
comfortwhich includes getting along with their colleaguesfor the
excluded. They will never be there when the chips are down. It
took a while for me to learn this. I once became furious at the chair
of my department for undercutting our faculty's vote in favor of a
black woman candidatewhom he had heartily endorsedwhen he
realized that a male colleague in another department was
vehemently opposed to the candidate. It appeared that the chair was
more concerned with avoiding conflict and enmity than with acting
honorably in relation to the candidate. I didn't fully understand the
logic of this behavior until another incident a while later when I
was discussing with an acquaintance a
 Page 98
controversy that had arisen when his department declined to even
interview a minority candidate who had been recommended by the
recruitment committee. Minority students and faculty had
complained and demonstrated, drawing media attention to the
issue. My acquaintance had been on the recruitment committee and
was involved in choosing the short list but had gone on leave
before the decision was made. He was seen by minority students as
a white person supportive of their concerns, so I expected him to
express regret about not having been there to advocate for at least
interviewing the candidate. Instead, he said, "I'm glad I wasn't
there; it was just as well not to be part of the conflict."
Another scenario that I have seen replayed over and over is one
where a position has been created as a result of organized efforts by
students, the administration, or sometimes a subgroup within the
faculty to diversify the faculty or to develop minority or gender
studies. Those opposed to targeted searches (usually in the name of
maintaining "quality" and preventing "race-conscious" hiring),
abetted by those who are indifferent, may reluctantly agree to go
along with the recruitment effort but make it difficult to get any
candidate approved. A common ploy is to anoint one particular
personpreferably one who is not availableas the only worthy
scholar of his or her ethnicity. (This is easy because usually only
one black/ Latino or Latina/Asian American is allowed to be
prominent in an academic field at any one time; she or he therefore
appears as the "exception.") Usually the person so designated will
already have a better job or have multiple bidders. Since that
person is not available, it is argued, it is better to make no
appointment than to get someone "second rate." In most such cases
the position eventually gets eliminated altogether.
When you are one of the candidates in this situation, it rapidly
becomes apparent that those interviewing you are merely going
through the motions and that they don't care whether the position is
filled. At two different universities in different years, I interviewed
for positions in Asian American sociology that had been created as
a result of student protests. On both occasions someone
interviewing me managed to work into the conversation his feeling
that it was a shame that the department could not get X/Y, who was
truly outstanding. Whether or not X or Y was, in fact, better
qualified is not the point. I doubt that in any other academic job
search, a faculty member or an administrator would blatantly insult
a candidate by lamenting the unavailability of another scholar. At
one of the schools, the chair of sociology blithely informed me that
he did not think race and ethnic relations would ever be an
important topic in his department. I found this statement
astounding in light of the centrality of issues
 Page 99
of race and ethnicity in the development of American sociology.
Furthermore, the campus was located in an urban center
experiencing large-scale racial conflict. Needless to say, no
appointment was made, although a few years later the department
appointed a white male scholar specializing in race/ethnicity. In
another case told to me by a Chicana sociologist, a rather reluctant
department did make her an offer, but at a salary below what she
was currently earning. Although she wanted to be at the institution,
she correctly interpreted this as a less than good faith offer and
turned it down. Nevertheless, the department could claim that
despite extensive efforts, no Chicano or Chicana sociologist would
accept an offer.
For those of us caught in this particular scenario, "peer review"
adds insult to injury. Not only do we not get the jobs because they
really don't want us or like the type of research we do; we are also
invited to apply, put through the wringer, and then informed that,
through a fair and thorough process, we have been judged
unworthy. If we don't accept this judgment or shrug our shoulders
philosophically, and instead raise the possibility that racism or
sexism colored the process, everyone in the department, even those
who are usually at odds over various internal matters, draws
together in common defense of departmental prerogatives, citing
"confidentiality" of procedures.
So to respond to my colleagues: yes, I am still angry, partly
because of my own experiences from years past, but also because I
observe the same processes of exclusion, marginalization, and
ghettoization at work. I do not wish to minimize the gains we have
made. In my own university women of color have reached double
digits if we include non-U.S.-born women. Some of us are tenured,
so collectively we have some influence. But we are a tiny minority,
concentrated in certain ghettosAsian American, Chicano, Native
American, African American, and Women's Studies; our presence
relieves pressure on mainline departments to develop more
inclusive faculty, curricula, and scholarship. These departments
remain white male bastions. Scholarship in these departments can
go on ignoring race and gender and continue to build theory that is
partial. Moreover, wherever we are located, we have to be
constantly vigilant against backsliding and attempts to roll back our
gains.

Notes
This essay was completed in July 1994 and has not been revised for
this publication. I let it stand as a document that reflects my
"memory" at that point. My thanks to all of the participants of the
working meeting on "The Missing Feminist Revolution
 Page 100
Revisited: Gender, Life Histories, and Human Agency"organized
by Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thornefor their feedback and
encouragement. This essay is dedicated to Gary Glenn, a feminist
before I was, for sharing the experiences described here and for
understanding white male privilege.
1. My mother recalls my declaring as a young teenager that I never
intended to have children. She took this declaration seriously, and it
stabbed her in the heart. I don't remember ever saying this and
believe that I always intended to have children.
2. I was wrong. I now realize that my father has always kept up
with "current events" by reading the paper and now by watching
hours of television news. However, he never discussed anything
that he heard or watched with us, so none of us ever knew what he
thought about issues.
3. Being the lone Asian American and/or lone Asian American
woman became so usual that I became comfortable with it. In the
three universities where I taught before my present job, I was the
only Asian American woman in my college or division. At Boston
University there was one other Japanese American in my
department, Scott Miyakawa, who became a cherished colleague.
His gentleness and caring drew many minority and international
students to him. I felt we had a special kinship because of our
shared heritage. Scottie passed away in 1981. Although my
uniqueness might seem to make me stand out, most of the time,
because I was "not black," my ethnicity was invisible. I recall
sitting in a faculty meeting in which there was a discussion about
the lack of minority on the faculty and someone remarked, "For
example, all of us sitting here are white." My interjection of "not
quite" elicited embarrassed laughs.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley
(New York: Bantam Books, 1961); Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais
Nin, ed. and trans. by Gunther Stuhlman (New York: Swallow
Press, 1966).
5. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman,
Culture, and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1974).
6. Chandra left BU in the mid-1970s to take a position at the
University of California, San Diego, where she still teaches. She
has written three highly acclaimed books in the sociology of
culture. Barbara moved to Seattle to take a research position at the
Batelle Institute, where she has flourished.
7. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1974).
8. Our first article, "Degraded and Deskilled," was published in
Social Problems 15 (1977): 52-64. Arlene Kaplan Daniels's
editorship of the journal undoubtedly had a great deal to do with its
receptivity to our kind of research.
9. Sacks coined the term to refer to a type of leadership that
involves building and maintaining connections necessary for
organized resistance. See Karen Sacks, Caring by the Hour
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
10. Carole Turbin, Chris Bose, Natalie Sokoloff, Myra Ferree,
Carol Brown, Susan Lehrer, Roz Feldberg, and I have been with
the group for the entire twelve years. Other past and present
members include Fran Rothstein, Peggy Crull, Nadine Felton, Amy
Srebnik, Amy Gilman, and Nancy Breen.
11. Christine Bose, Roslyn Feldberg, and Natalie Sokoloff, with the
Women and Work Group, eds., Hidden Aspects of Women's Work
(New York: Praeger, 1987). One unfor-
 Page 101
tunate aspect of my current residence in California is missing
meetings of the group. Fortunately, Carole Turbin, who spent a
year in California, and I have developed a close relationship
intellectually and personally, and frequently discuss our work with
each other.
12. I can be as dazzled and engaged by good work based on
multiple regressions as by good work based on ethnography or
historical research, but that doesn't mean I can do them equally
well.
13. For example, the deanship of the College of Arts and Science
was dubbed "the revolving deanship" by faculty critics because a
series of incumbents resigned in frustration. Finally, an individual
who many felt was unqualified for tenure was given tenure by
Silber and installed as dean. In 1992 the attorney general of
Massachusetts launched an investigation of Boston University
management practices that forced the university to agree to make
certain changes relating to the independence and oversight function
of the trustees.
14. Many accounts of violation of academic freedom and normal
academic practices have been published over the years in the
Boston Globe in the period from the late 1970s until the present.
15. Examples include the elimination of sociology departments at
Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Rochester;
unilateral downsizing at California State University at San Diego;
and proposals for a severe cut at Yale.
16. The prospect of transcribing approximately 100 hours of taped
interviews was daunting, but a good friend, Jean Twomey, became
fascinated by the interviews and volunteered evenings to
transcribing them. She transcribed one-third, I did another one-
third, and I hired Japanese-speaking assistants to transcribe the
remaining interviews. Jean and I spent many hours discussing the
project. Her commitment and interest boosted me over what had
been a formidable hurdle.
17. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Occupational Ghettoization: Japanese
American Women and Domestic Service, 1905-1970," Ethnicity 8
(1981): 352-386; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "The Dialectics of Wage
Work: Japanese American Women and Domestic Service, 1905-
1940," Feminist Studies 6 (fall 1980): 432-471.
18. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three
Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
19. My friend Liz Lyons, a lawyer, really bucked me up when I felt
the most dispirited. Always a fighter and advocate, she was totally
outraged by any violation of rights and by bureaucratic stupidity.
She was completely partisan in my favoran attitude I badly
neededand urged me to argue my grievance as aggressively as
possible.
20. Ironically, Silber was impressed by the documents I wrote in
support of my grievance and final appeal. He concluded his final
letter of denial with the statement "You write very well" and said
that I should therefore have no trouble finding another position! He
apparently was unaware that his own provost stated in his letter of
denial that my writing "verged on the ungrammatical."
21. Editors had not leaped at the chance to publish my manuscript,
seeing the method as too hybrid or the topic as too narrow. I am
therefore grateful to Mike Ames at Temple University Press for his
early interest in and encouragement of my work-in-progress.
22. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Split Household, Small Producer, and
Dual Wage-Earner," Journal of Marriage and the Family (February
1983): 35-46.
 Page 102
23. See Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972).
24. See, for example, Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mother's Grief:
Racial-Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families," Journal
of Family History 13 (1988): 415-431; Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
"Racial Ethnic Women's Work: The Intersection of Race, Class,
and Gender Oppression, Review of Radical Political Economy 17
(fall 1985): 86-108.
25. For example, Patricia Hill Collins presented early chapters of
Black Feminist Thought (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1990), at one
of the summer institutes in 1983. See also the collection of articles
by scholars working with the Inter-University Group or the
Memphis Center edited by Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie
Thornton Dill, Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994).
26. She currently teaches in history and African American studies
at the University of Michigan.
27. One of the issues I have faced in doing this research is a
hesitancy about speaking about African American and Mexican
American women's experience. Women of color have been critical
of white women interpreting our experience for us, and being
Asian American does not automatically endow me with special
understanding of other women of color.
 Page 103

Brandeis as a Generative Institution:

Critical Perspectives, Marginality and Feminism
Barrie Thorne
Inthe late 1960s and early 1970s, when second-wave feminist ideas
began to take hold in U.S. sociology, the Brandeis graduate
program was regarded as "good" but not at the top of the
profession, with only one woman on the faculty. Yet out of that
program came an unusually large proportion of the first generation
of contemporary feminist sociologists. 1 Why? What was it about
the Brandeis milieu that nurtured early connections between the
women's liberation movement and sociology as an academic field?
These autobiographical reflections start before but mostly dwell on
that focal place and time; they have been enriched with a lot of
help from my friends.

From Mormonism to Social Science

Given the geographic, ethnic, and political distance, I am probably
the only person from a Mormon background to have enrolled in the
Brandeis graduate program in sociology. My family's history
moves through nineteenth-century sagas of conversion to the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS); migration from
England, Scandinavia, and small farms in the Northeast; arduous
crossing of the Plains in wagons and on foot; and settlement in
what are now the states of Utah, Idaho, and Arizona. When I was
growing up in northern Utah in the 1940s and 1950s, we sometimes
attended large family reunions where distant cousins were
introduced as descended from the "first," "second," or "third" wife
of a shared ancestral patriarch. If that great-(great, great)
grandmother was known to have been the patriarch's "favored"
wife, her descendants also seemed a little special.
Education became my family's route out of hardscrabble farming
and into professional life. My maternal grandfather and my father
each put
Copyright ©1997 by Barrie Thore.
 Page 104
themselves through Utah State Agricultural College and went on to
get Ph.D.s (my grandfather, in economics; my father, in soil
chemistry). My mother, Alison Comish Thorne, also earned a
Ph.D., in consumer economics, from Iowa State, where she met my
father at the L.D.S., or Mormon, Sunday School. They married in
1937, and my father, Wynne Thorne, took faculty positions first at
Texas A&M and then at Utah State Agricultural College.
Mother used to say that she and Dad were a "pair-a-docs," but it
was obvious that these docs had quite different opportunities. Dad
rose through the faculty ranks and eventually became vice
president for research at Utah State. Nepotism rules barred Mother
from an academic career, although she occasionally taught at the
university and in the 1970s, as a part-time lecturer, helped establish
its women's studies program. She raised five children, wrote a
column for The Gifted Child Quarterly (the label weighed as
expectation), read philosophy and "great books" during the several
hours each day that she tried to set aside from domestic routine,
and actively worked for liberal causes in the conservative town of
Logan. She became a mainstay of the local Democratic Party and
League of Women Voters; led an unsuccessful 1950s campaign for
fluoridation of the water supply; and in the 1960s helped organize a
summer school for migrant farm children and federally funded
antipoverty programs in northern Utah. She served on the Logan
School Board for eleven years until, in 1971, after the U.S.
invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, she
participated in the first antiwar demonstration in Logan's history.
This led to rumors that "Alison Thorne is not patriotic" and her
defeat in the next school board election. 2
Our parents simply assumed that their five childrenspaced in an
older set of two, a gap of six years, and then three morewould do
well in school. As the oldest, my brother and I got especially strong
doses of the "n-ach" (need-for-achievement) that fuels cross-
generational upward mobility. For me, good grades became both a
ladder of opportunity and a self-inflicted whip. My "Book of
Remembrance," a scrapbook designed for girls and filled with
church-related categories, includes pages of neatly glued report
cards from elementary school through junior higha field of A's,
qualified by a few minuses, and one seventh-grade C, the
humiliation softened because it was in gym, a nonacademic
subject. I used to take pride in the field of A's, but they now make
me sigh over the years of obedience, self-suppression, and the
obsessive wish to please.
The ladder of A's did help me climb out of "Happy Valley" (our
sardonic teenage name for Cache Valley, where Logan is located)
and into a scholarship at Stanford University. During the first
semester, I felt like a
 Page 105
scared hick, intimidated by students from prep schools and
advanced placement classes, and I studied almost nonstop. I also
fell in love with ideas. In an introductory philosophy course,
Professor Mothershead persuasively argued each position, and then
after many of us had become believers, he unsparingly picked each
one apart. It was like a roller-coaster ride, climbing up to belief in
utilitarianism or logical positivism and then hurtling down the
slope of disenchantment. However, one of the readings, David
Hume's "On Miracles," had a lasting effect. I outlined the argument
again and again and concluded that I could no longer believe in
God or, therefore, in the L.D.S. religion. This culminated a slow
loss of faith that had begun with my parents' growing doubts and
liberal attitudes and my exposure to varied beliefs at Stanford.
Hume sealed it up, and in a series of small rebellions, I began to
engage in forbidden practices, which I came to call my
"sindrome"drinking Coke, coffee, tea, and alcohol; smoking an
occasional cigarette; and engaging in sex outside of marriage. 3
Loss of religious faith coincided with my taking an introductory
course in anthropology taught by George Spindler and Louise
Spindler (she was one of only two women teachers in my
undergraduate years; I had no women teachers as a graduate
student). I loved the Spindlers' detached comparisons, say, of the
religious practices of the Menominee and the Navajo. That
comparative approach, and the concept of "culture," gave me
perspective on the totalizing world I had come from; I discovered,
with fascination, that the Mormons were one of the "four cultures"
that a team of anthropologists had studied in the Southwest. I
decided to major in anthropology, with a minor in an honors
program in social thought and institutions, organized by Charles
Drekmeier, who had studied in the Social Relations Program at
Harvard.
Over time, I became much more comfortable at Stanford. I
especially loved the social thought seminar, cotaught by Charles
and Margot Drekmeier and several faculty from other disciplines.
Margot had a Ph.D. from Harvard and an inspiring relationship
with ideas; however, she did not have an academic appointment,
and, as with my mother, I vaguely sensed the injustice of her
institutional marginality. The seminar was held at the Drekmeiers'
home in Palo Alto. I savored the framed picture of Sigmund Freud
on their living room wall and the ritual glasses of sherry served as
the evening's conversation began. Each year the seminar focused
on a different themeit was "freedom" during my junior year. We
read Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Freud, Herbert Marcuse, B. E
Skinner, and court cases on pornography, and we threw around
concepts like "repressive desublimation." My senior thesis, grandly
titled "A Theory of Mind for the Sociology of
 Page 106
Knowledge,'' was a smorgasboard of ideas from Mannheim, Émile
Durkheim, Max Scheler, George Herbert Mead, C. Wright Mills,
Freud, and Norbert Weiner. I had discovered a taste for theory.
After graduation I followed the culture strand of my interests, and
as the first woman from Stanford to win a Marshall Scholarship, I
went to the London School of Economics to study social
anthropology. My hopes were high, but the program, which mostly
involved reading dull classics by Bronislaw Malinowski and E. E.
Evans-Pritchard and memorizing kinship systems, was not what I
had anticipated. I lived in a dreary undergraduate dorm purported
to have central heatingeven on the coldest days the radiators, at
best, were lukewarmand I felt lonely and uprooted. Instead of
switching programs or simply deciding to quit, I became so
depressed that I finally returned to the United States, where I
stayed with my brother and his wife and worked as a secretary in
the Princeton Physics Department. After the depression lifted, I
reconsidered my future.
By sheer chance I ran into a friend from Stanford who had gone on
to Brandeis to do graduate work in philosophy. She loaned me the
catalog, and I discovered that the Brandeis sociology program
focused on European social theory, my other intellectual passion (I
felt burned by anthropology). I applied in early summer and went
for an interview; Kurt Wolff and Robert Weiss nodded approvingly
at the field of A's on my Stanford transcript and approved my late
admission to the program. Weiss arranged for restoration of the
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that I had declined in order to go to
England, and the pieces fell into place for a second chance at
graduate school.
Brandeis and Converging Marginalities
When I arrived at Brandeis in fall 1965, the sociology graduate
program was only three years old; the university, founded in 1948
by an American Jewish group, was also relatively new. Although
Brandeis was officially nonsectarian, the majority of faculty,
students, and staff were Jewish, which created an ambience quite
different from anything I'd previously experienced. The Mormon
culture in which I had grown up, the WASP upper-middle-class
ethos at Stanford, and my experiences in England had left me
emotionally parched, and I drank thirstily from the affectivity and
warmth I found at Brandeis. I loved emotional exuberance, as when
Lewis Coser burst from his office and told me the results of my
qualifying exams by calling out, "Mazeltov!"as he came to give me
a hug. At first I was intimidated by loud and mutually interrupting
patterns of argument, but I learned
 Page 107
how to join in and found it energizing. I was moved by stories of
the Holocaust, some told by survivors, and came to realize that
words such as angst and weltschmirz, which I had encountered in
my undergraduate reading, were part of a language of suffering that
connected with human tragedy much more authentically than
prepackaged and repressed Mormon styles of experiencing. The
contrast felt like going from plywood to rich mahogany; from rigid
and conformist dogma to depth, mystery, and risk. 4 I had never
met people who talked so freely, and so often, about neuroses, and
I started pondering my own. The Brandeis folks liked to hear
Mormon stories, and they joked about my being the essence of goy.
In a time of lingering anti-Semitism at other universities, Brandeis
welcomed Jews as both students and faculty. The department also
welcomed women (including older and married women) as
students, although not, as I will later discuss, as faculty. Between
1965 and 1971, about one-half of the sociology graduate students
were women, and of those who completed Ph.D.s between 1966
and 1980, forty-six were women and forty-one were men.5In
researching the history of women psychoanalysts, Nancy
Chodorow uncovered a loose sociological principle that may help
account for the much higher proportion of women students at
Brandeis compared with other graduate programs in sociology.
Asked why so many women entered the field of psychoanalysis in
its early days, an elderly informant observed of the Austro-German
culture from which she came that where they allowed Jews, they
allowed women. When a range of groups are excluded from the top
stratum, they may end up together in more marginal or lower-status
places.6Of course, Jewish and female are overlapping social
categories. Other racial ethnic groups were not well represented at
Brandeis, although a few African Americans entered the sociology
program over the years. There was also a steady stream of
international students.
The Brandeis sociology faculty shared a sense of collective
marginality. From the time of the school's founding, Brandeis
welcomed refugees from Nazi Europe; Lewis Coser, Kurt Wolff,
Paul Kecskemeti, Egon Bittner, and Herbert Marcuse (in the
History of Ideas Program, but with close ties to sociology) were
central to the intellectual life of the Sociology Department.7Everett
C. Hughes came to Brandeis in 1961 to escape forced retirement
from the University of Chicago. Maurice Stein, Philip Slater,
Gordon Fellman, Jack Seeley, and Larry Rosenberg were self-
proclaimed exiles from mainstream U.S. sociology (Larry told a
story, which quickly became a legend, about having thrown his
dissertation into Lake Michigan after becoming disillusioned with
the highly quantitative training he'd received at the University of
Chicago). The faculty often voiced C. Wright Mills's criticisms
 Page 108
of the twin distortionsstill prevalent in the 1960sof grand theory,
especially structural functionalism, and the abstracted empiricism
perpetuated by large survey research empires at Columbia and
Chicago. 8The Brandeis faculty was determined to create a
graduate program organized around a different kind of sociology.9
Brandeis Sociology
The graduate curriculum required during my first year (1965-1966)
laid out the core of that difference. Our methods requirements were
minimala two-semester, hands-on course in field methods and a
one-semester survey of research methods, skillfully taught by
Robert Weiss. The other two required courses were in sociological
theory. Lewis Coser taught the first semester, which included
Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Marx, Weber, Robert Michels,
Mannheim, and lesser-known theorists such as Scheler and
Maurice Halbwachs. The second semester focused on
contemporary theory and was taught by Maurice Stein, who
assigned such authors as Mills, Marcuse, N. O. Brown, R. D.
Laing, Frantz Fanon, and Marshall McLuhan. The other graduate
courses focused on interesting and big ideas, whatever their
disciplinary homes, rather than on a narrowly defined corpus of
sociological literature. In addition to substantive seminars (e.g.,
sociology of family, taught by Slater; deviance and medical
sociology, taught by Irving Zola; social institutions, taught by
Hughes), there were many specialized offerings in social theory. I
took a seminar in the sociology of knowledge from Kurt Wolff
(who had been a student of Karl Mannheim), another on ideology
and social movements from Paul Kecskemeti (Mannheim's brother-
in-law), and an especially memorable seminar on the pretheoretical
foundations of sociology, which Wolff organized around the
philosophy of social science, phenomenology, and the writings of
Alfred Schutz. The theory courses drew students from the History
of Ideas Program, including Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry Weber,
who became central to my Cambridge-based circle of friends.
Jeremy and Shierry had studied with Theodor Adorno in Germany
and Marcuse at Brandeis and were translating writings by Adorno,
Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas. Martin Nicolaus, an older and
politically experienced member of our sociology graduate cohort,
was working on the first English translation of Marx's Gründrisse.
Wolff had published major English translations of Simmel's
writing, and Coser had written about Simmel. Even Hughes, a
quintessentially midwestern American, read German and had
undertaken his own mimeographed translations of essays by Weber
and by
 Page 109
Simmel. In short, graduate students at Brandeis felt directly and
richly connected with European social thought.
This connection included a lively commitment to psychoanalysis as
a social and cultural theory. Philip Slater and Gordon Fellman had
come out of the Harvard Social Relations Department, which
combined sociology, psychology, and anthropology and took
psychoanalysis seriously. Psychoanalytically based social criticism
was central to Stein's theory course, and many of us engaged
passionately with efforts to combine Marx and Freud.
Psychoanalysis wove in and out of daily conversations among
graduate students. We even created a guessing game where one
person would proclaim a behavior, such as "chewing your
fingernails" or "reading on the toilet," and the others would offer
psychoanalytic interpretations. We would then hunt up the behavior
in Otto Fenichel's encyclopedic A Psychoanalytic Theory of
Neurosis and the person who came closest to Fenichel's
interpretation won that laugh-filled round. 10
The Brandeis European theory tradition was unique among U.S.
graduate programs in its emphasis not only on psychoanalysis but
also on Simmel, the preeminent classical sociologist of everyday
life, and on Schutz and Mannheim. We were trained to theorize
everyday life, as well as larger structures, and to think of
knowledge as perspectival. Our reading of Schutz led us to ponder
such concepts as Lebenswelt (life world), multiple realities,
phenomenological bracketing, and the situation of the ordinary
knower. Phenomenology values everyday life, which, some of us
later came to see, is often defined as women's realm. In concert
with the sociology of knowledge, which also engaged us,
phenomenology moves the knower from the Archimedean point of
objective knowledge to a more situated understanding of the
relation of knowledge, social location, and interests. Our graduate
education exposed us to the roots of later feminist epistemological
writings about gender and ways of knowing.11
As graduate students at Brandeis we pursued questions of daily life
not only through courses on Simmel, Schutz, and psychoanalysis
but also through intensive training in field methods. When the
graduate program was founded in the early 1960s, the Brandeis
faculty saw its mission as teaching "understanding," or
verstehen,sociology, with an almost exclusive focus on qualitative
methods. Many of the Brandeis faculty had used participant-
observation and/or open-ended interviewing in their own research,
and they had a strong and self-conscious connection to the old
Chicago School of fieldwork (by the late 1960s Chicago had
shifted to a quantitative mode). Hughes, who had taught a
legendary graduate course
 Page 110
in fieldwork at Chicago brought the course with him to Brandeis. It
was taught collectivelywhen I took it, by Hughes, Slater, Zola,
Fellman, and Sam Wallaceand was an intense and collective hands-
on experience. The instructors sent us to Charlestown, a white
working-class, mostly Irish Catholic community and gave us the
initial charge of taking field notes on the sights and sounds of a
census tract. We then worked in smaller groups, piecing together a
community study. Learning to do fieldwork as a group was a great
source of bonding; together we figured out how to take and analyze
field notes and how to handle emotional, ethical, and political
dilemmas. We shared adventures, anxieties, and laments. "How can
I live for tomorrow when I'm taking yesterday's notes?" Marty
Epstein whined one day in the graduate student room, and we burst
into shared laughter.
Each of the instructors wrote very different comments on our field
notes. Next to my shocked response at seeing two young men in a
fistfight on the street, Slater wrote, "Are you taking an ingenue
role?" (role or not, I was far from streetwise, and the sting of his
comment carried multiple gender meanings). In the midst of my
field notes describing Sunday services in a small Protestant
congregation, I wrote that I liked the feel of singing hymns and
sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pews because it reminded me of
my Mormon childhood. The autobiographical aside whetted
Hughes's interest, and he stopped me in the hall to ask about it,
opening the first of many conversations and a lasting relationship
of mentoring and friendship. As he did for so many other students,
Hughes helped me use sociology to gain a more detached and
appreciative understanding of a former identity that chased me
around (one of his many imaginative conceptualizations). 12
The practice of fieldwork concretely anchored our more theoretical
readings in phenomenology, verstehen, and psychoanalytic
sociology, juxtaposing philosophical depth and critical perspectives
with the more pragmatic foundations of the original Chicago
School of fieldwork.13The mix was exciting but also jarring; the
European theory that Coser and Wolff taught veered toward the
philosophical and abstract, while Hughes generated ideas through
the concrete particulars of the social world. The contrast, which
bears on different modes of theorizing, is vividly conveyed by a
story Howard S. Becker tells about his own first year as a graduate
student taking a course from Hughes at the University of Chicago.
Becker came up after class and inquired, "Professor Hughes, what
do you think of theory?" Hughes asked in return, "Theory of
what?"14
In courses taught by Wolff, Coser, and Stein, we read and talked
Theory, with a capital T. It was a mode I had come to love in the
Stanford social thought seminarengaging with the overarching
frameworks of Marx
 Page 111
or Freud, examining their assumptions, spinning out implications.
Isaiah Berlin contrasts that systematizing mode, symbolized by the
hedgehog, with the approach of the fox, who darts from insight to
insight. 15 Hughes worked in the latter spirit. Rather than moving
from a general framework, he used the process of analogy and
juxtaposition to raise nuggets of insight, pointing, in the spirit of
Simmel, to underlying social forms. Hughes taught with stories and
Zenlike questions. For example, he opened the oral defense of a
dissertation on rabbis who presided over marriages between Jews
and gentiles by asking, "How are these rabbis like abortionists?"
His answer: they do the marginal and devalued work of their
profession.
Overall, the Brandeis intellectual milieu reinforced the value of
connecting sociology with everyday life and experience and with
critical consciousness. There was no sense in our training that
objectivity meant erasing subjectivity or the personal interests of
the researcher; indeed, the faculty openly discussed the passions
that guided their own projects. Wolff was working on the sociology
of evil; Slater, on issues of male narcissism in ancient Greek
society, with a critical view of contemporary masculinity. Always a
weathervane picking up the breeze of new ideas, Stein moved, over
my years at Brandeis, from writing about McLuhan, to the
counterculture, and finally to co-counseling. The faculty saw
themselves not as advancing a science but as making sense of
human experience and the problems of the time. They had no
interest in policing disciplinary boundaries; instead, they taught
ideas that engaged them, and they were openly critical, as Stein
once phrased it, of "people who inhabit something called careers."
In the Brandeis department there were no large, funded research
empires, no steady demand for graduate student labor. The program
was small, and students mostly subsisted on their own funding and
individual fellowships, including, in the late 1960s, departmental
NIMH training fellowships in field research methods.
The faculty encouraged us to pursue our own intellectual interests.
Nothing was too grand or ambitious for study. For example, Nancy
Jay developed a Durkheimian theory of sacrificial religions, Donna
Huse wrote her dissertation on the theory and practice of dialectical
rationality, and Jasminka Gojkovic wrote about ideology and
politics in the sociology of art. Nor was anything too odd, offbeat,
or seemingly trivial for serious sociological work. Hughes was
working on a paper called "The Humble and the Proud" and often
compared plumbers and physicians (both routinize other people's
crises), saints and sinners (both go to extremes), and told us about
former students who had studied taxi dance hall girls, furriers, cab
drivers, and funeral directors.16He encouraged us to develop topics
that
 Page 112
engaged our own experiences, and in his wry and wondering
approach to the human panorama, every experience counted. It was
an easy step for Nancy Stoller to do fieldwork on the management
of birthing in the Boston Lying-in Hospital, Lynda Holmstrom to
interview dual-career couples, Barbara Carter to observe in a
women's prison, and Natalie Allon to observe in a Weight
Watchers' program. Because of this emphasis on daily life and the
social contexts of knowing, we experienced less of the extreme
"bifurcated consciousness" that Dorothy Smith has described as a
woman studying sociological texts that erased many of her
experiences. 17
The New Left and Women's Liberation
In 1967 I finished coursework, passed qualifying exams, and began
to try on dissertation topics like a series of garments. The Vietnam
War was heating up, and the threat of the draft was sending ripples
of fear among students. In a tempestuous, all-university meeting,
Brandeis faculty and students debated whether the university
should release student grades to the Selective Service. Jack Seeley,
then chair of sociology, passionately argued that the university
should avoid complicity with the war in Vietnam. Meetings of that
kind drew us into intense personal engagement with debates about
the politics of intellectuals, universities, and the professions and the
urgency of our own historical moment.
My friends and I began to participate in antiwar demonstrations,
and I went through training to become a draft counselor with the
Boston Draft Resistance Group. It occurred to me that I could
combine the stances of activist and participant-observer by doing
draft counseling and helping organize demonstrations while taking
field notes on the side and eventually writing my dissertation on
the dynamics of the movement. Although I pulled it off, this mix of
purposes turned out to be less ingenious, and more fraught with
risk, guilty feelings, and ethical dilemmas, than I had anticipated.18
It inaugurated what has turned out to be a recurring personal
tension between the social movement mode of passionate
engagementthe collective stance of being "up against the system"
with the goal of social changeand a detached and analytic mode
that loosens the claim of singular beliefs and gives ballast against
dogmatism and intolerance (and helped free me from Mormonism).
My first serious encounter with the idea of women's liberation took
place at a national Resistance conference in Illinois in March 1969.
A speaker from Chicago Voice of Women argued that the spirit of
draft resistance, compressed in slogans like "Take control of your
own life," could be ex-
 Page 113
tended to the oppressed condition of women. She invited the
women to meet separately, and we talked, far into the night, about
our secondary position in the movement and the ways in which our
relations with one another were largely mediated through men. 19
After returning to the world of Boston-Cambridge, several of us
decided to continue the discussion by forming a women's caucus
within the New England Resistance. We invited others to join, and
we met weekly in one another's apartments, improvising a form of
consciousness-raising.20 That fall we joined other women's
collectives (as we called the groups of six to twelve that had
sprouted in varied New Left spaces) and founded Bread and Roses,
one of the first women's liberation groups on the East Coast.
The small-group structure of consciousness-raising created many
nodes of intimacy and commitment in Bread and Roses. We also
organized weekly mass meetings, occasional demonstrations (for
example, on International Women's Day), and spontaneous and
theatrical zap actions, as when a group of us protested the showing
of pornographic movies at a trendy Cambridge movie theater.
Various task forces focused on issues such as women and work,
child care, and women's health (their efforts evolved into the
widely read publication Our Bodies, Ourselves).21
By the early 1970s, women's liberation had become a vital
presence in the student milieu in the Boston-Cambridge area,
touching the lives and thinking of many, although certainly not all,
of the women in the Brandeis graduate program. The self-
conscious heightening of women's commitment to one another was
a major emotional feat of the movement. Those of us who were
heterosexual no longer waited around for men to phone for dates;
we made, and kept, Saturday night commitments to be with other
women. We developed a greater sense of conscious choice about
our sexual and personal lives, our appearance (we threw out girdles
and cosmetics and reclaimed our underarm and leg hair), and
possibilities for education and employment.
A group of us from Brandeis who entered the field of sociology
and the women's liberation movement more or less in tandem
found that the worlds sometimes collided and at other times met
with thrilling resonance. We became deeply bonded and together
developed the chutzpah to start questioning the conventional
categories of the field and the authority of our male teachers, while
also getting their ultimate blessing, which was emotionally
important to me, a connected daughter even as I rebelled.
Consciousness-raising and the early texts of the movement gave us
insight into women's subordination and consolidated a series of
pressing questions: Why were women so marginal as subjects and
as practitioners
 Page 114
in the field of sociology? Why did sociologists ignore women's
lower wages, their channeling into devalued occupations, their
exploitation in domestic labor, their sexual objectification?
Members of our collective gave outreach talks on behalf of Bread
and Roses in which we cited factsfor example, about employed
women's lower wages and their disproportionate responsibility for
houseworkand criticized stereotypes of women as overly emotional
and as male sexual objects. I helped give these raps, as we called
them, to the women's auxiliary of a Jewish synagogue; the wives of
Harvard Business School students; a group of junior college
students; and, in an especially memorable encounter, a large
undergraduate course on the sociology of the family at Harvard.
The T.A. introduced us as representatives of "women's lib,"
unaware that two of the three speakers (Donna Huse and I) were
also graduate students in sociology. The speaking of sociologically
relevant insights from a committed and collective movement stance
was a powerful experience. I liked the position of informed
advocacy and the feel of working in concert together as we
confronted audiences that were sometimes indifferent and even
hostile.
During that same spring of 1970, some of us who bridged between
Bread and Roses and Brandeis sociology decided to organize a
departmental colloquium on women's liberation, in essence
bringing our newfound insights and anger back to our home turf.
Several years before, Nancy Stoller had recorded patterns of
interruption in the graduate student room and found that men far
outscored women. It was also obvious that the all-male faculty did
most of the talking in colloquia, even when there was ample
student attendance. We decided that when we opened the floor for
discussion after our initial presentations on women's liberation, we
would call only on women. The faculty quickly became impatient;
Jerry Boime almost exploded from the pressure of not speaking.
Finally, Slater managed to get the floor (I chaired the discussion
and found myself calling him "Phil" for the first daring time). He
said that he felt uncomfortablelike a little boyand that the other
men seemed to feel that way, too, perhaps because their only
experience with women's voices being dominant was with their
mothers. That was a stunning Oedipal moment, when one of our
collective fathers said he felt like our son!
Although charged with tension, the colloquium also opened
glimmers of recognition and support. The Brandeis faculty was
eager to be up on political and cultural trends, and the women's
movement raised fascinating intellectual questions. Some of the
faculty had already warmed to the challenge of thinking about
gender, especially Slater, whose book The Glory of Hera traced the
origins of male narcissism to the anxiety of con-
 Page 115
fined and subordinated mothers; long before others, he saw that the
psychological emancipation of men ultimately depends on the
liberation of women, and he understood the emotional threat of
feminism to some men. 22 Boime was working on a theory of risk-
taking as a basis of male bonding, as in revolutions and gangs,
which he contrasted with the mode of civil society based on men
and women joined in families. Hughes had long recognized
patterns of discrimination; in his 1945 article "Dilemmas and
Contradictions of Status," he unpacked notions such as "woman
engineer" and "Negro doctor,'' observing that professions constrain
the participation of entire groups in order to limit competition.23
He was curious about this new wave of feminism and often
observed that his mother-in-law had been a suffragist, as well as a
judge, in Canada. Hughes often engaged in sociological reflections
by typing notes on his manual machine; the pale and uneven letters
bounced up and down instead of holding straight to the line. When
I worked as his research assistant between 1969 and 1971 in a
project on professional education, Hughes typed and gave me
several notes that focused on gender. In one he mused about what
each gender knows of the other's secrets, and in another he
pondered the sociological significance of the fact that the
biological dimensions of sex, unlike those of race, cannot be
eliminated by group interbreeding.24
Intellectual engagement was one thing, the actual treatment of
women another, and as feminist ideas spread, women graduate
students became more and more angry at the absence of women on
the Brandeis faculty. Helen MacGill Hughes and Rose Laub Coser,
whom we initially got to know because they were married to our
teachers, provided us with immediate examples of the barriers
women sociologists faced as they sought steady employment and
regular careers; nepotism rules and other patterns of sexism had
continually blocked them from positions at Brandeis and at the
other universities where their husbands had taught.25 (By then I
had had clearer insight into and anger about my mother's stalled
academic career.)
In 1967 Rosabeth Kanter joined the Brandeis sociology faculty,
which, except from 1958 to 1961 when Suzanne Keller was in the
department, had been all male. Graduate students (women, as well
as men) generally opposed the hiring of Kanter, as did some of the
faculty. Later, as we developed feminist consciousness, some of us
ruefully remembered the sexist comments that had been made at
the time of Kanter's hiring and wondered if we, then in the position
of daughters, could ever become sisters or full colleagues of the
men who were our teachers.
Throughout the 1970s the hiring and retention of women faculty in
the Brandeis department were shaky and uneven at best, a pattern
that later
 Page 116
cohorts of feminist graduate students loudly protested. In contrast,
the senior faculty seemed to go out of their way to support several
problematic junior male colleagues, showing a degree of tolerance
and protection that would be hard to imagine in most other elite
departments. Although unconventional in their masculinities, the
Brandeis faculty were clearly a brotherhood, generous to women as
students but uneasy about admitting women to equal positions of
collegiality. 26
Learning from One Another
The intellectual milieu of Brandeis, which combined critical
perspectives, theories of oppression, and an emphasis on personal
experience and everyday life, was especially generative for
feminist ideas. Our intellectual community remained distant and
critical of the central theoretical fare of other U.S. sociology
graduate programsstructural functionalismwhich cast gender as role
and stripped it of critical significance and systematic attention to
inequality. Because we were trained in field research and not in
survey methods, we were spared the snapping up of gender as a
binary variable, another way in which feminist insights have been
coopted in sociology.27 The tools we acquired from Marxism,
psychoanalysis, critical theory, the sociology of knowledge, and
phenomenology turned out to be extraordinarily useful in
theorizing women's oppression and the dynamics of gender. These
were all, of course, "masters' tools" and thus, in Audre Lorde's
compelling imagery, not fully suited for dismantling "the master's
house" of androcentric knowledge.28 But the theoretical
perspectives we learned at Brandeis turned out to be well suited for
feminist inquiry. The department had many women students, and
the emergence of a feminist political milieu nurtured our personal,
political, and intellectual bonds. Some of the faculty supported our
engagement with issues of gender. Above all, the department's
climate left us space to follow topics and interests of our own
choosing.
My most vivid experience of this mix of support, useful tools, and,
above all, learning from other women in a movement-inspired
context began in fall 1971. In a reading course with Slater focused
on the family, Marcia Millman, Nancy Chodorow, Nancy Jay, Janet
Mendelsohn, and Ann Popkin discovered a notable gap in the
literature. Much had been written about father-son, father-daughter,
and, especially (Slater's focus), mother-son relationships, but there
was almost nothing about mothers and daughters. The members of
the reading group set out to explore that intriguing gap by forming
a mother-daughter group of Brandeis women graduate students
 Page 117
and other friends in Cambridge. The group met weekly or
biweekly, with fluctuating membership, for the next three years.
We used a mode of consciousness-raising, which we had learned
through participation in the women's liberation movement, to talk
about our experiences as daughters and also (a few) as mothers.
The mother-daughter pairs were particularly welcome and on the
spot; visiting mothers and sisters enriched our meetings and made
us feel connected with one another's female family members.
The Mother-Daughter Group turned out to be a magical experience,
linking the personal and the intellectual in an abundance of
delicious moments. We talked, for example, about times when our
mothers seemed to think they owned our (daughter) bodies, telling
us how to wear our hair or going emotionally haywire over our
acne or weight. Shifting outlooks, the mothers among us explored
conflicted feelings about their own daughters' bodies. We
discovered that the consciousness of the mother and of the daughter
are totally separate, though intertwined, gestalts, even in the same
woman, and that psychological boundaries between mothers and
daughters are often problematic. We also talked about family
secrets and why we kept them even after the death of everyone who
might be shamed by the telling. In discussions that thundered with
laughter and emotion, we shared our own family secrets and then
explored the centrality of secret-keeping to family structure. We
also discussed family alliances; dyads and triads; guilt, shame, and
anger in mother-daughter relationships; and our fantasies of
maternal caretaking when we had been sick or facing abortions. We
discussed menstrual knowledge and its transmission, and we read
and analyzed fairy tales. The Mother-Daughter Group, which drew
upon consciousness-raising, psychodynamic understanding, and
phenomenologial bracketing, inspired myriad creative efforts,
including Nancy Chodorow's dissertation and my own interest in
teaching and writing about families and later about the sociology of
childhood. Harriet Rosenstein took off from our vivid discussions
to write a short story about her family's secrets, which was
published in Ms. Magazine, and Ann Popkin and Janet Mendelsohn
created films about their grandmothers.
From Then to Now
The Brandeis department became known as a place where students
could pursue feminist interests, and during the 1970s a steady
stream of women, some of them experienced political activists,
went through the program and came to define themselves as
feminist sociologists. I feel fortunate to have been at Brandeis
when there was a catalyzing mix of structure (provided
 Page 118
by the required courses in theory and fieldwork and by the
presence of "straighter" faculty such as Hughes, Wolff, and Coser;
Egon Bittner also gave this sort of stability to subsequent cohorts)
and radical questioning of sociology and, indeed, of academics
itself. In 1971 Slater, whose critique of mainstream U.S. culture,
Pursuit of Loneliness, was reaching a wide audience, announced
that he was going to drop out of academics and turn to doing
therapy and writing of poetry and plays. 29 He was a major
(transference) figure in the department, and his decision caused a
real stir. Soon after, Larry Rosenberg also left the university to join
a Buddhist community. Other faculty became immersed in antiwar
politics, meditation, cocounseling, encounter groups, the Rajneesh
community, and building of countercultural institutions. In 1969
Lewis Coser left for the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, where Rose Coser also secured a tenured faculty position,
and Everett Hughes took a second retirement and moved to Boston
College in 1968, although he continued to teach part-time at
Brandeis. Soon after, the department abolished required courses
and preliminary exams, leaving graduate students, in effect, to put
together their own versions of sociology. The department admitted
many older students, some with advanced degrees in other fields
and thus more able to make it through the loosely structured
program. In a statement for the twenty-fifth reunion volume, Doug
Harper (Ph.D., 1975) captured those odd, fragmented, and largely
laissez-faire departmental times: "I recall delivering a seminar
paper on the precapitalist forms of economic organization while in
the next room the class was singing, 'We get by with a little help
from our friends."' By the early 1970s, the diverse quests of the
Brandeis faculty had unraveled a sense of shared enterprise, and
later cohorts of students complained about feeling anomic and
being left too much on their own.
I feel lucky to have studied at Brandeis when the curriculum was
more structured but critique was well under way; I came out
attached to but also ambivalent about the discipline of sociology.
The word discipline itself suggests the weighing down, the
imposition of conventions, which can constrain creativity. In
contrast, "Brandeis sociology" questioned mainstream conventions
and valued interesting ideas, whatever their source; this freedom
helped us raise and pursue feminist questions and catch the
interdisciplinary winds of women's studies. But I have also come to
value the coherence, continuity, and intellectual community that
academic disciplines can provide.
Because I had come through a more structured program and had
earlier training in the social sciences, I was better prepared than
many Brandeis Ph.D.s to survive in mainstream contexts, a process
that started in 1971
 Page 119
when I became an assistant professor in the Sociology Department
at Michigan State University. My partner, Peter Lyman, is a
political scientist. We searched for jobs together and felt fortunate
to land in the same place. My marginality in the MSU department
became clear soon after I arrived when a tenured colleague whom
I'd barely met came into my office and announced, "It's all right for
you to educate undergraduates, but you have no business training
graduate students because you're not a scientist." I was speechless,
and tears of hurt and anger sprang to my eyes. Later I wished I had
told him, "Okay, you can have science; I approach sociology like
an artist."
Gradually, like locating members of my ethnic group, I found a
network of radical colleagues in and outside of the Sociology
Department. Peter and I lived together for several years without
marrying, which raised concern among some of our colleagues.
Peter's longish hair was a focus of whispering in his department,
my teaching in sandals led to comments in mine, and I relished the
thought that in spite of my faculty status, I was still a bit of a rebel.
I found other feminists around the campus, and together, with
considerable opposition from an overseeing administrator, we
began to develop an undergraduate concentration in women's
studies.
During those early years, when I had to struggle for permission to
create an undergraduate course in "sex roles," I turned to my
Brandeis friends for support. Many of them were also in their first
jobs and experiencing the "reality shock" (as Hughes called such
gaps between schooling for work and the work itself) of the wider
world of sociology. We packaged up syllabi and entire sets of
lecture notes on the sociology of women, family, and feminist
theory and shipped them across the country. These materials gave a
sense of tangible reality to our critical perspectives; confronted
with large lecture classes, we had materials to revise and draw from
and to give us courage. Object relations theorists would say that we
had the benign internal presence of the other at the lectern; we were
not alone. I also discovered that building ties to other qualitative
and feminist sociologists around the country gave me local
leverage and lessened the risks of marginality.
Several men who were at Brandeis during the late 1960s and early
1970s have wistfully told me that after embracing critical
approaches to sociology in graduate school, they ended up feeling
isolated. There was nothing like the women's liberation movement
to give them an ongoing sense of collectivity; there were no
immediate political goals, such as challenging discrimination and
articulating missing experiences, to propel them into academic
careers.
The creation of feminist sociology propelled some of us much
further
 Page 120
into the discipline than we had ever anticipated. Working
individually and collectively, we took up gender like a thick ball of
yarn that unraveled into continuous insights and topics waiting to
be knit. Over the years I moved from my dissertation interest in (as
we would now phrase it) the gender dynamics of social
movements, to research on women's and men's differing uses of
language and speech, and then to more theoretical writing about
feminism and families. 30 My interest in women, gender, and
families and shifts in my own experiences as I became a mother
eventually led me to ethnographic research with and conceptual
rethinking of children and childhoods.31 In addition to providing
topics, the convergence of feminism and sociology gave me
networks of collegiality and support and employment and career
opportunities that my mother's generation had been denied.
Looking back over the three decades that have passed since I first
entered the Brandeis graduate program, I am amazed at and
grateful for the accomplishments of feminist sociologists. I also
wonder if we have been coopted, if our efforts have mostly gone
into constructing another segment of a discipline and careers we
can congenially inhabit rather than transforming knowledge and
making social change. The inner conversations continue between
my activist self, who (in Hughes's memorable phrasing) testifies in
and out of season, and the detached observer, who weighs in with
ironic perspective.
Notes
I wish to thank Nancy Chodorow, who began as coauthor but faded
to supportive ghost-helper, for her substantial contributions to this
essay. Alison Thorne, Avril Thorne, Judith Stacey, Marcia
Millman, Kurt Wolff, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Shulamit Reinharz,
Gaye Tuchman, Tony Bales, Marilyn Aronoff, Judith Adler, Doug
Harper, and Nancy Stoller generously shared memories and
insights. I have also drawn on statements by former students about
"what the Brandeis experience meant to me" in the reunion volume
"Brandeis University Sociology Department 25th Anniversary of
the Graduate Program, April 11-12, 1987." This essay evolved
from a talk I gave at that reunion.
1. This early, collective movement toward researching women's
lives and experiences can be traced through Brandeis dissertations
written between about 1969 and 1976 and then turned into books:
Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, Ph.D., 1970, The Two-Career Family
(Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1972); Nancy Stoller Shaw,
Ph.D. 1972, Forced Labor: Childbirth in America (New York:
Pergamon Press, 1974); Fatima Mernissi, Ph.D., 1974, Beyond the
Veil: Male and Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1975); Nancy Chodorow, Ph.D.,
1975, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1978).
 Page 121
Chodorow's book won the American Sociological Association
Jessie Bernard Award, as did three other books by Brandeis Ph.D.s:
Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and the Socialist Revolution in China
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983);
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); and Patricia Hill
Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge. Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
Stacey received her Ph.D. in 1979, Rollins in 1983, and Hill
Collins in 1984.
Marcia Millman, Ph.D., 1972, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter (who
was hired in 1967 and was the sole woman faculty member in the
Brandeis department until 1972) edited Another Voice: Feminist
Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1975), the first anthology focused on the exclusion
and distortion of women's experiences in sociological knowledge.
Sociologists who received Brandeis Ph.D.s between the late 1960s
and the mid-1970s and who later published feminist books include
Gaye Tuchman, Ph.D., 1969, Edging Women out: Victorian
Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven. Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1989); Ruth Harriet Jacobs, Ph.D., 1969,
Life After Youth: Female. Forty, and What Next? (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1979); Barrie Thorne, Ph.D., 1971, Gender Play: Girls and
Boys in School (New Brunswick, N.J.; Rutgers University Press,
1993); Marcia Millman, Ph.D., 1972, Such a Pretty Face: Being
Fat in America (New York: Norton, 1980); Rachel Kahn-Hut,
Ph.D., 1974, et al., eds., Women and Work (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982); Janet Mancini Billson, Ph.D.. 1976,
Keepers of the Culture: The Power of Tradition in Women's Lives
(New York: Free Press, 1995); Kelly Weisberg, Ph.D., 1976, ed.,
Women and the Law: The Social-historical Perspective
(Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1982); Mamic Garvin Fields,
with (her granddaughter) Karen Fields, Ph.D., 1977, Lemon Swamp
and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: Free Press,
1983); Shulamit Reinharz, Ph.D., 1977, Feminist Methods in Social
Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Louise
Levesque-Lopman, Ph.D., 1977, Claiming Reality: Phenomenology
and Women's Experience (Totowa, NJ.; Rowman and Littlefield,
1988); Wini Breines, Ph.D., 1979, Young, White, and Miserable:
Growing up Female in the 1950s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992);
Margery W Davies, Ph.D., 1979, Women's Place Is at the
Typewriter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Nancy
Jay, Ph.D., 1981, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice,
Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992); and Lise Vogel, Ph.D., 1981, Marxism and the Oppression
of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ.;
Rutgers University Press, 1983).
Sociologists trained at Brandeis have long been active in promoting
feminist ideas within sociology For example, Rachel Kahn-Hut and
I have chaired the ASA Section on Sex and Gender, and Elizabeth
Higginbotham, Ph.D., 1980, helped found the Memphis Center for
Research on Women; in 1993 she and two colleagues (Bonnie
Thornton Dill and Lynn Weber) won the Jessie Bernard Award for
promoting work on race, social class, gender, and women in the
South.
2. In the 1940s my mother began drafting a book manuscript on the
importance of women sustaining their own values rather than
conforming to expectations about neat housekeeping. Over the last
decade she has rewritten the manuscript as a personal, family, and
community memoir: Alison Comish Thorne, "Leave the Dishes in
the Sink: Memoirs of a Liberal in Conservative Utah" (unpublished
ms).
 Page 122
3. In 1980 the L.D.S. Church sought me out for excommunication.
Since (along with my parents and siblings) I'd been a lapsed, or
"jack," Mormon for many years, I was surprised at the heavy
emotions that process unleashed: anger at the church elders and
their nerve in actually holding an excommunication trial, which I
refused to attend, and, after the anger settled, a feeling of soaring
freedom. Increasingly annoyed by the church's shift to the
fundamentalist right and especially by its subordinating treatment
of women, my mothers and siblings formally revoked their
memberships in 1993. My father, Wynne Thorne, died of cancer in
1979; he had long been estranged from the church.
4. In construction projects around the world, the L.D.S.
"authorities," as the top (male) leaders are called, continue to use
bland 1950s church architecture, a physical sign of the conformity
and hierarchy basic to Mormon culture.
5. Information compiled from "Brandeis University Sociology
Department 25th Anniversary of the Graduate Program." A loosely
comparative set of statistics from the Department of Sociology at
the University of California, Berkeley: from 1952 to 1972, one-
third of the graduate students were women; of these, only one-
quarter received doctorates, compared with one-third of the men.
See Kathryn P Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, Introduction
to Kathryn P Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, eds., Gender
and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 2.
6. This observation and information come from personal
conversations with Nancy Chodorow, who also supplied additional
examples. When Margaret Lawrence, an early woman
psychoanalyst and an African American, tried to get an internship
in 1940, she ended up at Harlem Hospital, mostly with Jews,
Italians, and a few other African Americans; all had been passed
over by the more white, Protestant, mainstream New York
hospitals. See Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead: Journey
of a Healer (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988). Another
example, which suggests that exclusion by the top stratum may be
a key dynamic, comes from Meyer Fortes, who observed, in a
personal conversation with Nancy Chodorow, that in the late 1930s
British anthropology attracted (and allowed in) Jews, women, and
white people from the colonies; British gentlemen with
anthropological interests went into the colonial service, which
excluded people from these other backgrounds.
7. For the larger story, see Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in
America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1984).
Marcuse left Brandeis for the University of California, San Diego,
just before I arrived at Brandeis, but his influence lingered. Kurt
Wolff often invited graduate students to confer about their work at
his home. After coffee and cake with his wife, Carla Wolff (also a
German Jewish refugee and a great friend to many of us), Kurt
would lead the way up the stairs to his book-lined study, where he
invited the student to sit in an old and comfortable chair that,
according to student rumors, once belonged to Marcuse. We
students privately called it "the Marcuse chair," fancying that his
vibrations infused the conversations that circled around it.
After reading a draft of this paper, Kurt Wolff wrote me that he has
no recollection of such a chair. This points to the ambiguous and
divergent nature of memories (it was Kurt's study, and I trust his,
rather than my, memory of the lineage of its furnishings) and of
gossip turned into shared mythology. Our belief that Marcuse had
once owned the chair had real effects in the world.
 Page 123
8. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959).
9. Shulamit Reinharz has traced the history of the Brandeis
graduate program in "The Chicago School of Sociology and the
Founding of the Graduate Program in Sociology at Brandeis
University: A Case Study of Cultural Diffusion," in Gary Alan
Fine, ed., A Second Chicago School? The Development of
Midcentury Sociology at the University of Chicago (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 273-331. Three other
feminist sociologists have written about their experiences in the
Brandeis graduate program, in Ann Goetting and Sarah
Fenstermaker, eds., Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty
Years of Women in Sociology (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1995): Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, "Working the Third Shift,"
pp. 251-270; Shulamit Reinharz, ''Marginality, Motherhood, and
Method: Paths to a Social Science Career and Community," pp.
285-302; and Gaye Tuchman, "Kaddish and Renewal," pp. 303-
318.
10. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New
York: Norton, 1945).
11. Brandeis graduates, especially Nancy Chodorow (The
Reproduction of Mothering),Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist
Thought),and Shulamit Reinharz (Feminist Methods in Social
Research), have made significant contributions to this branch of
feminist theory
12. Hughes referred to my struggles with Mormonism in "Teaching
as Fieldwork" (1969): "One of my favorite graduate students is of
Mormon family; she confesses to liking the collective warmth of
sitting shoulder to shoulder in a great congregation of people all
lifting up their voices in lusty song, as Mormons and Methodists
do. She and I have this feeling in common, although neither of us
subjects himself to the pressure for further participation that would
come if we indulged the collective pleasure often. She has found
other outlets for her love of collective activity and for the social
idealism that is evidently part of her heritage. But hers is not the
reaction of the alienated; it is emancipation without alienation. That
is something teacher and students can share. It makes a base for
mutual learning and teaching" Reprinted in Everett C. Hughes, The
Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (New Brunswick, NJ.:
Transaction Books, 1984), p. 573. Addendum from the student: I
felt alienation, as well as emancipation.
13. In an interview quoted in Reinharz, "The Chicago School of
Sociology," pp. 302-303, Paul Campanis, Ph.D., 1966, discusses
the juxtaposition between the Chicago fieldwork tradition and
European phenomenology and critical theories: "The Europeans in
the department, especially Kurt Wolff and Lew Coser, grounded the
philosophically shallow Chicago tradition in European philosophy
In particular, they sharpened its fuzzy pragmatism with more
rigorous European phenomenology; on the other hand, the
fieldworking Chicago tradition expanded the range of the armchair
European phenomenologists to the actual perspectives of those of
different social locations. . . .The Chicago sociological tradition
had always been more appreciative than critical, more wide-eyed
with wonder that institutions could function at all than cynically
squinting at what was wrong with their functioning."
14. From a personal conversation, May 1994.
15. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Mentor
Books, 1937). Lewis Coser also makes this point in his editor's
introduction to Everett C Hughes on Work, Race, and the
Sociological Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), p. 14.
 Page 124
16. Everett C. Hughes, "The Humble and the Proud," in The
Sociological Eye, pp. 417-430
17. Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A
Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).
18. See Barrie Thorne, "Political Activist as Participant Observer:
Conflicts of Commitment in the Draft Resistance Movement of the
1960's," Symbolic Interaction 2 (1979): 73-88.
19. I wrote a dissertation chapter on the contradictory experiences
of women activists in the draft resistance movement as one source
of the women's liberation movement as it emerged from the New
Left. This became my first solo publication: Barrie Thorne,
"Women in the Draft Resistance Movement: A Case Study of Sex
Roles and Social Movements," Sex Roles 1 (1975): 179-195.
20. Priscilla Long, another member of that collective, has written
an essay about those years: "Myself/Ourselves: Remembering the
Women's Movement," to be published in an anthology of feminist
memoirs edited by Ann Snitow and Rachel Blau dePlessis.
21. For a brief history of Bread and Roses, based on a 1978
Brandeis sociology Ph.D. dissertation, see Ann Popkin, "The
Personal Is Political: The Women's Liberation Movement," in Dick
Cluster, ed., They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee (Boston:
South End Press, 1979), pp. 181-222. The Boston Women's Health
Book Collective, which continued this project after Bread and
Roses dissolved, regularly updates Our Bodies: Ourselves; Simon
and Schuster published the latest edition in 1996. For a discussion
of Our Bodies, Ourselves as one of the "ten most influential books
of the last 25 years," see Linda Gordon and Barrie Thorne,
"Women's Bodies and Feminist Subversions," Contemporary
Sociology 25 (1996): 322-325. Irving Zola, who was on the
Brandeis faculty and a strong supporter of feminism for many
years, came to be closely connected with the Health Book
Collective and its work.
22. Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the
Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
23. Reprinted in Hughes, The Sociological Eye, pp. 141-150.
24. In June 1976 when I was living in Michigan, Everett wrote me
from Cambridge: "Someone should study the attitudes of men to
the women's movement. In the academic world, with things not
looking very bright, there may be a half hidden anti-woman
feeling. . . . I predict also a campaign in favor of people whose
publications are very technical and not related to any social cause.
The more trivial the points made, the more scientific they will be
classed. Some journal will be the prime scientific, least meaningful
one; get into it to be promoted."
25. Helen Hughes and Rose Coser became active feminists and in
1973 jointly wrote the first American Sociological Association
report on the status of women in sociology. Helen published two
perceptive essays about her career: Helen MacGill Hughes, "Maid
of All Work or Department Sister-in-law? The Faculty Wife
Employed on Campus," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973):
5-10; Helen MacGill Hughes, "WASP/Woman/Sociologist,"
Society 14 (1977): 69-80.
26. Kathleen Barry, who was on the Brandeis faculty in the 1980s,
published a satire of her experiences, criticizing men sociologists
who "prided themselves on having trained a generation of graduate
students to be feminists" but who were "suspicious of anything
calling itself feminist theory that is not marxist and/or freudian or
critical or particularly socialist-feminist (feminist theory that does
not come from the
 Page 125
feminism they reproduced)." See Kathleen L. Barry, "Tootsie
Syndrome, or 'We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Us,"'
Women's Studies International Forum 12 (1989) 387.
27. See Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, "The Missing Feminist
Revolution in Sociology," Social Problems 32 (1985): 301-316;
and R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and
Sexual Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).
28. Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master's House," in Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press,
1984), pp. 110-113.
29. Philip Slater, Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press,
1970).
30. Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, eds., Language and Sex:
Difference and Dominance (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House,
1975); Barrie Thorne, with Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the
Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982).
31. Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993).
 Page 126

Disloyal to the Disciplines: A Feminist Trajectory in

the Borderlands
Judith Stacey
It is more than a decade now since Barrie Thorne and I commenced
a set of public discussions about the impact of feminism on
sociology, which we summarized in an essay with the somewhat
reproachful title "The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology."
1 The initial impetus for that project was my participation in a
session at a National Women's Studies Association conference in
1982 that had the more politically specific, and, for its period,
unremarkable title "Socialist-Feminist Perspectives on the
Disciplines." Few feminist conferences or lecture series would be
likely to adopt such a title today, nor would I be likely, if one did
so, to be invited, or to agree, to assess sociology under such an
aegis. I remain committed to the ideals of economic and gender
justice and to those of political and cultural democracy that once
undergirded my earlier socialist-feminist identity, but too much has
happened in global geopolitics and in feminist theoretical
developments to sustain my earlier comfort with the first political
term or with the dual structure of such an identity.
Moreover, I can no longer imagine undertaking an essay that
presumed that sociology, or any of the existing disciplines, was the
appropriate terrain to excavate for a feminist revolution in
knowledge. To anticipate discrete revolutions in discrete scholarly
disciplines is to betray a decidedly unrevolutionary conception of
the disciplinary constructions of knowledge. Had such a feminist
"revolution" occurred in sociology, should it not have challenged
the discipline's recognizable borders or "essence?"2
Shifts in feminist labeling fashions and in my own disciplinary
self-conception index, I believe, a significant set of transformations
within feminist political discourse, as well as in feminist relations
to the disciplines. I discuss these transformations
autobiographically by "reading" the trajec-
A version of this essay appeared in Feminisms in the Academy, ed.
Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995). Reprinted by permission of the University of
Michigan Press.
 Page 127
tory of my own work as a feminist sociologist as
emblematicperhaps some will think it symptomaticof shifts that
have taken place in theoretical and disciplinary fashions in
women's studies and social theory more generally To take this tack
is to enact my current "disciplinary" location as an ambivalently
postmodernist, reflexive ethnographer. Or, for those unsympathetic
with what some have called "the postmodernist turn in
anthropology," 3 the fact that I take this tack may confirm the
judgment of a hostile reviewer of my ethnography Brave New
Families, who labeled its first-person narrative approach "self-
indulgent."
Certainly my trajectory is unique, indeed in certain aspects,
idiosyncratic, and I do not presume that the evolution of my own
theoretical and substantive interests typifies that of feminist
sociologists. The core of American sociology, if such a decentered
discipline can be said to have a core, remains deeply positivist,
while its diverse qualitative, interpretive, and theoretical schools
have, in varying degrees, accommodated themselves to feminist
inquiry without much evidence of conceptual turmoil. Thus, a great
many, perhaps a statistical majority of feminist sociologists,
continue to conduct valuable empirical research, often with
significant policy implications, unaffected and unfazed by shifts in
theoretical climates that I have found so compelling and
unsettling.4
In fact, I believe that it is the idiosyncratic character of my feminist
trajectory that might help to illuminate certain notable recent
developments in feminist scholarship. My scholarship has always
been centered not in sociology but on the disciplinary borderlands
that have nurtured the intellectual audacity that feminists have
needed to think our ways radically through the disciplines. But in
this regard I have begun to find myself increasingly out of step. A
great deal of feminist scholarship today seems more entrenched in
and bound by academic disciplinary identities than it did when
Barrie Thorne and I first recorded our reflections on feminist
knowledge transformations.
The increased strength of disciplinarity observable in contemporary
feminist scholarship can be read, of course, as a cheering index of
our astonishing successes. In most humanities and social science
disciplines today, feminist inquiry has achieved undisputable
legitimacyin some, a level of acceptability approaching
normalcyand the demographic trends seem irreversible. The Sex
and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, for
example, has displaced the far-better-funded research subspecialty
of Medical Sociology as the largest "subfield" represented in the
organization. Sociology, like other social sciences and humanities
disciplines, is a feminizing field.5
 Page 128
Yet I am worried, as well as cheered, by these achievements, for
this success also breeds new intellectual and political dangers.
Because so many feminists can now enjoy sympathetic collegiality
and legitimacy within our disciplinary enclaves, there is less
compelling impulse for extradisciplinary migrations. As it becomes
increasingly possible for feminists to achieve (what was once
unthinkable) a fully respectable and rewarded academic career
within a conventional discipline, there is less incentive or demand
for feminists to acquire counterdisciplinary language and research
questions or to participate in the more transgressive forms of
knowledge renovation that I still consider to be crucial. I worry that
this may blunt the critical edge, as well as the public intelligibility,
of our once-visionary project. Perhaps this anxiety signals my
personal anomalous experience. For precisely during this period of
feminization and of feminist incorporation in my official discipline,
I have been experiencing my own work and identity as increasingly
marginal to "actually existing sociology." Is it this traveler or her
disciplinary itinerary that has provoked this anomaly?
Sketched schematically, my trajectory through my discipline
travels from socialist-feminist historical sociology to feminist and
"postsocialist" ethnographic sociology and interdisciplinary
cultural studies. I have spent most of my research energies since
my first year as a graduate sociology student at Brandeis University
in 1973 studying family revolutions and always by transgressing
disciplinary boundaries. The three books I have completed since
then are preoccupied with a common set of substantive
issuesgender, family, and rapid processes of broad-scale social
change. They differ greatly, however, in their geopolitical settings,
research methods, and textual products. The first, about peasant
families and revolution in modern China, trafficked in historical
sociology The book that resulted was a theoretical analysis of
secondary literature, organized chronologically and written in a
conventional third-person narrative format. 6 My second book-
length project focused on family change among white, working
people living in postindustrial "Silicon Valley," California. After
three years of commuter fieldwork, I wrote an ethnography in a
first-person, reflexive mode that incorporated dialogic elements,
organized the book somewhat novelistically, and dusted it with
"post" words.7 Unexpected political responses to that book induced
me to write In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family Values
in a Postmodern Age,8 which might be characterized as a
contribution to political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and
cultural studies. Or it might better be described as my attempt to
practice a form of "applied" feminist sociology by intervening
more directly in the cultural wars being fought over ''family values"
in the United States. In-
 Page 129
deed, I found the call to this form of intellectual activism so
pressing that it led me to withdraw from a very different research
project to which I had turned after completing Brave New
Familiesacollaborative study with feminist literary critic Judith
Newton of male cultural critics.
As is evident, whatever coherence is discernible in my work lies in
Left feminist political and theoretical domains rather than in
specialized research topic, methodology, or epistemology. For
better and worse, I work as a disciplinary dilettante. If the un-
disciplined character of my academic affiliations is somewhat
unusual, it has historic roots in the social movement that generated
feminist scholarship. It seems crucial to note that when I entered
the doctoral program in sociology at Brandeis University in 1973, I
did so as a feminist who had already participated in establishing a
women's studies program elsewhere. 9 Indeed, it was my
"conversion" to feminism, my commitment to emergent women's
studies, and my desire to study and build feminist theory that led
me to abandon a doctoral degree in education that I had been
pursuing and enter a social science discipline instead. Feminism
was (and remains) my primary, and sociology a secondary, and,
indeed, somewhat of an arbitrary, disciplinary affiliation. In fact,
when in the early 1970s I looked for a disciplinary context in which
to pursue my/ our then-new interest in feminist theory, I applied for
admission to doctoral programs in anthropology, as well as in
sociology As I look backward, it seems less surprising to me that I
should have migrated from the historical to the anthropological
borders of my nominal discipline than that it has taken me so long
to do so.
My un-disciplined proclivities met few constraints in the Brandeis
Sociology Departmenta decidedly maverick program that
foregrounded and enacted the decentered character of the discipline
that was depicted in one of the first influential books I read about
my new fieldAlvin Gouldner's The Coming Crisis in Western
Sociology.10Profoundly affected by the radical pedagogy and self-
actualization ideals promoted by political and countercultural
movements during the 1960s, the Brandeis faculty had eliminated a
shared curriculum or set of degree requirements. Even more
unusual for an American sociology department was its pervasive
hostility to positivism. Interpretive sociology and theory were
privileged at Brandeis, and the privileged body of theory for my
cohort of New Left veterans was Marxism and its Frankfurt School
elaborations. My sister graduate students and I quickly identified as
socialist-feminists and steeped ourselves in the emergent Marxist-
feminist "discourse," a term we had not yet heard.
We were trailblazing here. Although there were a couple of
feminists on the Brandeis faculty, they were no more advanced in
this then-nascent
 Page 130
endeavor than we were. Consequently, my principal graduate
school experience involved a form of collective self-education.
With and without faculty participation, feminist graduate students
formed study groups in which we made up a decidedly
transdisciplinary approach to feminist sociology as we went along.
I also benefited from an exhilarating extracurricular graduate
education. By participating in one of the Northeast coast Marxist-
feminist groups that emerged in the early 1970s, by teaching (while
learning) "Marxism for Women" at a local grassroots women's
school, and later, and most significantly, by serving for more than a
decade on the editorial collective of the interdisciplinary journal
Feminist Studies, I "interned" in feminist theory and developed my
undisciplined approach to feminist sociology. The startling
overrepresentation of Brandeis degree-holders among feminist
sociologists who have published widely recognized work suggests
the creative potential of a highly permissive approach to
disciplinary training. 11
This was the intellectual milieu that enabled the audacity of
selecting for my dissertation topic a subject about which I had
received no formal schooling-patriarchy and socialist revolution in
China. Of course, the political milieu that fostered that decision
was equally heady and is hard to recapture. Highly romanticized
images of the Cultural Revolution in China and wildly inflated (or
grossly understated) reports that "Women hold up half the sky"
were being deposited on overly receptive shores of the anti-
Vietnam War era by waves swelling in the wake of President
Richard Nixon's historic thaw with China; these inspired enormous
curiosity and enthusiasm among American socialist-feminists.
Although twenty-five years had passed since the Chinese
revolution, the Chinese Communists did not seem to have followed
the disappointing precedent set by the Russian Bolsheviks in their
earlier postrevolutionary backlash against family and gender policy
in the Soviet Union.12 I was eager to explore the sources and
effects of the seemingly more resilient Maoist family revolution.
"Dual-systems" theory, the dominant socialist-feminist framework
of the period, which presumed that gender and social class
represent two distinct and interrelated systems of domination,
influenced my original conceptualization of my study. Because
dual-systems theory asserted the relative autonomy and equal
significance of gender, it seemed then to be the most promising
strategy for liberating feminism from the subordinate position in its
"unhappy marriage" to Marxism.13 Examining the history of the
Chinese revolution through the lens of gender and family
dynamics, my analysis pushed feminist claims for the fundamental
significance and the relative autonomy of gender about as far as
they could go. So far, in fact, that they upturned the dual-systems
premise with which I had begun
 Page 131
my research. The prerevolutionary agrarian crisis, I argued, was
also inseparably a patriarchal peasant family crisis, and the
resolution of that crisis through policies that built patriarchal
socialism was a central vehicle for the victory of the Chinese
Communists. Thus, I concluded, gender and class dynamics were
inextricably intertwined in the Chinese revolution, and a fully
feminist historical materialism, rather than a dual-systems model,
was needed to comprehend this.
By the time I completed my study of the Chinese family revolution,
I was dissatisfied not only with dual-systems theory but also with
the abstract and secondary character of this research and book and
their remoteness from the agency of women to which I was
committed theoretically. This fed my determination that my next
project would involve the sort of primary, "hands-on," qualitative
research that I, like many feminists by the early 1980s, had come to
presume was the privileged method for feminist research. 14
Coinciding with my newly expanded personal family
commitmentsthe birth of my son in 1981this conviction conspired
to place geographic restrictions on my possible research fields. The
demands and delights of delayed mothering, also characteristic of
my generation of feminists, confined my field research options to
locations accessible to my San Francisco Bay Area residence. In
fact, it seems plausible to me that the emergence of what
anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer approvingly
call "repatriated anthropology" in the United States may have been
propelled by changes in the gender and demographic composition
of their discipline as much as by a principled response to the
politically troubled conditions of postcolonial ethnography.15 The
influx into anthropology of women whose family commitments
were less portable or expendable than those typical of their male
counterparts would in itself have fostered interest in formulating
geographically accessible ethnographic questions.16 Certainly, my
own ethnographic impulses were about to be "disciplined" in this
manner.
It was during this personal period of research transition that Barrie
Thorne and I wrote "The Missing Feminist Revolution in
Sociology," where, in a passing comment, we lamented. the dearth
of feminist sociologists who had chosen to work within the
discipline's own rich, ethnographic tradition of community studies.
This aside unwittingly foreshadowed the project I was soon to
engagemy accidental ethnography of the families of white working
people in California's Silicon Valley Once again I began with a
vintage socialist-feminist subjectworking-class gender relationships
under postindustrial conditions. Again, too, I began with a
historical sociological orientation. In fact, in the project's initial
stages I was collaborating
 Page 132
with a historian. Our plan was to integrate a historical overview of
occupational and demographic shifts in the region and the nation
with my untrained conception of a conventional sociological
qualitative research design involving numerous semistructured
interviews. The political impetus for this research, however,
contrasted sharply with the optimistic and innocent motivations for
my China study. It was my mounting concern with the antifeminist
"pro-family" backlash movement in the United States that had been
credited by many for providing the grassroots kindling for the
1980s Reagan revolution.
Given my geographic constraints, it is fortuitous that I lived within
commuter reach of an ideal research site for my project. Silicon
Valley was not only a vanguard region of postindustrialization but
also one where the demographic indices of family change were
stark and where feminist ideology once had been articulate and
politically consequential. Although I selected this research site for
its vanguard features, I chose to study a population that I
erroneously presumed to manifest the opposite tendencies. Like
most white middle-class feminists, I regarded white and Latino
working-class people as the most "traditional" in their family
convictions and behaviors and thus the primary appreciative
audience for the remarkably successful "pro-family" performance
of the quite untraditional (and unsuccessful) Reagan family
My formal research design, to interview a large sample of Anglo
and Latino people working in and around the electronics industry,
unraveled rapidly As my book describes, two interviews that I
conducted immediately after Reagan's landslide reelection in
November 1984 profoundly challenged my own class and gender
prejudices and provoked my surrender to the lures of an open-
ended ethnographic quest. First, "Pam," a woman I had known for
four months and thought to be a feminist, revealed to me her recent
conversion to evangelical Christianity and her participation in
Christian marriage counseling. One week later, "Dotty," a survivor
of an often abusive, thirty-year-long marriage, surprised me with
her feminist convictions. Abandoning my research plans, I spent
the next three years conducting intermittent fieldwork among these
women and their kin.
This accidental but, I later came to believe, overdetermined turn to
ethnographic methods shifted my disciplinary cross-dressing
impulses to anthropology (the discipline that Barrie Thorne and I
had earlier rated comparatively high in our feminist transformation
assessments), just when that discipline was turning reflexive about
the power/knowledge nexus of field research and textuality. 17 This
was also a period when postcolonial consciousness, in addition to
demographic changes, had encouraged increas-
 Page 133
ing numbers of anthropologists to cross-dress as sociologists
studying "others" at home. 18 Here, however, I enjoyed an
advantage as a sociologist. Most practitioners of "repatriated
anthropology" in the United States were still struggling for full
legitimacy in their discipline, in part, because foreign fieldwork has
long been one of that discipline's best-equipped border guards
patrolling the research terrain it shares with sociology.
Doing urban anthropology (or a postcommunity study) as a Jewish,
secular feminist among born-again Christians and hard-living,
crisis-riddled people more than sated my craving for engaged
research. It also propelled me spontaneously to struggle with
numerous ethical, political, and textual questions about
representation and to engage with some postmodern feminist
debates that, by the late 1980s, were beginning to migrate from
literary criticism and the humanities into anthropology, and to a
lesser extent into history, but not yet noticeably into sociology. I
lost my feminist ethnographic innocence in the field, as I explain in
an essay written in the midst of this upheaval, "Can There Be a
Feminist Ethnography?"19 Only a "partially" feminist one is
possible, I concluded, intending both senses of the term and placing
myself thereby in the camp of those who reject as utopian the claim
that there is such a thing as a specifically feminist research
methodology or even the view that any one method is specifically
suitable for feminist research.
The partially feminist ethnography I wrote about Pam and Dotty
(and me) bears the traces of these disciplinary and political
transitions. I structured the book as two documentary novellas and
wrote it, against resistance from my male editor, in a reflexive,
first-person, and occasionally dialogic narrative style. The novellas,
however, are sandwiched inside a more conventionally
authoritative, third-person, interpretive sociological account of the
history of family revolutions in the United States. Thus, in structure
and style, this book enacts my ambivalent relationship to the
postmodernist turn in feminist anthropology and exhibits an
interdisciplinary feminist research and rhetorical stance.
The same tension besets the book's two central arguments. One is
avowedly postmodernist, the other an empirically grounded
revision of conventional sociological understandings of family and
social transformations. I argued first that "the postmodern family"
is a useful conceptual category for analyzing the transformation of
gender and kinship that has accompanied and helped shape
postindustrial society. Literary critics in a Humanities Institute
seminar in which I participated while struggling for an interpretive
vocabulary for my ethnography prodded me to develop a
theoretical understanding of the elusive concept of "postmodern."
Not surprisingly,
 Page 134
therefore, I turned to humanists to explicate what I meant when I
used the concept of "the postmodern family condition" to signal the
collapse of a hegemonic family system. I found that I could readily
apply art historian Clive Dilnot's answers to his own rhetorical
question "What is the postmodern?" in an essay on postmodern
culture to current family conditions in the United States. The
postmodern, Dilnot maintains, "is first, an uncertainty, an
insecurity, a doubt." Most of the "post-" words provoke uneasiness
because they imply simultaneously ''both the end, or at least the
radical transformation of, a familiar pattern of activity or group of
ideas" and the emergence of "new fields of cultural activity whose
contours are still unclear and whose meanings and implications . . .
cannot yet be fathomed." 20 The postmodern, moreover, is
"characterized by the process of the linking up of areas and the
crossing of the boundaries of what are conventionally considered to
be disparate realms of practice."21 Similarly, I argued that
contemporary U.S. family arrangements are diverse, fluid, and
unresolved and that the postmodern family is not a new model of
family life equivalent to that of the modern family, not the next
stage in an orderly progression of family history, but the stage in
that history when the belief in a logical progression of stages
breaks down. Donning unmistakable postmodernist drag, I even
wrote: "Rupturing the teleology of modernization narratives that
depict an evolutionary history of the family and incorporating both
experimental and nostalgic elements, 'the' postmodem family
lurches forward and backward into an uncertain future."22
The book's second major argument, however, remained a
plainclothes historical-sociological one about family revolutions
and vanguard classes. A major shift, I argued, has taken place in
the class direction of U.S. family change. Most historians agree
that the white middle classes were in the vanguard of the "modern"
family revolutionthat is, the transformation from a premodern,
corporate, patriarchal family economy into a male breadwinner
"companionate" family that transpired between the late eighteenth
and the early twentieth centuries. Although the modern family
pattern achieved cultural and statistical dominance, most working-
class people attained the male family wage, their economic
passport to that pattern, very late, if at all. I interpreted this to
suggest that by the time, in the 1960s, that white working-class
people got there, another family revolution was already well under
way. Once again middle-class white families appeared to be in the
vanguard; frustrated middle-class homemakers and their more
militant daughters subjected modern domesticity to a sustained
critique, at times with little sensitivity to the effects that our
antimodern family ideology might have on women for whom full-
time domesticity had rarely been feasible.
 Page 135
Thus, feminist family reform came to be regarded widely as a
white middle-class agenda and white working-class families its
most resistant adversaries. These, after all, had been the
presumptions that led me to focus my study of postindustrial family
change on white working-class people in the first place.
But this time appearances were deceptive. Field research convinced
me that white middle-class families have been less the innovators
than the propagandists and principal beneficiaries of contemporary
family change. Instead, I argued that postindustrial conditions have
reversed the trickle-down trajectory of family change once
predicted by modernization theorists. By studying a family
revolution ethnographically, I upturned many of my preconceptions
about gender, class, and even born-again Christianity more
profoundly than would have been possible using only the more
distant research methods of historical sociology. I discovered on
the ground, for example, that evangelical Christians are not
monolithically antifeminist, nor are their family relationships
uniformly "traditional" or patriarchal. And I observed firsthand
some of the ways in which many evangelical women and even
antifeminist women have been reinventing family forms as
creatively as have many feminists. Feminists have received far too
much credit and blame for instigating postmodern contests over the
meaning of "the family," perhaps because we have done so much to
challenge the "essentialist" connotations of the term.
Ethnographic research also brought "home" to me the grounds for
pervasive ambivalence about postmodern family and social crises.
Observing the everyday traumas and tragedies caused by the
irrationality and injustice of contemporary occupational and social
conditions reinforced my feminist and still democratic socialist
beliefs that equitable, humane, and democratic gender and family
policies could go a long way to alleviate the "surplus" family
oppression that most women and many men suffer. But I no longer
fantasize (as I did when I concluded my book on China with the
claim that it had achieved a family revolution, but not a feminist
family revolution) that even a feminist family revolution could put
an end to family distress. There are human costs to the fruition of a
fully voluntary sexual and kinship system that no social policy can
fully eradicate. No nostalgic efforts to restore the "traditional"
modern family system, however, can offer a more effective, let
alone a democratic, resolution to family upheaval. For better and
worse, the postmodern family revolution is here to stay.
The last chapter of Brave New Families ends on that note, indeed
with that sentence. It acknowledges just cause for widespread
ambivalence about postmodern family and social conditions but
offers no parallel reflections
 Page 136
on my own ambivalence about my current relationship to feminist
sociology and postmodernist theories. The book itself does not end
there, however. Displaying, perhaps allaying, some of my
unresolved ethical-textual-political anxieties, I chose to end the
book instead with an epilogue in which Pamela appears to have the
provocative last word on my reading of her life: "You could never
capture me." This somewhat disingenuous democratic gesture,
which masks my asymmetrical control over the dialogic and textual
conditions of its production, also signals the straddle position I
came to occupy within and among contemporary debates about
feminism and ethnography
Even though my ethnographic rhetorical strategies in Brave New
Families were somewhat reflexive, dialogic, and decentered, they
produced a book that remained incurably humanist in the same
sense that feminism and socialism have been humanist projects,
committed to the emancipation of subjects who are comfortable
naming themselves in gender and class terms. My humanist
feminism sympathizes with the critique made by Francis Mascia-
Lees, Colleen Cohen, and Patricia Sharpe of the premature forfeit
of a female subject and of the frequent excesses of textual
experimentation for its own sake sometimes found in "the
postmodernist turn in anthropology." 23 Nonetheless, I am not
willing to polarize feminism and postmodernism in this way, for I
believe that feminism has been one of the enabling conditions for,
as well as a generative force in, the development of theoretical
developments often designated loosely as "postmodern." Gender
crises embedded in the kinds of family revolutions I have studied
through both historical sociology and ethnography have been
among the important sources of the crisis of representation, the
critiques of unified subjectivity, and the preoccupation with
questions of difference, identity, culture, and authority that
galvanize postmodern theories.
With this formulation of the relationship between feminism and
postmodernist forms of knowledge in mind, I turned from the study
of family revolutions to a project designed to explore the
relationships between feminism and postmodernist cultural
criticism by men. Migrating even further "afield" from most
sociological projects, and adopting the surprising new feminist
fashion here of studying men, I began collaborating with feminist
literary critic Judith Newton on a project that combined
ethnographic and literary critical approaches to contemporary
fashions in cultural critique. Both my choice of collaborator and
the linguistic shift evident in our defining this project as
cultural,rather than social, criticism reflect and reinforce recent
shifts in the primary locus of feminist and other radical theories.
The historic collapse of "actually existing socialist societies"
 Page 137
deepened a crisis in Marxist social thought. At the same time, and
perhaps as a result, a right-wing intellectual backlash in the United
States has directed much of its energies to an assault on feminist
and multicultural challenges to the classic Western canon. Perhaps
this explains why the gravitational center of critical theory seems to
have swung from the social sciences to literary criticism and the
humanities. 24 I worried about and wanted to understand this
tendency even as I found myself participating in it. Thus, beginning
with "the new historicism" in literary studies and with what some
have termed "the new ethnography" in anthropology, Judith
Newton and I began to study and rewrite the stories of the genesis
of these discourses in ways that write feminisms into the narrative
of these postmodern "turns," even if primarily as a displaced
"other."25
As we navigated a route through the turbulent waters of
postmodern feminist debates on men "in" or "and" feminism,26 we
pursued a middle course that we began charting while team-
teaching a graduate seminar on feminist theory. With most of our
students, we found many insights developed by feminist and other
postmodern theorists persuasive and useful. Striving for
ethnographic and textual reflexivity about the nexus of power and
knowledge in cultural research and representation seemed crucial
to us, as did efforts to historicize the conceptual vocabulary that
feminists employ in our work. Feminists of color, along with other
postcolonial, as well as postmodern, critics have taught us to
mistrust dominant conceptual categories that falsely universalize
the experiences and conditions of dominant subjects.27 And like
other feminists influenced by Michel Foucault, we had come to
understand power to be productive, as well as repressive.
At the same time, however, we retained conceptions that some
poststructuralist theorists eschew, still finding fruitful notions of
agency, experience, resistance, and social referentiality, even if the
social world that agents construct, experience, and resist has
become one in which images dominate and, to a significant extent,
constitute social reality Thus, although I can no longer sustain the
socialist-feminist confidence with which I once represented the
narrative of family revolution in China, and I now find all
metanarratives to be inevitably provisional, I nonetheless find them
indispensable vehicles for representing relationships of power and
injustice, such as those distributed along old-fashioned axes of
gender, class, race, and sexuality For this reason (and others), I am
willing to employ, as Gayatri Spivak advocates, a "strategic" use of
essentialism.28 Indeed, I confess that, reminded during the Gulf
War of the ubiquity of male associations with militarism and
physical violence, I found myself entertaining more than
 Page 138
strategic ideas about essentialism. I even dared publicly to
interrogate monolithic refusals by most feminists, like myself, to
consider the possibility that biology might provide more than a
semiotic resource for the more lethal aspects of masculinity. 29
As my trajectory was picking its undisciplined and anxious way
through feminist and other bodies of postmodern social theory, my
feminist colleagues in literary criticism began to report a mounting
feminist backlash in their discipline against the hegemony of
poststructuralist theories, while some feminist critics of
postmodern anthropology were beginning to move beyond critique
to creative appropriations.30 Meanwhile, ironically enough, my
home discipline, sociology, began to exhibit early symptoms of
postmodern courtship: sessions on postmodern selfhood and
society began to infuse the annual meetings of the American
Sociological Association; the November 1990 issue of Social
Problems, the official journal of the Society for the Study of Social
Problems, an organization and publication heretofore more noted
for its liberal and Marxist sensibilities, featured "Three Papers on
Postmodernity and Panic" (one by the 1991-1992 president of the
organization), followed by "Two Papers on Feminism, Language,
and Postmodernism"; and the theme of the 1992 meetings of the
SSSP was explicitly "Postmodernity as a Social Problem: Race,
Class, Gender, and the New World Order."
Interestingly, perhaps perversely, just as the postmodern theory
industry seemed to be outsourcing some of its knowledge
production sites from a humanities "core" and an anthropological
"semiperiphery" to heretofore peripheral sociology, "cultural
studies" was migrating from Birmingham, England, to displace
postmodern theory, as well as feminist theory, as the favored sign
and institutional site for left-wing inter-, trans-, and
counterdisciplinary intellectual work in the United States. The rise
of cultural studies over the past few years has been meteoric, with
new centers, institutes, conferences, journals, graduate programs,
and even undergraduate majors proliferating, despite the severe,
often devastating, impact of the economic crisis on higher
education.
From a sociological standpoint, it is interesting to note that the
standard, and generally male-authored, genealogies of cultural
studies locate its roots in the 1970s Birmingham Centre for
Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary project in which sociology,
particularly of a critical Marxist cast, played an integral part.
However, sociology failed to survive the late 1980s transatlantic
crossing of this intellectual vessel, which disembarked primarily in
humanities settlements. Perhaps this is partly because many of the
indigenous roots of cultural studies in the United States can be
found in
 Page 139
feminism, ethnic studies, and American Studies, projects in which
literature and humanities scholars increasingly dominate. From this
perspective, I found it oddly comforting to observe anthropologists
at their 1992 meetings organizing plenary sessions to express, and
to analyze the sources of, their own widespread feelings of
marginalization from the vortex of multicultural and cultural
studies discourses, intellectual territory in which many
anthropologists presumed proprietary disciplinary interests. 31
This displacement of postmodern theory by cultural studies seems
to be coinciding with a notable transfer of intellectual energies
from gender and classthe foundational cross-bars of socialist
feminismto race and sexuality as the privileged sites of radical
theorizing. What is more, this shift from gender and class to race
and sexuality is evident not only in the United States version of
cultural studies, broadly defined, but even within women's studies
and feminist theory. So fully has feminist attention to differences
among women and to conceptions of multiple subjectivities
displaced unitary formulations of gender differences between
women and men that it has become challenging to decide whether
one still can identify an intellectual terrain that remains a
specifically feminist project. By 1994 I found myself naming the
graduate seminar in contemporary feminist theory that I teach
"Different Differences and Significant Others: The Decentering of
Gender in Feminist Theory."
In fact, what many feminists of color came to label "white feminist
theory" has been so successfully mainstreamed into most of the
humanities and a few of the social sciences that queer theory and
multiculturalism are displacing feminism as the primary targets of
conservative backlash. Former New Leftist turned neoconservative
intellectual entrepreneur David Horowitz made the vanguard role
of queer theory explicit in "Queer Revolution: The Last Stage of
Radicalism," a rather loathsome diatribe he presented at a self-
consciously backlash session of the 1992 meetings of the American
Studies Association. Parodying the Communist Manifesto,Horowitz
began: "A specter is haunting the American academy, the last
refuge of the political left. It is the specter of queer theory."32 He
proceeded to portray queer theory as the final assault by radical
theories of social construction on nature, normalcy, and
civilization, thereby transferring to queer revolution the privileged
status of pariah once "enjoyed" by feminism. Similarly, the
widespread political backlash against affirmative action, both on
and off U.S. campuses, seems to be directed more vocally against
compensatory remedies for racial than for gender imbalances.
The rhetoric and outcomes of recent and current electoral
campaigns in the United States reflect these shifts, as homophobia
and racism are
 Page 140
proving to be far more potent resources than sexism for galvanizing
backlash voters. Tangible feminist gains in the 1992 "Year of the
Woman" coincided with anti-gay rights victories in Colorado and
in Tampa, Florida, and a frighteningly close call for a draconian
antigay proposition in Oregon whose language about perversity and
abnormality is echoed in the David Horowitz pamphlet. Likewise,
Year of the Woman hoopla helped to mask the Democratic Party's
active suppression of its traditional racial equality and antipoverty
discourses in favor of universalist appeals to a "forgotten" middle
class, not so subtly coded as white. As I compose these thoughts in
the midst of the 1996 electoral season, the Democratic Party has
dropped the mask. Party strategists openly count upon sustaining
the gender gap advantage Democrats enjoy among women and pro-
choice voters as a crucial component of a reelection constituency.
At the same time, however, President Bill Clinton has signed two
pieces of historic, and in my view heinous, backlash legislation that
directly pander to popular prejudice against gays and lesbians and
the disproportionately nonwhite poorthe Defense of Marriage Act,
which defines marriage as an exclusively heterosexual right, and
the repeal of our already paltry system of federal welfare
entitlements for the poor.
I have indulged these meditations on recent shifts in politics and
theory trends at some length because they have impinged on my
own recent work as well. The multifaceted national cultural wars
have pulled my work in unanticipated directions. In fact, ironically
enough, ever since December 1992 when one of these discourses
"hailed" me, as an Althusserian might say, by name from the op-ed
pages of the New York Times, 33I have found myself drawn
irresistibly back to "the family." A surprising new campaign for
family values, spearheaded by social scientists, subjected Brave
New Families, my feminist ethnography about postmodern family
life, to hostile attention, inadvertently drawing me away from my
ethnographic project on cultural studies and into the fray of public
intellectual combat over family research and politics.34 Having
been cast by the campaign in the role of a dissident respondent, I
began to map its institutional, rhetorical, and political frameworks.
What began as a cartographical project, a reflexive sociology of
knowledge treatment of political and intellectual developments
inside and outside the academy that drive and configure the neo-
family values campaign gradually generated an unanticipated book.
I self-consciously undertook to write In the Name of The Family to
intervene in contemporary representational struggles over family
politics that now operate at the boundaries of social science, the
media, and political discourse. At the same time, and to the same
ends, I began working with an interdis-
 Page 141
ciplinary group of family scholars and clinicians, many of whom
evince little interest in, or patience with, the favored rhetoric and
theories of cultural studies, to form a Council on Contemporary
Families. The council plans to serve as a research and education
clearinghouse that will work to challenge misleading social
scientific claims made "in the name of the family" that have been
used to justify reactionary political initiatives.
My recent engagement with a decentered genre of feminist cultural
studies in the academy helped alert me to the social significance of
the cultural campaign for family values and furnished me with
analytical resources for examining its mastery of the politics of
representation. For example, where once I might have read Dan
Quayle's assault on Murphy Brown in straightforward terms of
gender, now I could readily perceive that she functions as a
multilayered cultural code signifying racial, sexual, and social class
meanings at least as potently. However, to directly challenge these
meanings, to engage, that is, in a kind of applied cultural studies in
the public arena, I have had to bracket my academic investments in
cultural studies. After all, it is my disciplinary status as a
credentialed, and decidedly modernist, sociologist that legitimates
my scholarly authority to engage in the cultural politics of the
family.
These disciplinary and political disjunctures provide "disloyal"
feminists like myself paradoxical new constraints against and
opportunities for interdisciplinary work. The increased
disciplinarity, specialization, and sheer magnitude of feminist
scholarship makes cross-disciplinary feminist discourse ever more
difficult. At the same time, however, feminism has become a
significant presence in cultural studies, a key site of
interdisciplinary theory and politics, but one in which sociology is
even more marginal than anthropology. Meanwhile, backlash
movements against the liberatory politics of gender, race, class, and
sexuality have achieved so much success in the public arena that
they now threaten to render the flourishing academic project of
feminist cultural studies, as well as all forms of critical inquiry,
either an irrelevant or endangered activity
I conclude these reflections on my travels in feminist disciplinary
borderlands with thoughts provoked by Avery Gordon, a decidedly
postmodernist, "disloyal" feminist sociologist and cultural studies
scholar, in her discussion of disciplinary impediments to writing
ethnography and literary fictions as sociology: "Perhaps the key
methodological question is not: what method have you adopted for
this research? but what paths have been disavowed, left behind,
covered over and remain unseen. In what fields does field work
occur?" 35
Looking back over my travels to, from, and within the study of
family
 Page 142
revolutions, I have no desire to disavow my undisciplined migrant
labors in cross-fertilized feminist fields, least of all those that
challenge arbitrary and increasingly atavistic disciplinary divisions
of knowledge. Indeed, I worry rather less about the consequences
of my personal disloyalty to the disciplines than about the costs to
feminism of what strike me as increasingly conducive conditions
for disciplinary loyalty now evident in the social sciences and
humanities. Yet I find comfort, as well as concern, in my
conviction that these will provide a fertile "field day" for an
emerging generation of feminist cultural studies theorists who must
confront the challenge of keeping success from spoiling academic
feminism.
Afterword
Not long after I had written an earlier version of the preceding
essay for a multidisciplinary women's studies lecture series and
volume on the impact of feminism on the disciplines, I received the
invitation from Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne to contribute to
the conference that yielded this volume an autobiographical essay
that applies "a life history methodology" to "the recent history of
feminist thought within sociology." 36 Although my response
claimed that I had recently completed such a piecean earlier
version of the preceding essayfor a different venue, rereading that
essay, I discovered how few of the "life history" dimensions, that is
to say, of the intimate motivational dimensions of my trajectory, I
had chosen to reveal. Regard this Afterword, therefore, as a kind of
thin overlay relief map to the essay it follows. Adding a layer of
personal texture and tone to the essay's more composed reflections
on my theoretical and political autobiography, it hints at some of
the extratextual desires, vulnerabilities, anxieties, obsessions, and
happenstances that inevitably undergird, but are repressed by, more
conventionally processed representations of intellectual biography.
Once pressed by Barbara and Barrie to think more confessionally
about my research, I allowed the subtitle of Brave New Families,at
the time my most recently published book, to bring an instant blush
to my face. For I immediately recognized the private double
entendre of the "stories of domestic upheaval in late twentieth
century America" that I had simultaneously signaled and masked
therein. My own family history is marked by upheavals that
intersect with, at times in boldface, at others less overtly, many of
those I tell in the ethnographic portions of that book, as with the
broader social trends the book interprets. Indeed, I could readily
produce a reductionist, but not false, narrative about how my more
than two-decades-long intellectual preoccupation with family
revolutions, as well as the best-honed
 Page 143
undergraduate course I teach on the making and unmaking of the
modem family, were propelled by the painful discrepancy between
the sentimentalized 1950s family ideology that was culturally
dominant during my teen years and the grittier texture of life in my
troubled natal family.
I lived my childhood and adolescence in New Jersey during the
1940s and 1950s, suffering the underside of Ozzie and Harriet
Land in an "intact" lower-middle-class modern family. Until both
children had begun their own first marriages, my mother, a
frustrated, socially ambitious, intermittently full-time homemaker,
sustained an overtly hostile, incompatible marriage to my father, a
distant, depressed, working-class breadwinner, for fear of the
serious social stigma and economic risks of divorce. My quotidian,
experiential curriculum documented the hollowness of the modem
family ideal, but, like most children, I fancied my own family's
pain no critique of the institution, but an anomalous, and
disgraceful, instance of its failure. In consequence, it was a family
pattern I felt compelled to replicate until liberated by the "domestic
upheavals" of the 1960s.
A true product of 1950s gender culture, I possessed no educational
or career goals of my own but devoted my undergraduate years in
the early 1960s to seeking a husband. In June 1964, immediately
after graduating from the University of Michigan, I married a
medical student and moved with him to Chicago, where I spent the
next three years teaching social studies in secondary schools,
earning what we young working wives of student doctors in that
period called our Ph.T. degrees (putting hubby through). The
synergistic effects of Sputnik, Vietnam, civil rights, marijuana, and,
later, feminism gradually rescued me from this ill-suited, feminine
life course.
Sputnik inspired the National Defense Education Act, which,
among other things, funded summer enrichment programs for
public school teachers. Because I was beginning to be drawn into
the mounting cultural and political maelstroms of the mid-1960sthe
antiwar, civil rights, cultural revolutionI enrolled in an intensive
summer institute at the Chicago campus of the University of
Illinois to study what was then called Negro history. There an
inspirational, attentive professor helped awaken and fuse my too-
long-suppressed intellectual, political, and erotic passions. During
politically volatile 1968, I completed a master's degree program in
U.S. history at that same university, writing an M.A. thesis, "The
Martyrdom of Malcolm X." I also divorced my first husband,
joined the Gene McCarthy for President campaign, and enrolled in
a doctoral program in history teacher education at the University of
Chicago.
Thus, I had already divorced, as had my parents by then, and had
begun to develop a left-wing political consciousness when
feminism en-
 Page 144
tered and redirected my life in 1970. ''Feminism provided an
analysis and rhetoric for their discontent, and it helped each woman
develop the self-esteem she needed to exit or reform her unhappy
modern marriage" and to pursue educational and occupational
interests of her own, I would write twenty years later about Pam
and Dotty, the central subjects of my ethnography, neglecting to
indicate the autobiographical roots of this insight. 37 So profoundly
did feminism alter my own consciousness and commitments that it
has been my vocation ever since.
As I construct this more psychological reckoning of my interest in
family change, the decade of work I committed to studying China
reads almost as a displacement in which a remote geographical and
abstract analytical plane allowed me unthreatening means with
which to contend with unresolved, no doubt irresoluble, personal
preoccupations with questions of familial repression and with the
possibilities and limits of liberation. In such a reading, Brave New
Families represents the nearest facsimile of an intimate "life history
methodology" as this family sociologist is willing to record in
print. That project was precipitated, as I hint in its pages, by the
collapse in 1984 of my feminist-inspired joint household in
Berkeley, Californiaa household that had survived longer than my,
or many other, first marriage(s). Its failure catapulted me uneasily
into the first nuclear family household of my adult years.
As I read backward, additional displacements become visible. For
example, I first drafted this autobiographical Afterword in
December 1992, one week after viewing Spike Lee's film about
Malcolm X. I could not help but notice that Lee's masculinist,
idealized treatment of the slain black nationalist hero bore an
uncomfortable resemblance to the one I had produced in the M.A.
thesis written during my prefeminist black history period. The
naive, well-intentioned, white female college student whom
Malcolm, in his separatist phase, rebuffs in the Spike Lee film
reminded me that the interpersonal effects of black nationalism
facilitated my long retreat from a central focus on racial politics
and scholarship, as well as my turn to what I later learned to regard
as white feminism.
Intriguingly, two decades later I once again chose to study men.
And although this time I did so through feminist lenses, the project
on male cultural critics revived my long-standing, but for too long
subordinated, interest in race. I suspect that the coincidence of my
then eleven-year-old sons budding adolescence with my own
approach to the midlife "change" that Germaine Greer was more
willing than I to celebrate seeded some of the furrows I began
raking over in those newer fields.
From this perspective, however, my collaborative project on men
could
 Page 145
also be read as an abortive attempt to escape the family. I'm
reminded of another of my published titles, which evokes another
blush. "Are Feminists Afraid to Leave Home?" I queried
rhetorically in 1986 in a review essay of works by Betty Friedan,
Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Greer herself, which I termed
"conservative, profamily feminism." 38 Retrospectively I see that I,
too, only managed to escape the lure of ''the family" for a few years
before I found myself irresistibly called back to work that truly
does feel like home. My current research, writing, public speaking,
and organizing on the politics of family values seem to draw on
and satisfy a remarkably extensive range of my intellectual,
emotional, and political identities.
Intellectually, this project requires the sort of disciplinary
disloyalty, or dilettantism, I have honed over decades. For example,
the sources I drew on to write the last chapter of In the Name of
The Family"Gayand Lesbian Families Are Here; All Our Families
Are Queer; Let's Get Used to It!"which was solicited for inclusion
in a family policy collection, ranged from literature in child
development, demography, critical legal theory, the daily print
media, and feminist theory, to online postings from political action
groups and episodes from TV sitcoms such as Roseanne and
Friends. Moreover, this project attends equally to those "tc"
(theoretically correct) Four Horsemen of feminist cultural
studiesgender, race, class, and sexuality Even more compelling, I
suspect, are some of the emotional and political functions this
project serves. It enables me to fuse scholarship with political
activism on issues of profound personal salience. I confess to
taking a portion of perverse pleasure from engaging in intellectual-
political combat against the family values brigades while
occupying the "subject position" of a married, heterosexual,
working mother. No doubt, this derives from my 1960s era
investments in a countercultural identity, as well as that era's
idealistic injunction to "keep the faith."
Nor would I deny that on a more personal level, this project
provides me continual opportunities to reflect on and reconsider
my own kinship history and strategies. Apropos, I am concluding
this Afterword exactly one week after giving the word to old and
new colleagues that I have decided to accept a new academic
position at USC . My son will be entering his junior year of high
school when I assume this position, and my own, perhaps overly
child-centered, family values prevent me from uprooting him from
the community and school that he does not wish to leave. In
consequence, I will soon join the ranks of long-distance, commuter
marriages as we negotiate a dual-household family strategy.
Despite the misgivings and anxiety with which I anticipate this
challenge, I also look forward with some pleasure to the
opportunity it will give me to "divide the k'ang," as the joint
 Page 146
Chinese families I once studied described the process of household
division. After more than a quarter century of domesticity, I am
ready to savor some of the privileges of inhabiting a part-time
"home of my own." This stage of my personal and professional life
history will have to take clearer shape, however, before I would
disclose in a scholarly venue any more than this about its
meanings.

Notes
My thanks to Sarah Fenstermaker, Judith Newton, Domna Stanton,
Abby Stewart, Barrie Thorne, and Susan Gerard for helpful
responses to an earlier draft.
1. Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, "The Missing Feminist
Revolution in Sociology," Social Problems 32 (April 1985): 301-
316.
2. Barrie and I discuss this issue at greater length in a postmortem
commentary on our earlier essay: Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne,
"Is Sociology Still Missing Its Feminist Revolution?" ASA Theory
Section Newsletter 18 (summer 1996): 1-3.
3. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino
Cohen, "The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a
Feminist Perspective," Signs 15 (Autumn 1989): 7-33.
4. Even the most cursory, arbitrary list suggests the continued
vitality and value of contributions by feminist sociologists whose
work thus far displays little interest in postmodern theory
disputesfor example, Barbara Katz Rothman, Lenore Weitzman,
Carole Joffe, Ruth Milkman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Maxine Baca
Zinn, Arlie Hochschild, Kristin Luker, Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
Judith Rollins, Lillian Rubin, Diana Russell, Candace West,
Barbara Reskin, Rosanna Hertz, and Marcia Millman. The
American Sociological Review, the major, and primarily positivist,
journal published by the American Sociological Association
routinely publishes feminist articles on such issues as female
employment, fertility, family behaviors, status attainment, political
behaviors, deviance, and gender attitudes. Feminist work permeates
Social Problems, the more qualitative and critical journal published
by the less mainstream Society for the Study of Socialist Problems,
and Sociologists for Women in Society publishes its own journal of
feminist sociology, Gender and Society.
5. In 1994 the Sex and Gender Section had 1,271 members, which
was 200 members more than the Section on Medical Sociology,
which is currently the second largest specialty section of the ASA
(data provided by American Sociological Association). The
proportion of sociology Ph.D. degrees awarded to females
increased from 33 percent in 1977 to 51 percent in 1989 (National
Science Foundation [NSF], "Science and Engineering Degrees,
1966-1989: A Source Book" NSF 91-314 [Washington, D.C.:
19911, NSF, Table 54). Compare this 50 percent increase and
achievement of female numerical dominance with the 20 percent
increase of Ph.D. degrees awarded to females in all fields: In 1980,
30 percent of all Ph.D. degrees in the United States were awarded
to females, and in 1990 the proportion had risen to
 Page 147
36 percent (National Research Council, "Summary Report 1990:
Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities"
[Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 19911.) These figures
for completed doctoral degrees likely understate the feminization
trends evident among currently enrolled graduate students in
sociology and other fields.
6. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
7. Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic
Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic
Books, 1990).
8. Judith Stacey, In the Name of The Family: Rethinking Family
Values in a Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
9. In 1971 I joined women faculty and students at what was then
called Richmond College of the City University of New York in
implementing a women's studies program. As I was an instructor in
education, I developed a course, "Women in Education," that
inspired my first feminist publication, Judith Stacey, Susan
Bereaud, and Joan Daniels, eds., And Jill Came Tumbling After:
Sexism in American Education (New York: Dell, 1974).
10. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (New
York: Basic Books, 1970).
11. To name just an arbitrary sample of feminists who have
received degrees from the Brandeis sociology department: Nancy
Chodorow, Barrie Thorne, Marcia Millman, Lise Vogel, Gaye
Tuchman, Judith Rollins, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Patricia Hill
Collins, Nancy Shaw, Wini Breines, Marjorie Davies, Shulamit
Reinharz, Fatima Mernissi, Lynda Holmstrom, Natalie Allon, and
Elizabeth Long. Barrie Thorne provides a longer list and an
insightful analysis of the conditions at Brandeis that fostered this
feminist renaissance in "Feminist Sociology: The Brandeis
Connection," a presentation she gave at a symposium in April 1984
honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the department's graduate
program, and in her essay in this volume.
12. Because early Bolshevik efforts to undermine patriarchal sexual
and family practices were rescinded after the Soviet regime
consolidated its power, most social scientists theorized that
revolutionary gender policies were strictly instrumental and short-
lived. Reactionary gender and family policies would inevitably
follow the consolidation of state power by a formerly revolutionary
regime. See, for example, Rose L. Coser and Lewis A. Coser, "The
Principles of Legitimacy and Its Patterned Infringement in Social
Revolutions," in Marvin B. Sussman and Betty E. Cogswell, eds.,
Cross-national Family Research (Leiden: Brill, 1972).
13. Heidi A. Hartmann wrote the essay that galvanized attention to
theoretical relations between feminism and Marxism: "The
Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More
Progressive Union," in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution.
(Boston: South End Press, 1981). An important early anthology of
dual-systems theory was Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist
Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist-feminism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1979).
14. I discuss some of the feminist literature extolling the virtues of
interactive field research in "Can There Be a Feminist
Ethnography?" Women's Studies International Quarterly 11
(1988): 21-27.
15. George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as
Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
 Page 148
16. I am grateful to Abby Stewart for initiating a provocative
dialogue on this issue with me and others.
17. The collection that canonized the reflexive, experimental turn
in anthropology was James Clifford and George Marcus, eds.,
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).It
was foreshadowed, however, by numerous earlier essays and
ethnographies, most of which are surveyed in Marcus and Fischer,
Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Of course, as Barrie Thorne has
properly reminded me, my turn to ethnography in itself need not
have propelled me outside sociology, where there is also a rich,
honorable tradition of ethnographic work starting with the early
twentieth century urban studies of the Chicago School and
continuing in the community studies tradition to which our earlier
essay pointed. Once again the primacy of my feminist,
antidisciplinary grounding proved decisive.
18. In addition to the works discussed by Marcus and Fischer, see
Michael Moffatt, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and
American Culture (New Brunswick. NJ.: Rutgers University Press
1989); Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an
American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989); and Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and
Chicano Families (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). A
vanguard instance is one of my favorite ethnographies: Barbara
Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Dutton, 1978). For a fine
collection of feminist anthropological studies of the United States,
see Faye Ginsburg and Anna Tsing, eds., Uncertain Terms:
Negotiating Gender in American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press,
1990).
19. For other analyses of the quest for a feminist research
methodology, see Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli-Klein, Theories
of Women's Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980);
Sandra Harding, ed. Feminism and Methodology (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Gross, "Conclusion:
What Is Feminist Theory?" in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross,
eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1987), pp. 190-304; and Liz Stanley
and Sue Wise, Breaking out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist
Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
20. Clive Dilnot, "What Is the Post-modern?" Art History 9 (June
1986): 245.
21. Ibid, p. 249.
22. Stacey, Brave New Families,p. 18.
23. Mascia Lees et al., "The Postmodernist Turn."
24. Thus, humanists, rather than social scientists, took much of the
initiative in organizing Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC,
my emphasis), mobilized to defend multicultural and feminist
curricular reforms against the anti-political correctness campaign
of the National Association of Scholars and other reactionary
groups. The organizational meeting of TDC was held at the
December 1991 meetings of the Modern Language Association.
25. Judith Newton and Judith Stacey, "Learning Not to Curse, or
Feminist Predicaments in Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Movie
Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt," Cultural
Critique 23 (winter 1992-1993): 51-82. I find it gratifying that
other feminists have challenged genealogies of postmodernist
theory and cultural studies that marginalize feminist contributions.
See, for example. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiance: Feminism,
Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988);
 Page 149
Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender
Skepticism," in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism
(New York: Routledge, 1990); Elizabeth Long, "Feminism and
Cultural Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communications 6
(1989): 427-435; and Cathy Schwichtenberg "Feminist Cultural
Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 202-
209.
26. Much of the academic debate about the proper preposition,
conjunction, and character of the two terms was initiated by Alice
Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York:
Methuen, 1987). See also Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden,
eds., Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism
(New York: Routledge, 1990).
27. The critical literature on this theme is vast. See, for example,
Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham,
and Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in
Women's Studies," Signs 11 (1986): 290-303; Chandra Mohanty,
Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press
1991); Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo
Caras (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990); and bell
hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South
End Press, 1984).
28. Gayatri Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogue (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 10.
29. I first raised this issue while serving as a commentator at the
"Unraveling Masculinities" conference at the University of
California, Davis, in February 1991. A revised version of the
commentary was published as "Toward Kinder, Gentler Uses for
Testosterone," Theory and Society 22 (1993): 711-721.
30. Four particularly influential critiques of the critical excesses of
the antiessentialist "club" are Barbara Christian, "The Race for
Theory," Cultural Critique 6: 51-63; Bordo, "Feminism,
Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism"; Diane Fuss, Essentially
Speaking: Feminism, Nature, Difference (New York: Routledge,
1989); and Tania Modleski. Feminism Without Women: Culture and
Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991). At
the November 1990 meetings of the American Anthropological
Association, Francis Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen
Cohen, the authors of the widely discussed feminist critique of
postmodern anthropology, gave, or rather performed, a paper that
was decidedly reflexive about its textual, as well as political,
dimensions. They did so, moreover, at a session on feminism and
postmodernism organized by Mascia-Lees.
31. This was the basic premise of the entire panel
"Multiculturalism and the Concept of Culture" and other panels.
See, for example, Sherry Ortner, "Anthropology's War of Position"
(Paper presented at American Anthropological Association
meeting, San Francisco, California, December 1992).
32. David Horowitz, "Queer Revolution: The Last Stage of
Radicalism" (Studio City Calif.: Center for the Study of Popular
Culture, 1992), pamphlet.
33. A widely circulated op-ed by David Popenoe, "The
Controversial Truth: The Two-parent Family Is Better," New York
Times, December 26, 1992, p. A13, identified me as an ideological
exception to an emergent consensus among social scientists that
two-parent families are superior.
34. I had been collaborating with Judith Newton in a study of male
cultural critics when the op-ed just mentioned appeared, followed
quickly by other articles by
 Page 150
family values advocates that identified Brave New Families as an
example of misguided feminism and liberalism. I discuss the
orchestrated character, as well as the substance of this campaign, at
length in In the Name of The Family.
35. Avery Gordon, "Feminism, Writing, and Ghosts," Social
Problems 37 (November 1990): 499.
36. The lecture series was sponsored by the Women's Studies
Program of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It resulted in
publication of Domna Stanton and Abigail Stewart, eds.,
Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1995). I am quoting language in the invitation to participate
in the conference "The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology
Reconsidered," convened by Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne at
UC Berkeley, February 1992.
37. Judith Stacey, "Backward to the Postmodern Family:
Reflections on Gender, Kinship, and Class in the Silicon Valley," in
Alan Wolfe, ed., America at Century's End (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p 23.
38. Judith Stacey, "Are Feminists Afraid to Leave Home?: The
Challenge of Conservative Profamily Feminism," in Juliet Mitchell
and Ann Oakley, eds., What Is Feminism?(London: Basil
Blackwell, 1986): pp. 219-248. This was an expanded version of
"The New Conservative Feminism," Feminist Studies 9 (fall 1983):
559-583.
 Page 151

Long and Winding Road

R. W. Connell
Social theory grows out of the material detail of life as much as it
comes from the abstracted conversation of theory-makers. And
theory must, in the end, return to everyday practice. The project
here is to explore the territory from starting points in personal
experience.
Being a foreigner and a man, I do not have the experiences that
most of the other authors in this book discuss. I do have a
relationship with their story: American feminism has been
important to me and to people with whom I have worked. The
narrative frame in which participants retell their struggle is not
available to someone who was not even in the country for most of
it. My story is necessarily about intersections, not continuities.
Making a virtue of necessity, I have borrowed from Australian
author Frank Moorhouse the idea of "discontinuous narrative" and
from British authors Carolyn Kay Steedman and David Jackson the
idea of an autobiographical documentation of gender that
repeatedly opens out a narrative for theoretical inspection. 1
An outsider nonnarrative is likely to highlight issues different from
those of an insider narrative. Two are, for me, unavoidable: the
significance of American corporate wealth and cultural power and
the personal and public response to feminism by men. Neither is
simple; I hope to document some of their crosscurrents.
These issues involve strong emotions, among them humiliation and
resentment, fear and admiration, pleasure and solidarity. Barbara
Laslett argues convincingly for giving full weight to emotions. But
how? The conventions of academic prose are designed to exclude
emotions, not convey them. I have therefore drawn freely on other
genres and techniques of writing.2
The story starts with my first encounter with North American
sociology about twenty-five years ago; goes on to Australian
universities, the growth of feminism there, and my adventures in a
new sociology department; moves to Europe and the international
publishing business; and returns to the North American academic
world in recent years.
Copyright © 1997 by R. W. Connell.
 Page 152

The Patriarch in the Woodwork

The scene is set at the end of the 1960s, at a Famous American
University, in the office of a Very Famous Scholar. Enter a young
man, just married, just off the plane from a distant country, just
done with a Ph.D. thesis. He is about to join the department as an
unpaid temporary postdoctoral fellow and find out what sociology
is like in one of its world centers. A legacy from a great-aunt has
funded an expedition by the couple to this side of the world. The
young woman will, as it turns out, keep the ship afloat for a year
doing clerical work at a consulate.
The Very Famous Scholar looks up from his correspondence, turns
from his desk, smiles, and reaches out his hand. The young man is
thrilled to shake it. The wood paneling, the leaded windows, the
ghosts of sociologists past, frame the moment. The Very Famous
Scholar kindly asks about intentions. The young man launches into
hopes and plans for the year. About three minutes into the
recitation, the Very Famous Scholar reaches a decision, swivels
back to his desk, and continues signing his correspondence.

Conferenceville
By Greyhound across the continent, to the annual meetings of two
associations. 3In 1970 only working-class people and students
travel by bus. The dirt and indifference of Greyhound terminals are
memorable. So is the dawn sunlight blazing on the mountains
behind Salt Lake City.
Friends among the graduate students have arranged a bed in the
city where the ASA conference is being held. So I know one or two
people there; and I have an Australian friend to meet who knows
his way around the radical student network. But the mass and
anonymity of the conference are overpowering. The entire
membership of the Sociological Association at home would fit into
one of this conferences parallel sessions. The corridors are
turbulent, full of business, none of which is my business.
I have bought a spiral-bound notebook and start filling it with field
notes. There are so many sociologists that they have to be
accommodated like a tourist invasion. So instead of the seedy
functionality of university classrooms where Australian conferences
are held, this one rejoices in the commercial splendor of a giant
hotel.
The busiest place in the conference is an enormous book bazaar.
Neatly dressed publishers' representatives stand around in little
booths trying to get their texts adopted in the sociologists' courses,
while the sociologists try to get the publishers interested in their
proposals for books. I get my first picture of the scale of
 Page 153
American publishing and the economic stakes in higher education
here. Some of the texts are familiar; the publishers also market
them at home.
I also get a glimpse of employment practices. In another large
room is the meat market. Hundreds of people are undergoing
public humiliation, advertising their need for a job, putting their
life courses on show in loose-leaf books for anyone to see.
The conference sessions themselves are a continuous display of
professional power and status. An interesting paper on a topic
close to my Ph.D. is delivered by a woman of about my age to an
audience of about seven. A panel including a masculine Name I
had heard even in Australia has a larger attendance, though I don't
know exactly how bigI can't get in the room; several hundred
people at least are there before me.
Commentary
The Very Famous Scholar, I thought at first, had simply decided I
was not going to be part of his clientele. I was neither his student
nor a resource for his research program. The insult was certainly a
display of academic power.
There was more, of course, not least the hegemony of the United
States. The term "hegemony" derives from the classical Greek term
for the leading state in a military coalition. At this time, the United
States was leading an alliance in Vietnam in which my country was
a minor participant, a fact of which the Very Famous Scholar was
certainly aware. This hegemony extended deep into academic life.
Indeed, that is why I was there and not sitting on a rock in the Blue
Mountains evolving an Australian sociology from my own inner
consciousness. The Very Famous Scholar was, as Louis Althusser
had put it not long before, merely the bearer of a structure.
More exactly, structuresthough this took me longer to see. The
scene would not have played the same way if the Very Famous
Scholar had been a woman. Or, probably, if I had been. The
authority on display amid the polished wood, and the way it was
exerted, had a lot to do with gender.
So did the collective processes of the annual meeting. The Names
competing for prestige were masculine. The profoundly alienated,
market structure of the conference as an institutionnotionally an
occasion for the sharing of scientific knowledgereflected a public
world predicated on the gender division of labor, and massively
dominated by men. I know now that a feminist movement was
developing in the ASA, but I did not know it then. The first
meeting of Sydney Women's Liberation had been called just before
we left on the flight to the United States.
 Page 154
But there was something more, which took even longer to see. If
the Very Famous Scholar was bearing a structure that day, so was I.
The nervous young man was also a competitor in the struggle for
gendered authority, and the Very Famous Scholar was doubtless
bright enough to see that and a whole lot more experienced at its
moves.
If I was one of seven at my comrade's paper, I was also one of
hundreds turning up to hear the Name. Reeling around the carpeted
corridors of the Sociology Hilton, I, too, was a beneficiary of the
gender order that underpinned its glittering horror. My wife was
working for me to be there.
There is truth in Dorothy Smith's account of the academic world as
a sector of a patriarchal power structure producing abstracted
knowledge through texts that substitute for concrete knowledge. 4
Yet her imagery is all too mild to capture the lunatic divisiveness of
that world and the tangled dynamics producing academic
masculinities as ways of surviving and operating in it.
My path into academic jobs involved learning certain gendered
practices (such as ferocious concentration on writing tasks at the
expense of human relationships) and rejecting others (including
such conventional masculine items as enthusiasm for sport and
sexual aggressiveness). In the context of a higher education boom,
I was rapidly appointed to senior positions. The trip to the United
States and some publications in American journals were no small
part of my qualifications.
Senior appointments gave access to some resources needed by a
movement to democratize higher education. We thought of it at the
time as creating liberated zones in universities. I was, I think, the
first New Left professor (i.e., head of department) in Australia,
acutely conscious of being on the establishment's ground and wary
of cooptation. Both my access and my resistance were gendered.5 I
was fighting against hegemonic masculinity at the same time as I
deployed its techniques. I think this gained me a reputation for
eccentricity, if not psychopathology: oddly dressed, long in the
hair, humorless, by turns quiet and abrasive. In the mid-1970s this
trajectory was complicated, but also clarified, by the growth of
Australian feminism.
Learning
It is 1974, at the conference of another venerable institution run by
men, the Australian and New Zealand Association for the
Advancement of Science (ANZAAS). Feminism is gaining footholds
in the academic world, and here is
 Page 155
one. A program of sessions on ''the Australian family" has been
organized by Madge Dawson. The topic sounds traditional; the
content is not. It includes countercultural, gay, and feminist
critiques of the family.
The lineup of speakers is diverse. I am one, equipped with a not-
very-diverse paper, a quantitative report on sex differences in
adolescence wittily called "You Can't Tell Them Apart Nowadays,
Can You?" My statistics echo back off the walls of the University of
New South Wales, formerly University of Technology, with
architecture to match.
There is no flood of requests for copies. Nevertheless, the paper
becomes part of Madge's second coup: a special issue of the
ANZAAS journal Search, usually packed with geomorphology and
rabbit virology. Not only does the symposium turn into a special
issue, but also the special issue turns into a book. Interest in
gender questions is building.
Madge is one of a group of women, older than the Women's
Liberation activists, who have been very important in getting
feminist concerns onto academic agendas. Madge published the
first study of the position of women vis-a-vis Australian higher
education, Graduate and Married. This book was the product of
collaborative work by a group of women in Madge's adult
education class, a precursor of many later discussions of feminist
research methods. 6I met her through the peace movement and the
Labor Party. I learned from her some important lessons about how
tolerance and tough-mindedness, good humor and militancy, might
be combined.
By the early 1980s, feminism was the leading intellectual force in
Australian sociology-ignored by some established men, resisted by
others, yet plainly the liveliest area of research, publication, and
student interest, and finding support from women and men in
almost every sociology department. The person who probably did
most to make this possible was someone not conspicuously a
feminist, Jean Martin. She was the best sociologist in the country in
the decades when Australian academic sociology was being
established, and she set up the largest department. Although her
writing was mainly about community and migration, a thread of
argument about family relationships and women's influence ran
through it from the 1950s onward.7 Toward the end of her life, she
was explicitly researching the social position of women, and she
inspired a great deal of research by other women.
I met her only a few times. The earliest was when I was an
undergraduate history student. Jean Martin was the first live
sociologist I had seen, and I asked her for a list of books to read. I
thought that, unlike the history I was learning, sociology might say
something of relevance. I don't have her list any more, but I
remember that it emphasized field research and was mostly
American.
 Page 156

The Patriarch in the Abattoir

With the new chair, which I took up in 1976, some resources could
be expected from the university's normal staffing processes. Several
feminist courses had recently started in other departments on
campus, mostly operating on a shoestring budget. Resources for
feminist teaching and research would leap if we directed some of
sociology's expected growth into the area of sexual politics. The
question was how best to do it.
So perhaps twenty-five people sat around the walls of an upstairs
meeting room in the Behavioural Sciences building, newest of the
concrete bunkers from which Australian higher education defied
the world. From one window we could see the Harbour Bridge
across seven miles and a thousand gum trees; from another we
could see a big wattle tree that exploded each year in golden
flower. Amid this patriotic riot wemostly women, both students and
academic staff from half a dozen departmentsdebated with a good
deal of vigor and humor the options of a broader interdisciplinary
program or a narrower but deeper concentration within the
sociology discipline. We eventually decided to put our new
resources into the latter. A decisive argument came from women in
other departments who did not want the men in their areas,
beginning to feel pressure to include material about women in their
"mainstream" courses, to be let off the hook.
So gender and sexuality were defined as one of the core areas for
the new sociology program, and I drafted up course proposals and
staffing requests. Which in good academic time were approved.
Within a few years a group of academics concerned with gender
and sexuality had formed. There were a research program, a group
of graduate students, and a flow of publications.
The irony of a male head of department pursuing a feminist agenda
was not lost on my fellow patriarchs in the professoriate, or on my
colleagues in the department, or on the students. For the most part,
the situation was a source of energy; I felt supported, and I was
able to support. But there were built-in tensions. It was not a happy
coincidence that I was assigned by the departmental meeting to
teach the course that centered on feminist theories of patriarchy
(its usual convenor being on leave) at the time a separatist current
was strengthening in Australian feminism.
I tried to run the course as a lectureless, self-managed forum where
ideas could be pooled, joint research and reading planned, and
conceptions of patriarchy debated, without an agenda predefined
by me. The department at that time made regular staff-student
reviews of each course after it had run. We sat in a dark downstairs
room, and for the two meetings and several hours we spent
reviewing my course, the place felt like an abattoir
Some (at least) of the students said that they had been let down by
the
 Page 157
course. Some said its structurelessness involved an abuse of power.
It is generally difficult for students to criticize the professor; and
when I argued against the criticisms, it seemed like further abuse. I
don't pretend to give an impartial account of this; the memory is
very painful. Perhaps the most interesting criticism was that by not
giving a course of lectures, I had withheld knowledge and thus
preserved patriarchal power. For my part, I felt that certain things
being said were false, others distorted. I felt for the first time under
factional attack, and it seemed as if in the final analysis I was
being carved up for being the wrong gender The other academic
members of the department were divided by conflicting
commitments and loyalties. Some put a lot of energy and kindness
into trying to mend the situation. The aftertaste was still bitter for
me. An agreement was reached, then not fully observed. In
following years the department made sure I was not called on to
chair that course again. And I don't think I have ever taken such
risks again in teaching.
Some of my students in another course about this time decided that
for their collective research project they would interview men in
their lives and around campus. It was the first research project on
masculinity I had anything to do with, maybe the first in the
country. All members of the group were women.
Commentary
Other essays in this volume have spoken of pioneers and mentors.
Older women serve as models and mentors not only for younger
women. In a paper about young men involved in Green politics
who were trying to reform masculinity, I remarked that most of
them had formative encounters with women's strength, 8 and I
guess I was unconsciously referring to myself as well.
The point may apply more broadly. The current strength of
feminism in Australian sociology is partly an outcome of the
alliances women have been able to make. These historically were
partly determined by the influence on men of women such as Jean
Martin, Madge Dawson, and Jean Blackburn. (Jean Blackburn, an
architect of Australian educational reform, among other things,
coauthored a 1963 study, Australian Wives Today, and the very
influential 1975 national report Girls, School, and Society.)9
Such alliances may not be comfortable for either side. Being a male
friend of feminism (in Australia, unlike the United States, one does
not speak of men as feminists) is a contradictory situation; tension
can be expected. As a minor example, a man in this situation gets
to hear many expressions of casual, and sometimes not so casual,
hostility toward men in general, including the penis jokes
mentioned by Gary Dowsett.10 The clash
 Page 158
that developed around my teaching was not exceptional, though, of
course, it had its specific local causes. Difficulties of that kind,
with a fair chance of emotional injury, can be expected whenever
there is sustained involvement of men with feminist projects.
Nor is there a simple way around or through these
contradictionsexcept giving up the attempt to make an alliance
work. The pleasures of separatism for men have now been
discovered by the followers of Robert Bly, the author of Iron John,
and other leaders of the masculinity cults that developed in the
1980s out of men's consciousness-raising groups, New Age culture,
and Jungian therapy. All-male gatherings, "warrior weekends," and
reconstituted initiation rituals among men are central to their search
for the "deep masculine"an entity that, however powerful and
shaggy, seems too shy to emerge in the presence of women. 11
Engagement is much more demanding, but it is possible. Alliances
can be sustained, despite the inevitable tensions and injuries,
wherever there are shared commitments. Such commitments most
commonly rest on principles with a certain universalitythe cause of
humanity, the principle of justice, the goal of equality
Ironically, radical theory over the last thirty years has put a lot of
energy into dismantling principles of this kind: from the
Althusserian denunciation of humanism, to the postmodern scorn
for grand narratives and the poststructuralist valorization of
difference. Radical identity politics hopes to overcome division by
generating coalitions, and rainbow coalitions have certainly been
formed. But what will hold people in those coalitions when they
meet rocks in the road? We will need unconditional commitments.
We will need theorizing that moves across boundaries and between
standpoints and even finds, like Pauline Johnson's Feminism as
Radical Humanism, unexpected common ground.12

The Materiality of Theory

I am sitting in a small room at the back of a brick house in south
London, looking at a row of brick houses across a row of
backyards, some with dogs that do not observe curfew. We are
living with a close friend who has been fighting for women's
interests in British trade unions, a long and grinding struggle. For
globe-trotting intellectuals, London is the place to be in 1984: a
woman prime minister is in power; the miners are on strike. It is
the year of George Orwell, the year our daughter is born, the year
of writing Gender and Power.13
Literally writing, with a pen. I have a sensuous relationship with
the text flowing slowly onto the page, not just a cerebral one; a
relationship compounded
 Page 159
of body, clothes, chair, ink, paper spread on the table, stillness of
the room, light falling from the window, scurries in the backyards.
These physical matters seem to be part of the way ideas solidify
and sharpen, the way prose gets shaped.
The baby is involved with this text-making, sharing a lot of it
asleep in a carry cot on the floor behind me. She gradually swims
up to the top end and gets stuck with her head in a corner, at which
point her grunts and gurgles change tone, I get up and lift her back
to the bottom, and she starts the journey again. Sometimes the
grunts turn to grousing, a familiar aroma steals across the room,
and it is time for a paragraph break.
I mostly do the midnight feed, which gives Pam the chance of a
solid sleep and me an excuse to be up late. I like writing at
midnight. With the house still, and no lights on but the desk lamp
(bad for the eyes!), I seem to be in the middle of a vast, dark space
stretching out in all directions to the stars and nebulae. The only
things sounding in it are the words I write and the grunted
comments of the next generation.

Men's Studies
The world turns; Gender and Power is published; other comments
appear. There are twenty-seven reviews that I know of, from New
Zealand to Finland. What is most striking is the difficulty many
journals and reviewers have in categorizing the book. Can't be
social theory because it's not about Marx and Weber. Can't be
women's studies because it's written by a man. Must be jelly 'cause
jam don't shake like that.
Seven journals work out a solution that completely throws me when
I see the first reviews. Because it's about gender, and because it's
by a man, it must be men's studies. (True, it does contain three
pages setting out a condensed model of masculinity.) So Gender
and Power is rolled into review essays covering a bunch of Books
About Men, or samples of The New Men's Studies, as a sardonic
feminist reviewer puts it. 14 I have not felt so firmly positioned
since the days when reviewers decided that because I wrote about
class, I must be a Marxist.
Feminist teachers prove to be more interested than feminist editors.
The book comes to be used as a text in a number of courses, and
the publishers have recently shown me the list to help me in
thinking about a second edition. Most are in women's studies
programs.
Commentary
Although men come to support feminism for a great variety of
reasons, in most cases of which I know, personal relationships with
women have been important. Few men, gay or straight, have no
close ties to women. Often
 Page 160
men have dense networks of ties to mothers, daughters, wives,
lovers, sisters, grandmothers, nieces, coworkers, neighbors, and
friends. There are interests and motives in abundance here. For
instance, I have a fairly close relationship with our daughter, and
however well or badly I manage it, this relationship defines a
political interest. I want a world that will give her the respect and
resources it will give the sons of our friends living across the road.
To produce that world means supporting feminism. The arithmetic
is not very difficult.
As with a good many other Australian intellectuals, my earliest
political commitment was to the labor movement and socialism.
The kind of socialism I learned from my mother and father, from
Labor Party members such as Madge Dawson, and from reading
(George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia especially) was about
equality, courtesy, respect, and human solidarity rather than about
modes of production and commentaries on Capital. It still seems to
me that a commitment to equality is the litmus test in politics.
Given this beginning, it is not hard to see the next step when the
facts of gender inequality and the abuse of women are, to use a title
of Orwell's, "In Front of Your Nose." 15 They were in front of my
nose because I loved, lived with, and worked with feminist women.
I have done my best to put the same facts in front of a lot of other
men's noses.
The proboscis theory of men's support for feminism has one great
flaw: it presupposes that they are willing to read. Orwell's point
was precisely that people often are not. Hegemonic masculinity and
patriarchal ideology provide a whole repertoire of routines for
evading the obvious in gender relations. Here are a few: declaring
gender inequality a fact of nature (helped on by sociobiologists);
exaggerating the gains made by women (helped on by "PC"
backlash campaigns); exaggerating the woes of men (helped on by
Bly); mobilizing homophobia (on the principle that any man who
sympathizes with women must be a fagnote how the Religious
Right, in retreat on abortion, is targeting gays with new vigor);
projecting onto minorities (helped on by raciststhe current
demonizing of immigrants and "violent criminals" in the United
States is striking).
In this field of ideological struggle, there is plenty of work for men
as well as for women. No applicant will be turned away.
The success of patriarchal ideology depends not only on how
vigorously it is contested in public, but also on how receptive or
resistant people are in their personal lives. I doubt we will ever see
capitalist patriarchy overthrown by revolutionary masses led by
drag queens in quite the way projected by Italian gay theorist
Mario Mieli.16 But we do need to look closely
 Page 161
at the fissures, tensions, and contradictions in gender, and at the
occasions and potentials they offer for political action.
So far as concerns men, this is now happening in the research on
masculinity that has multiplied, and strikingly improved in quality,
in the last few years. I have put energy into this work, and have
done my best to help other men, and women, engaged in it. This
research has begun to feed into practice, for instance, in work
against rape and domestic violence, in education, and in relation to
AIDS. The applications are still on a small scale, but the demand
for ideas is certainly there, and I think this activity will grow. The
need is so clear that I have grown a little more sympathetic to the
idea of "men's studies"which at first appalled me and still worries
meto the extent that it provides a venue for this kind of strategic
research.

Back in the ASA

Another tourist palace, glittering even harder as we approach the
end of Reagan's administration. This time I am present by official
invitation, to take part in a thematic session about gender in
American sociology. I am not exactly a Name, but at least an
Object of Interest, possessor of a strange accent and exotic
footnotes, as well as being a man doing gender I feel like an
ambassador from Mars. This is silly. A number of people here are
familiar with my work, and that is why I have been invited.
The room where the panel is to speak seems dark (all my memories
of ASA annual meetings seem to involve dark interior spaces; Erik
Erikson would love them). It is full to overflowing; I hear that sex
and gender is the most buoyant area of the ASA's membership, and
this certainly looks like it. About nine-tenths of those in the room
are women.
The presentations are followed closely by the audience. I do my bit
about American sociology and my bit for Australian sociology,
passing out reading lists of Australian work in the area and
inviting people to get in touch to be networked. The session ends,
the people swirl out into the corridor, and this time I am full of
business.
Later in the conference, as a thematic session presenter and foreign
guest, I am invited to a presidential reception in a hospitality suite
of the hotel. I sit on the bed in my room on the fourteenth-floor-
that-is-really-the-thirteenth, looking out over the urban core of
Atlanta (a cluster of high-rise banks and hotels oddly resembling a
fleet of spaceships), and have a crisis of my New Left conscience.
Should I go? Do I join the Names and finally abandon the People?
Is this my final selloutnot even for thirty pieces of silver, just
eighteen pages in the presidential
 Page 162
Book of the Conference? Well after the time for the reception to
start, I convince myself I ought to go, if only to be Ambassador
from Mars. So I set off, dressed as little like a banker as possible.
The reception is in another dark place. The room seems to shimmer
with a gray mist. Through it I can make out Names in silvery suits,
scores of them, and they are the same Names as twenty years ago,
but somehow changed, paler and more lined. They all seem to
know each other and are talking quietly but determinedly. Most of
the women present are wearing another kind of costume, move
deftly through the mist, and offer drugs to all who come. I am
courteously introduced to the association's senior officers, inquire
about its finances, am waltzed into a technical discussion of
conference fund-raising behind the cheese plate. The mist thickens,
the voices rise. My panic threshold is reached and I shake hands
and run for it.
Boardrooms
The paper did appear in the Book of the Conference. 17 I admired
the president then, and admire him still. Not all of the people at the
reception were Names; not all of them were men. Most of the
academic women did, however, wear suits, in semiotic opposition
to the maids.
Months after that reception, I sat in an elegant room in another
American city at a lunchtime feminist seminar where a
considerable weight of jewelry was present. Its main element was
gold.
Commentary
American sociology has declined in size, and perhaps in influence,
since the 1970s;18 but it remains the most wealthy and powerful
body of sociologists in the world. My second conference
experience was as clear on that point as the first. Sociology is
better entrenched institutionally in the United States than in
countries like Australia. And it is far more settled in its ways, fully
equipped with origin myths, heroes, sacred sites, canonical texts,
and ritual disputes. Feminist revolutionaries face a tougher
proposition here than in many other places.
The feminist presence at this annual meeting, then, registers a
considerable success. Women are much more visible in the
organization, every major publisher's booth has its women's studies
list, and the conference agenda gives ample space to gender and
sexual politics. Sociology here and now is a venue for women's
experiences, for truths about sexuality and inequality, in a way it
certainly was not a generation ago. Moreover, the
 Page 163
success of American academic feminism becomes a resource in
other countries. The cultural and economic power of the United
States helps legitimate feminist work there; American feminism
means literature, models, and sometimes direct personal support for
feminism in other parts of the world.
Intellectual influence on the men in the metropole, however, is
more elusive. In this respect the revolution is still missing. Most
men attending the annual meeting do not come to the sessions on
gender. Most theory sessions trundle down the old tracks.
American sociology long ago found it could deflect critique by
defining each criticism as a new specialty This mechanism is
clearly operating to contain feminism.
Perhaps, too, the seductions of power operate more intensely here
in the imperial center than in a small university system in the
colonies. As American feminism has won battles, accumulated
resources, and pressed on into the academic establishment, it has
begun to take on more of the coloration of the American ruling
class. Beyond radical and liberal and socialist and cultural
feminisms, we seem to be getting corporate feminism.
Listening to the gold jewelry, I realized I was now sitting square in
the middle of the privilege that the labor movement had been
formed to fight against. Twenty years ago I was demonstrating in
the streets against this. Other people in that room had done the
same. I do wonder about the meaning of the current turn of theory
away from material inequalities and toward complexities of
language, relativist epistemologies, and issues of identity, as the
movement enters the house of power.
Notes
1. Frank Moorhouse, The Americans, Baby: A Discontinuous
Narrative of Stories and Fragments (Sydney: Angus and
Robertson, 1972); Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good
Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986); David
Jackson, Unmasking Masculinity: A Critical Autobiography
(London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
2. Among my sources are "memory work," in June Crawford,
Susan Kippax, Jenny Onyx, Una Gault, and Pam Benton, Emotion
and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory (London: Sage,
1992); and prose techniques borrowed (with trepidation) from
James Joyce and Patrick White.
3. The title of this section is, with a tip of the Akubra hat to Frank
Moorhouse, Conference-Ville (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1976).
4. Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A
Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1990).
5. My access also involved class and ethnic privilege; I came from
the Australian-born Anglophone professional bourgeoisie, had an
elite education, and had enough money to launch the trip to the
United States.
 Page 164
6. Madge Dawson, Graduate and Married (Sydney: Department of
Adult Education, University of Sydney, 1965); Madge Dawson,
ed., Australian Families (Australian and New Zealand Association
for the Advancement of Science, 1975).
7. Perhaps her finest work was Jean 1. Martin, Refugee Settlers
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1965).
8. Robert W Connell, "A Whole New World: Remaking
Masculinity in the Context of the Environmental Movement,"
Gender and Society 4 (1990): 461.
9. Australian Schools Commission, Girls, School, and Society
(Canberra: Schools Commission, 1975).
10. Gary Dowsett, I'll Show You Mine, if You'll Show Me Yours:
Gay Men, Masculinity Research, Men's Studies, and Sex," Theory
and Society 22 (1993): 70.
11. For fuller discussion of this movement and its context in
masculinity politics, see R. W Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
12. Pauline Johnson, Feminism as Radical Humanism (Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 1994).
13. R. W Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and
Sexual Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987).
14. Christine Griffen, review of The Making of Masculinities,
Changing Men,and Gender and Power, Feminist Review 33 (1989):
103-105.
15. George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose," in Collected Essays:
Journalism and Letters, vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),
pp. 150-154.I am not implying that Orwell was any supporter of
feminism! Quite the reverse was true.
16. Mario Mieli, Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay
Critique (London: Gay Men's Press, 1980).
17. R. W Connell, "The Wrong Stuff: Reflections on the Place of
Gender in American Sociology," and "Notes on American
Sociology and American Power," in Herbert J. Gans, ed., Sociology
in America (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), pp. 155-166, 265-
271.
18. Enrollment statistics for undergraduate majors and Ph.D.s were
compiled by the national office of the ASA.
 Page 165

Brave New Sociology? Elsie Clews Parsons and Me

Desley Deacon
Diana Trilling, in an extraordinary passage in her recent
autobiography, writes of her childhood in New York in the early
part of this century that ''fear is the emotion I remember best." "I
grew up in a fear culture," she goes on.
Here are some of the things of which I and the grown-ups around me
were afraid: lightning, thunder, wind, heavy snow, driving cars,
driving in cars, horses, snakes, worms, germs, poisonous plants and
berries, electrical appliances, gas and gas fixtures, fire, cows, bulls,
all boats including rowboats, swamps, quicksand, flies, mosquitos,
bees, Greek ice cream parlors, bats, mold, rust, gangrene, spiders,
caterpillars, strange cats and dogs, mice, rats of course, canned goods,
bad fish, damp, drafts, whooping cough, blood poisoning, influenza,
infantile paralysis, ruptured appendices, syphilis, other people's
towels or tubs or toilet seats (much the same as syphilis), subways,
bananas, tomatoes, oranges, oysters, fruit pits, and medicine taken
even once in excess of a prescription, any two medicines taken in
conjunction, foods in unusual combination with other foods, deep
water, undertow, waves, leeches, toads, eels, dyes, hospitals, insanity,
imbecility, brain fever, pinkeye, ghosts and ghost stories, cemeteries,
Saint Vitus' dance, the poorhouse, lockjaw, rabies, heredity, sunstroke,
trains, gypsies, beggars, intermarriage, leprosy, lice, nits, pimples
(related to syphilis), anything swallowed without sufficient chewing,
ice water, the dark, burglars. I put last what was the most embracing
of my fears: burglars. Burglars were anything that menaced me in the
dark or when I was alone.
"Fear is at present out of fashion," Trilling goes on to observe; "it
has been largely replaced by anxiety. I am constantly surprised by
the fearlessness of
Copyright © 1997 by Desley Deacon.
 Page 166
people today, especially young women; they move about as if the
world held no terrors for them." For Trilling, fear had a certitude
about it: fear is "something specific which proposes, if not always
reliably, the existence of a cure." But anxiety is "more diffuse and
seldom offers a cure or escape." Anxiety is something to be
managed, lived with, while fear leads only to negative action that
keeps people in their place: ''If I am afraid of deep water, I can stay
on shore; if I am afraid of snakes, I can avoid the places where they
are known to congregate." 1
Alongside her bundle of fears, Trilling also felt an intense longing
"for someone or something which could not be named, a
transcendence, I suppose, of my capacity and
experience."2Tragically, the tension between this longing to move
beyond her circumscribed experience and her fear of the forbidden
and dangerous led to the paralysis of agoraphobia for much of her
young married life.
Trilling's list would not look very different from the things I was
supposed to be frightened of as a child growing up in Australia in
the 1950s. I would add some sexual fears: of washing my hair
while menstruating, of not being popular with boys, of becoming
pregnant out of wedlock, of being too thin (yes!), of being too
clever; but Trilling's text suggests that these could well have been
added to her list. I would also add some political ones: communism
and Asia, with its falling dominoes. These barely hovered on the
periphery of my secure childhood, but they manifested themselves
in the adult community around me in a suspicion of anyone
foreign, particularly the "Balts" (an all-encompassing term for the
refugees from Eastern Europe who had to earn their right to live in
the land of the free with two years' labor on the roads), the "Dagos"
(the Italian immigrants we allowed the privilege of working in our
new manufacturing industries), and even the "Poms" (British
immigrants, who unfortunately had a propensity to "whinge" and
want to return home).3
What the United States in 1910 and Australia in 1950 had in
common was that they were self-satisfied, rule-bound societies,
confident that they had found the key to prosperity and progress.
The message they tried to pass on to the next generation was that
you were safe as long as you stayed within the boundaries they set;
but if you ventured into the deep water, into the places where the
snakes congregated, or into the dark, or if you ventured out alone,
you were in dangerous territory. At the same time, the United
States of the 1910s and Australia of the 1950s were societies in the
process of swift and dramatic social change, as evidenced by the
presence of the Balts, Dagos, and Poms in my Australian
childhood. In the United States, Trilling could sense the
possibilities for new experience and new
 Page 167
rules that these changes brought with them; but her childhood
experiences and the new certainties of 1930s prevented her from
exploring them. My own childhood in rural Australia gave me a
sturdier sense of efficacy and a greater disdain for certainties that
experience showed me were false. When snakes were swiftly
dispatched by my mother and darkness and unlocked doors were
my only experience of night and strangers, I could readily be
skeptical of the other fears as well. I was also luckier than Trilling
in my times. As a "clever" girl with only a minimal desire to
conform to the old rules, I found the doors of newly expanded
universities opening in front of me and employers newly anxious
for educated workers competing for their first female employees.
With little effort on my part, I became a pioneerthe first woman
employed in my particular government agency, the first to be
groomed for high-level policy work, the first to be married, the first
to be nine months pregnant at the office, the first working mother.
Yet I found myself completely unprepared for the opportunities that
opened up to me; and that world was completely unprepared for
me. I was surrounded by competent women as a child and was by
far the most able student at my small rural school. But there were
invisible rules about how that competence could be applied that
made no sense to me. These rules lay very lightly on me as a child.
After all, in a school of seventy pupils it is hard to put two cricket
teams together if you exclude the girls. When I first encountered
the rules in their explicit, organized form at boarding school at the
age of fourteen, I was incredulous; and I am still bitter at the totally
inappropriate ideological training that school provided. Only my
own sense that my "brains" gave me alternatives pushed me on to
university, while all my friends got married or started to save for
trips overseas, the Australian girl's standard prelude to "settling
down."
I had no idea what to do with my university education. Books had
been the only key to interpreting the social rules I found so curious,
so I decided to study English; and a counselor suggested I do
honors, an elite stream that involved a fourth year and a thesis. I
did not know at that time that this was the all-important gateway to
graduate work. I found English totally foolish. Its formalistic
approach and its emphasis on disembodied creativity in no way
satisfied my desire to understand social life, and it was not until I
discovered sociology a decade later that I recognized what I had
been looking for in those four sterile years. But I did well, even in
politics, where my complete ignorance was rewarded with an
A,while my politically active male friends gained Cs. (This made
no difference for the men. One of these is now minister for
education in the state government, and the other is a millionaire
corporate lawyer.)
 Page 168
When I graduated, I was sought after by a number of prospective
employers and chose to join a new training program for top-flight
policy work in the federal civil service. Again, I had no idea of
how to make use of this opportunity. Nor did the well-intentioned
men who hired and were supposed to be training me. We all carried
the baggage of stereotypes about what women should and should
not do. This was accentuated by the absurd situation we were in
institutionally. Under the laws that governed the civil service,
married women could not be employed, and women who married
had to resign. Like every woman of the mid-1960s, I was
determined to get married. When I did marry a year after I was
recruited, I continued as a "temporary" until I went overseas with
my diplomat husband. The law changed while I was abroad, and
my male colleagues, unfailingly affectionate and accommodating,
always had a job ready for me when we returned from overseas
postings; and they could not have been more supportive after my
first son was born. But my "brilliant career" was never anything but
a job, and I was never anything but a well-treated "pet." (Rosabeth
Moss Kanter's Men and Women of the Corporation captures my
experience brilliantly and is still one of my favorite pieces of
feminist sociology.) 4
I did not have a word for what I was in the 1960s. I thought of
myself as unusual, deviant in some sort of commendable but
uncomfortable way; my father thought me misguided; my
husband's colleagues, in what must be one of the most intractable
institutions of allthe diplomatic service thought me uncooperative.
We were abroad for much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I
missed the formative bonding experiences of my generation: the
movement opposing the Vietnam War and the enthusiasm for a
New Left emancipatory Marxism/socialism that often went with it.
I read Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in medieval Malta in
1971 with a shock of recognition; but I was totally unprepared for
the change that had taken place in Australian society when I
returned in 1973. It was as if the whole world had been taken over
by people just like me. I was soon absorbed into the feminist
movement and for the first time began to find a language to speak
about my own experience. The pleasurable feeling of having
comrades-in-arms was an important part of the exhilaration of that
period. But feminism to me was always a movement to allow
women to be different in whatever way they wanted to be, to
jettison the old rules, and to rid ourselves and others of the old
fears and stereotypes.5
It was during this exhilarating and unsettling period that I was
introduced to sociology. We had returned from a short and very
unhappy posting in Saigon, from which my two small sons and I
were evacuated in April
 Page 169
1975 by air force Hercules aircraft. I was in despair about my life
as a diplomatic wife, and my civil service "career" had finally
fizzled out. I was hired for my knowledge of the local political-
bureaucratic scene by an American sociologist at the Research
School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University
who was carrying out a major study of Australian elites. I loved
sociology from the start. It dealt with the questions I had been
asking all my life, and like feminism, it gave me a vocabulary that
helped make sense of my experience. I rapidly absorbed the new
feminist sociology, anthropology, and history. 6
By the time Elites in Australia was finished, I had decided to go on
to graduate school. In the Australian system, graduate students are
expected to come adequately prepared by a first-class honor's
degree to plunge straight into their dissertations. There are no
graduate courses, and the candidate spends three years writing what
is expected to be a major piece of work under the supervision of
only one member of faculty. My coauthorship of Elites in Australia
and two undergraduate classes in sociology were considered
adequate preparation for this rite of passage. Luckily, I was
appointed as tutor in the department at the same time, and I was
able to complete my education in sociology on the job.7
This unconventional path to sociology meant that I was totally
unsocialized into what was in Australia a new and very inchoate
discipline divided between an abstracted empiricism imported from
the United States and an indigenous New Left/feminist wing of
whom Bob Connell was the undisputed leader. My dissertation was
supervised by a male colleague and friend (there were no women in
the department), who brought his considerable critical acumen to
the task but knew nothing at all about my topic. My most important
audience was my peers. Apart from my fellow (male) tutors, who
were sympathetic and generally involved in New Left projects, this
was an interdisciplinary network of young and enthusiastic feminist
scholars on my own campus and around the country who rapidly
came to know one another.8
I have always been grateful for the creative marginality this
situation gave me. It allowed me to become a historian, as well as a
sociologist, and to find a methodology and theoretical position that
emerged from my own experience of the data. Two moments stand
out from the learning process that was my dissertation. The first
happened very early on and was decisive in determining the
direction of my work. I was putting together some basic
background material for what was to be a study of contemporary
women in managerial work inspired by Rosabeth Kanter. Looking
up the late-nineteenth-century occupational censuses to get a
timeline, I began to
 Page 170
notice anomalies. I read the footnotes to the tables and then the
explanatory text. What I discovered was that New South Wales
government statistician Timothy Coghlan had radically changed the
definition of women's work in 1891 and revised the figures from
previous censuses to match. Then a young "water walker"to use
Kanter's delightful phraseCoghlan had gone on to write the
standard economic history of the period, and his figures and his
vision of women's place had become the received wisdom about
women "never working" that had hovered over my early life and
career. Curiously, this discovery led me back to that bizarre
"marriage bar" that had blighted my early career, for Coghlan
turned out to be the architect of that policy, which one of his cohort
of Young Turks then brought into the federal civil service. These
series of revelations about an innovating intellectual and his cohort
crystallized my interest in the social construction of knowledge
about gender and the role of state institutions in disseminating
these ideologies. Above all, however, the story of Coghlan and his
cohort focused my attention on the human agency, ambitions, and
desires that constructed what were then usually referred to in
monolithic terms as "the state'' and "the new middle class." 9
The second moment occurred much later in the project. I had
already labeled Coghlan definitively as the sociological version of
a male chauvinist pig when I came across a warmly worded letter
from the leading feminist of the period thanking him for all the
work he had done for women. When I got over my shock, I
returned to the data and found a much more complex picture of his
motivations and the gender order of the period than I had
previously seen. This jolt to my own assumptions led me to the
more nuanced and historically specific view of masculinity that the
dissertation finally conveyed.10
I concluded this study of the gender order, the state, and the new
middle class with a profound sense of the precariousness of the
social order, its constant construction and reconstruction through
the wills and desires of its members, its discontinuities, and its
variability. In other words, I had found none of the predictability
and certainty that my 1950s upbringing had tried to convince me
of. I also came away with a fascination with biography, the life
history of exemplary figures, such as Coghlan, who seem to
embody the experiences and choices of a generation and in the
process manage to invent the future.

Mydissertation was immediately accepted for publication when I

finished it in 1986, and it was published in 1989 as Managing
Gender: The State, the New Middle Class, and Women Workers,
1830-1930.
 Page 171
By this time, however, I had moved to the United States to marry
the senior sociologist I had worked with in Australia, and I had
discovered the limits of marginality As an Australian teaching in an
American studies program and a sociologist working among
colleagues trained in the humanities, a foreign scholar finding her
way in a new invisible college, and a mother, daughter, sister, and
friend living an ocean away from family and longtime companions,
I found myself longing for the first time for certainty and stability
and anguishing over the discontinuities and disloyalties of my life.
My "traitorous location" suddenly and unexpectedly became a
burden to me that I have often wished desperately to rid myself of.
11

My companion through these travails has been Elsie Clews

Parsons. I first met Parsons on the cover of Rosalind Rosenberg's
Beyond Separate Spheres in 1982. I was drawn to her image like
iron filings to a magnet before I knew anything more about her.
Her cool, level gaze; her exquisite dress, which I now know
probably came from Worth; andmore than anythingthe baby on her
lap spoke to me across the gap of eighty years and many more
geographical miles. I could see immediately that she was a pioneer
of new gender arrangements because professional women at the
turn of the century did not usually marry and have children. When I
read Rosenberg's chapter on Parsons, I was pleased to find that she
had been a sociologist, one of the first to get a Ph.D., from
Columbia University in 1899; that she had taught at Columbia
through two pregnancies; that she had been the mother of four
children; and that she had become a very successful anthropologist
and the first female president of the American Anthropological
Association. At a time when I was launching myself as a
sociologist, and was myself the mother of two young boys, I felt as
if I had gained a new colleague. When my new trajectory took me
to an American studies department in the United States as a
feminist historical sociologist of knowledge, it was almost
inevitable that I should write about her. Ever since I had discovered
the pivotal role of Timothy Coghlan in my book on gender and the
state, I had been interested in using biography to explore the
exceptional person who is, as we so inadequately put it, "before his
or her time." "No one is ahead of his time," Parsons's contemporary
Gertrude Stein pointed out, ''it is only that the particular variety of
creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are
creating their own time refuse to accept. . . . That is the reason why
the creator of the new composition . . . is an outlaw until he is a
classic." Biography allows the sociologist to see the outlaw in
relation to her times; and I badly wanted to understand how an
outlaw manages to persist in creating in the face of her
contemporaries' refusals.12
 Page 172
As I became more involved in Parsons's life, I became aware of the
emotional struggles that lay behind her successful career. As a
sociologist of knowledge, I was particularly interested in the way
those struggles forced her to think through and articulate the
theoretical positions that underpinned her intellectual and personal
life. What interested me was how Parsons dealt with being a
woman living in the shadow of the certaintiesand fearsof the late
nineteenth century. Eerily, her battles seemed to echo my own
belated reckoning with my legacy of the 1950s. And what
heartened me was the serenity with which she persisted, once she
had worked through her anguish, in a life deliberately based on
uncertainty. In a period of intense personal and professional soul-
searching, she became my companion and guide.

Elsie Clews Parsons was born into a wealthy New York family in
1874, the same year as Gertrude Stein, whose life history paralleled
Parsons's in important ways. Her generation were the first modern
Americans, irrevocably cut off from the past by the trauma of the
Civil War, by the massive transformation of the nation through the
processes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, and
by the Darwinian intellectual revolution. Her family shared the
self-satisfactions and fears of the late-nineteenth-century
bourgeoisie, but the family's roots in tradition were shallow, and
Parsons escaped a thorough socialization into their culture. The
radically modified women's college in the form of Barnard
College, with its close association with Columbia University, and
the professionalizing cultures of the research university and the
settlement house provided alternative models for Parsons, which
she eagerly took up. Although she faced resistance from her family
and her future husband, her early career from B.A. to M.A. to
Ph.D. in the new disciplines of sociology and education and her
activities in the settlement house movement were the confident
moves of a young modern little troubled by the past. Even when
she married in 1900, after much hesitation, and continued her
teaching career at Barnard and Columbia and her settlement work
through two pregnancies, she saw herself as an inventor of the
future, consciously demonstrating what a modern marriage could
be. The confident photograph that had drawn me to her initially
was taken during this period. 13
Parsons began to feel the social weight of the past seriously for the
first time in 1906. Her husband, Herbert, had been elected to
Congress at the end of 1904, and Elsie had used their move to
Washington to break her ties with the closely linked worlds of
university-based sociology and the settlement house. She now
envisaged a much more outspoken role for her-
 Page 173
self, where she would use journals of social comment and the
conversation of Washington society as forums for the propagation
of new ideas. In particular, she wanted to talk about sex.
Parsons's observations of tenement house life, her students'
sociological fieldwork, and the hostility she and other working
mothers encountered had convinced her that sexual mores were
more resistant to innovation than any other area of social life. A
series of tragic personal events during 1906 convinced her of the
urgent need to find a new approach to sexuality. In April 1906 her
third child died two weeks after birth. Six weeks later she was
again pregnant, and, troubled and unwell, she struggled through a
pregnancy that ended in the loss of a second baby in February
1907. Early in 1906, as she was recovering from the death of her
baby, her beloved friend Stanford White was shot dead by the
husband of a former lover, and ugly stories of his extramarital
sexual activities were revealed to a salacious public. Then as the
year unfolded, the marriage of her friend Katharine Dexter
McCormick was revealed as a sexual tragedy of major proportions,
which illustrated starkly the consequences of sexual repression and
reticence. 14
Parsons had immersed herself in the burgeoning comparative
literature on the family and sexuality while teaching a course on
the family from 1902 to 1904, and she was eager to apply the
literature's new message of cultural relativity to problems of
contemporary sexual life. In a series of articles during 1905 and
1906, Parsons argued for frank discussion and acceptance of the
moral and physical aspects of sex relations, including pregnancy,
divorce, prostitution, and birth control. She quite deliberately
linked the issue of women's emancipation with the cause of free
speech. "In primitive communities taboo is a far-reaching and most
effectual instrument and preservative of group tradition," she
pointed out. "In modern civilization there are not a few survivals of
taboo in out of the way mental corners, but the taboo of direct
reference is perhaps the sturdiest." "In no other class of subjects . . .
is taboo on clear thinking so onerous . . . and failure to 'think thru'
so practically disastrous, as in our sex morality," she argued.
"There is an ethical, as well as intellectual, obligation in seeing
things as they were and are before concluding what they ought to
be.'' Defending herself against the accusation that no "decent"
woman would publicly discuss such subjects, she argued that no
one else could carry out the task of improving attitudes toward
sexuality. "Men merely because they are men, live or are reputed to
live too firmly encased in glass houses to lead in the stone-
throwing." The unmarried, the divorced, the unhappily married,
and the childless woman are also handicapped in such a discussion.
As a
 Page 174
privileged woman who was happily married with children, she had
a duty, she pointed out in a dictum she followed throughout her
life, to speak out and act in situations where other women would be
more severely sanctioned, especially if, she added, they were
familiar with the morals of other peoples or had directly observed
different economic or cultural classes in their own society. 15
Speaking out on sexuality and defending free speech were the
province of anarchists and freethinkers, not of wives of
congressmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that her book The
Family (1906), which ended with a plea for trial marriage,
regulation of births, and economic independence for women, allI
might addin the cause of preserving monogamous marriage, was
greeted in many quarters with horror. On the day of its publication,
a leading newspaper declared that "no more radical declaration
from the pen of an author relating to matrimony has been
published." Over the next few weeks, Parsons's ethics were reviled
in newspaper after newspaper as "the morality of the barnyard,"
"absurd," ''pretentious," and "diabolical," and the book was
condemned from New York pulpits during Thanksgiving Day
services.16

Parsons was devastated by the tirade her book unleashed. For the
first time she had come face to face with the fears and certainties
that Trilling found so omnipresent in her childhood during this
period, and she had discovered the limits of acceptable behavior.
Worried by the possible effect of this publicity on Herbert's career,
and weakened physically and mentally by the loss of the second
baby in February 1907 and the termination of another pregnancy
soon after, Parsons was effectively silenced. Over the next few
years she struggled with the shadow of fear that hung over her life.
This struggle against the safety of the conventional life manifested
itself most forcefully and distressingly in her obsessive jealousy
over Herbert's friendship with Lucy Wilson, the conventionally
feminine wife of a Washington colleague, which began in 1909 as
Elsie anxiously awaited the outcome of another pregnancy. One of
the tenets of the "experimental" marriage she had embarked on
with such misgivings was that she and Herbert should remain
individuals, each with her or his own lives, interests, and friends.
But she found that in practice she was unable to be detached about
Herbert's admiration of another woman, especially when she
realized that his admiration was based on that woman's eagerness
to lose her own personality in his. "All her little conjugal ways
pleased him," she wrote in a fictionalized account in 1913. "So did
her conventionalities with him." What was more galling, perhaps,
was her real-
 Page 175
ization that Herbert merely tolerated, rather than approved and
supported, those activities in which she most directly expressed her
individuality. "Do you realize that apart from the family and the
routine of life all my energy and a very large part of my interest
have gone into writing which you have never shown the slightest
interest in?" she wrote him in 1912. "That my first book you didn't
read, my second, published anonymously (you being still in public
office when it went to print) you didn't even know about and the
one I am writing now and talking to every one but you about (for,
as it is popular, I get help from all sides) you also ignore? Your
indifference or even antagonism once certainly hurt my vanity, but
now I have no vanity about writing. But now as always to have you
absolutely out of so large a part of my life is cutting." "I suppose
cowardice is my reason," Herbert replied, acknowledging the truth
of her accusation. "I feared that there would be so many points on
which we would not agree that life would run more smoothly if I
did not cross them. I have tried to be tolerant in other ways &
thought I had been, though I could not always smile at it." 17
Parsons strenuously resisted the decline in physical, mental, and
moral strength that threatened her during these six years of
anguish. In 1907, wrestling with terrible "fear-thoughts" in the
wake of her double defeat as a radical intellectual and a mother, she
found particularly helpful William James's 1906 presidential
address to the American Philosophical Association, "The Energies
of Man." Drawing on the doctrine of action formulated by the
young Italian pragmatist Giovanni Papini, James examined the
problem of habit-neurosis that inhibited the full development of
mental and physical resources. "The human individual lives usually
far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he
habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he
behaves below his optimum," James pointed out. "In elementary
faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every
conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an
hysteric subjectbut with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is
diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate habitthe
habit of inferiority to our full selfthat is bad." But the vicious cycle
of "psychasthenia'' can be broken, he argued, by means of
excitements, ideas, and efforts, which can be used to break down
"the barriers which life's routine [has] concreted round the deeper
strata of the will," "gradually bringing its unused energies into
action."18
Parsons read James's address soon after the death of her baby.
During this stressful period, she took his advice to heart and made
every effort to use her rage and despair as a stimulus to action. She
had always found physical outdoor activity liberating mentally and
socially. Over the next few
 Page 176
years she increasingly turned to strenuous trips as a means of
shaking off her depression. At first she tried to interest Herbert in
the sort of travel she craved, but he had little inclination for such
jaunts, and the few they took together were not successful. In 1910,
after a year in which Herbert's friendship with Lucy Wilson had
strengthened and Herbert Jr., her third living child, was born,
Parsons found the perfect companion in George Young, a secretary
at the British Embassy in Washington. An authority on Turkish law
who had traveled by horseback all over the Middle East, George
Young came from an aristocratic family who shared a "brilliant
contrariety" and a love of physical adventure. Young taught
Parsons the delights of pushing herself to the limit, canoeing and
walking in wild unknown country. 19
With renewed faith in her own mental and physical strength,
Parsons made a trip to the American Southwest that was to be a
turning point in her life. With a new sense of purpose, she began to
prepare herself for a career in anthropology. In a notebook labeled
"American Ethnology SW," the page marked "Plans" included a list
of things she had to learn. Along with Spanish, cooking (which she
tried but never managed), cross-saddle riding, and masonry, she
noted, "Practice with pistol, with compass." Throughout the
following year she read voraciously about the Southwest,
established contact with the anthropological museums in
Washington and New York, rode, canoed, and camped with Young,
despite the pregnancy that ended with the birth of her youngest son
in September 1911.20
Parsons's sense of purpose and efficacy was strengthened by the
new movement among women that was beginning to be called
"feminism." This movement distinguished itself from the
nineteenth-century "woman movement" by its emphasis on
individual self-development and action; its focus on psychology
and sexuality; its outspoken, "unladylike" stance; and its
determination to make allies of sympathetic men. Parsons and her
friends Katharine Dexter McCormick and Alice Duer Miller
immediately recognized themselves as "feminists." By the time she
returned to New York at the end of 1911, after Herbert had lost his
congressional seat, Parsons found she had a readymade network of
"restless'' women like herself and an enthusiastic audienceboth men
and womenfor her views. In the feminist group Heterodoxy, she
and Alice Duer Miller joined a group of unorthodox women whose
friendships survived until their deaths. And in Greenwich Village
and in the numerous discussion groups and little magazines that
sprang up eagerly to debate the new sexuality, the new family, and
the new ethics, her terse, witty iconoclasm was quickly in demand.
The confidence she gained from this sense of support helped
Parsons to bring her simmering jealousy of Lucy Wilson out into
the open and precipitate a crisis in her relationship
 Page 177
with Herbert. In a long and frank discussion during the 1912
summer, Herbert confessed that her "new ways" puzzled him and
that he had begun to realize that "travel, things new &
unconventional are necessary for your enjoyment." For her part,
Parsons admitted that he was unable to share her "new experiences,
my new ideas, and feelings, my fresh impressions of persons and
places." ''My trips and my occasional flirtations . . . keep me from
making uninstitutional demands on you which you wont or cant
meet," she wrote him depairingly. In a fictionalized account,
Parsons spoke of this period as marking the end of her love for
Herbert. She continued to suffer jealousy until Lucy faded from the
picture sometime in 1916 (interestingly enough, after Lucy
divorced her husband) and always retained a strong affection for
Herbert; but over the next few years she deliberately diffused her
emotional life among her work, her children, and her friends, some
of whom became lovers. Her fieldwork became particularly
important to this process of emotional diffusion. It is significant, I
think, that she finally found "her" place for intensive ethnographic
work at Zuni, New Mexico, during the period when Herbert was in
Reno with Lucy Wilson in his capacity as her divorce lawyer. 21

Parsons's re-creation of herself as an anthropological fieldworker

was not just a retreat from painful personal problems.
Anthropology gave her the ideological and structural reinforcement
she needed to successfully challenge orthodoxy and habit. Her
foray into fieldwork in the Southwest brought her into contact with
a group of young anthropologists based in the American Museum
of Natural History and Columbia University. Over the next few
years these young men, Robert Lowie, Alexander Goldenweiser,
and Pliny Goddard, became her close friends and colleagues,
welcoming her as a kindred spirit into the discipline they were
reconstructing.22
The weapon that Parsons's new friends and colleagues used in their
critical project was positivismnot the system-building positivism of
Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer, but what Robert Lowie called
the "chaste" positivism of Ernst Mach. Mach was an Austrian
physicist and historian of science, born in 1838, whose work had
an enormous impact on turn-of-the-century scientific and artistic
practice. "Physics is not a church," Mach argued; and he insisted
that even the most useful theoretical system, such as Newtonian
mechanics, must be continually challenged and historicized. Mach
used historical inquiries and studies of perception to question the
bases of knowledge claims and to critique accepted scientific
concepts. He rejected metaphysical speculation and theorizing
 Page 178
demonstrating what postmodernists call an "incredulity toward
metanarratives"and reminded scientists that all knowledge was
based on experience. For Mach, knowledge was a provisional
processing of experience for the purposes of survival. All we can
know is given through our sensations, he argued. All our
ideasincluding those of space, time, body, and egoare personal cuts
into the chaos of sensations according to current need, to be
discarded in the face of new experiences and new needs. For Mach,
theories are "like withered leaves, which drop off after having
enabled the organism of science to breathe for a time." The
metanarratives implicit in words, concepts, classifications, and
theories are therefore temporarily useful fictions that must be
discarded before they became impediments to adaptation to new
conditions. 23
Mach's insistence on tearing down current systems was highly
attractive to the modernist avant-garde, to revolutionary political
groups, to innovative intellectuals, and to the women and men who
were beginning to call themselves "feminists." In emphasizing
experience as the only legitimate source of knowledge, Mach's
critical positivism eliminated the weight of history and validated
the idea of starting overthe idea of the "new" that was the basis of
modernism. It also validated the search for experience itself, as a
way of seeking a wider basis for formulating useful knowledge,
thereby underpinning the restlessness and continuing search for the
new that characterized the modern. The emphasis in Mach's
positivism on the provisional character of all knowledge initiated a
wholesale critique of language and conceptual, classificatory, and
theoretical systems. It brought the body back in as an important
factor in the constitution of knowledge: if all we can know comes
through the sensations, the body obviously cannot be ignored. And
it treated the ego as but one among many useful fictions subject to
reconceptualization. "The Ego cannot be saved,'' Mach wrote in
1886.24
Mach's lucid and engaging work electrified the generation that
came to adulthood at the turn of the twentieth century. Albert
Einstein acknowledged the profound influence of Mach's critique
of Newtonian concepts on the development of his Special Theory
of Relativity in 1905. The young Polish scholar Branislaw
Malinowski and the promising Austrian novelist Robert Musil both
wrote their doctoral dissertations on Mach. And in Russia,
Machism was such a serious rival to Marxism that Lenin was
impelled to devote his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to
challenging it in 1909.25

Mach's impact was particularly strong in the United States, where

he saw William James's pragmatism as "the coming frontier"
 Page 179
of a critical positivism that would "wash metaphysics out of
philosophy" One of Elsie Clews Parsons's new friends, Alexander
Goldenweiser, had discovered Mach's work as a student of James's
at Harvard in 1902. When Goldenweiser joined the graduate
program in anthropology at Columbia, he and fellow students
Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, and Morris Cohen formed a reading
group in which they read the leading new positivists, Karl Pearson,
Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, and Wilhelm Ostwaldseeking, like
others of their generation, for a new worldview better suited to
their rapidly changing circumstances. 26
As Jewish immigrants with backgrounds in the European
intelligentsia, Goldenweiser, Lowie, Cohen, and Radin could be
characterized as secure outsiders, a status that allowed them to be
critical of established intellectual thought and able to tolerate the
uncertainties implicit in Mach's approach to knowledge. When
Parsons met Lowie and Goldenweiser in 1910, they were
embarked, under Mach's inspiration, on a wholesale critique of the
central concepts and theoretical systems of nineteenth-century
ethnology. As Lowie put it in a call to arms in 1914:
Like the generation of thinkers that preceded ours, we are living in an
age of revolt, but the object of our revolt is different from theirs. Our
predecessors fought tradition as arrayed against reason. We have the
task of exorcising the ghosts of tradition raised in the name of reason
herself. There is not only a folklore of popular belief, but also a
folklore of philosophical and scientific system-mongers. Our present
duty is to separate scientific fact from its envelope of scientific
folklore.27
Parsons had much in common with these young Jewish
intellectuals. An outsider by virtue of her gender and radicalism,
and secure by virtue of her wealth and social position, she found
their deconstructive project highly sympathetic. Through them she
found a supportive group of colleagues and friends, who later
included Franz Boas and the three women she helped move from
their secretarial positions in Boas's office into fieldwork and
professional anthropology, Gladys Reichard, Ruth Bunzel, and
Esther Goldfrank.28
Through Lowie and Goldenweiser, Parsons also found in Mach's
ideas a crystallization of her own attempts to overcome fear and to
fashion a more complex and flexible approach to life and work.
Over the next few years she used Mach's ideas as the basis of her
critique of the situation of women and as the charter for the new
way of life she created for herself. Between 1912 and 1917, at the
same time as she established herself as an anthropologist, Parsons
set out her critique in a series of popular books, articles,
 Page 180
and unpublished manuscripts that could be considered as
manifestos for the new feminism. Drawing on a variety of
ethnographic material, assembled with a cool irony, she mocked
the past, celebrated the speed of change, and looked forward to
what she called "An Unconventional Society"a future society that
science would help bring about by undermining the influence of
"the Elders." Along with Gertrude Stein, who was experimenting
with an entirely new use of language, Parsons set out to "kill what
was not dead, the nineteenth century which was so sure of
evolution and prayers, and esperanto and their ideas." 29
Although her focus is always on women, or rather on the
relationships between women and men, Parsons's critique is
embedded in a general conception of social freedom in which
people are no longer swallowed up by safe identities defined by
age, sex, class, married status, or nationality. Just as Mach had
freed modern physics from outmoded and unnecessary concepts
and categories, Parsons's project was no less than to free people
from the imprisonment of social categories. Human beings have a
passion for classification, she argued in Social Freedom in 1915,
and a fear of anomaliesin other words, a fear of those people who
are unclassified or unclassifiable. The social categories are
obsessive and imperial, she wrote, spreading over the irrelevant.
"The modern Chinaman, however feminist he may be, cannot avoid
referring to darkness or cold or the evil side of the world by the
same word he uses for woman. Nor can he write the ideograph for
wrangling or intrigue without using the character for woman." Not
only are the classifications imperial; they also arrest innovative
thought. "The classification once made is still binding," she pointed
out, "more binding than the bandages [the feminist Chinaman] is
now removing from the feet of his daughters."30
The urge to classify, the fear of social change, and social control
are closely interrelated, Parsons argued in Social Rule in 1916.
"The social categories are an unparalleled means of gratifying the
will to power. . . . The classified individual may be held in
subjection in ways the unclassified escapes." In particular,
classification by sex maintains the segregation of the sexes,
preventing women from encroaching on men's territory. With the
ironic use of ethnographic materials typical of her style, Parsons
pointed out that "in certain New Guinea tribes during times of
religious excitement the village is deserted by the women; they
have to take to the woods. With us it is the woods, sometimes men
say, which are no place for women." "The streets of Seoul were
once taboo to women by day," she observed drily; "there are streets
of New York once taboo to them at night."31
Given the power of classification, Parsons argued, feminism's main
 Page 181
objective is "the declassification of women as women, the
recognition of women as human beings or personalities." "The
more thoroughly a woman is classified the more easily is she
controlled," she pointed out. "The new woman" therefore "means
the woman not yet classified, perhaps not classifiable." This
unclassified, unclassifiable woman is new not only to men but also
to herself. For women were, from Parsons's observations of her
own social milieu, more conventional than men. Parsons had a
deadly eye for the conventionalities of daily life that women
maintained to uphold the distinctions between the sexes, and she
delighted in turning Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's concept of ''primitive
thinking" on its head by demonstrating the "magical" and
"sentimental" basis of the thinking of society women. She was
especially scornful of what she called the "antifeminist suffragist."
Drawing on her own acquaintances who were strenuously involved
in the campaign for the vote in New York State, she defined the
antifeminist suffragist as "sheor hewho sees in enfranchisement an
expression for sex, not an expression for personality." "Is not every
attitude of the anti-suffragist taken in the assumption that politics is
a function of sex, a kind of secondary sex function?" she asks. The
suffragist who argues for the vote on the basis of the difference
women would make as women is no different from the
antisuffragist. What is more, suffragists who do not rebel against
the conventionalities of daily life undermine whatever political
gains they may make. "Anxious beyond measure for the vote," she
wrote, "such a woman remains wholly unperturbed by the
constraints of her daily life." "Is not chaperonage a more important
question for women than suffrage?" she asked. 32
Basic to Parsons's feminism was the notion of experience as the
source of knowledge, adaptability, and power. The female traveler
and the female stranger epitomize for Parsons the modern,
independent woman. As Parsons pointed out in 1914, in terms
reminiscent of Trilling's "burglars": "In no culture have women
shown desire to do anything which requires running the risks of
being alone. Women hermits are extremely scarce, there are few
women explorers, there are no women vagabonds. . . . Rarely
indeed do women go off by themselvesinto the corer of a ballroom,
into the wilderness, to the play, to the sacred high places of the
earth, or to the Islands of the Blessed. Penelope stays at home."33
Feminism, for Parsons, is therefore an "adventure" involving the
crossing of boundaries and the challenging of classifications. In the
ideal "Unconventional Society" that she set up at the end of Fear
and Conventionality (1914), Parsons placed the principle of
fearless and unrestricted travel at the center of her vision. "The
viability of the world will be taken advantage
 Page 182
of," she predicted. "The habit of living in lairs will die out and . . .
we shall live at large, going where it is best for us to be,
unperturbed by novel experience and not safeguarded against it."
34

For Parsons, one of the most important outcomes of the lifting of

the social categories was the possibility of substituting
"personality" for a more rigidly defined "ego." "The ego must be
given up," Mach had argued. The ego should be a makeshift,
designed for provisional orientation and for definite practical ends;
but it more often took on a fixed quality that was "insufficient,
obstructive, and untenable.'' Mach's view of the ego as a theoretical
construction, like the category "woman," opened the way for
Parsons's view of the "personality." A personality did not have any
preconceived characteristics or consistency. Instead, it was a
heterogeneous bundle formed by the spontaneous reaction of its
various facets to their environment. In conditions of social
freedom, men and women would have a wider scope in their
expressions of self, and these different expressions would be more
frankly expressed in their relationships. "The day will come,"
Parsons wrote in her unpublished "Journal of a Feminist, 1913-
1914,"
when the individual . . . [will not] have to pretend to be possessed of a
given quota of femaleness or maleness. . . . This morning perhaps I
feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a
female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel
sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly. . . . It is such a confounded
bore to have to act one part endlessly. Men do not resent being treated
always as men because, in the first place, of the prestige of being a
man and because, in the second place, they are not treated always as
 men. And yet men too may rebel some time against the attribute of
maleness.... The taboo on a man acting like a woman has ever been
stronger than the taboo on a woman acting like a man. Men who
question it are ridiculed as effeminate or damned as perverts. But I
know men who are neither "effeminate" nor perverts who feel the
woman nature in them and are more or less tried by having to
suppress it. [Some day, she concluded,] there may be a "masculinism"
movement to allow men to act "like women."35
Parsons saw sexual relationships as particularly bound by
conventions, and she looked forward to greater frankness, sincerity,
and privacy between the sexes under conditions of social freedom.
"Between a relationship all sex as in the ante-feminist past and the
entirely sexless relationship of the Professional Feminist . . . I don't
see much to choose from," she wrote
 Page 183
in "Privacy in Love Affairs" in 1915. "Why keep sex so tagged and
docketed? So shunted off from human relations? Sex is a part of
every personality, and into any personal relations between a man
and a woman it naturally entersmore or less. Whether more or less
is to be decided for itself in each case, otherwise a relationship is
not private at all, it's impersonal, a status relationship, a
relationship of the old order." 36
The greatest opportunity for the expression of personality,
according to Parsons, was between friends because friendship is
"so regardless of conventions, so heedless of status." Friendship
cuts through social barriers and insists on a highly personal
interaction, it is nourished by difference, and it does not expect
unbroken companionship. Because of all this, friendship is more
imaginative, alert, spontaneous, and joyful than other relationships.
Marriage, in contrast, tends to obliterate all expression of
personality. In a chapter of The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913)
mordantly titled "One," Parsons documented ideas of conjugal
identity across cultures. And in an article in the New Republic in
1916, she asked the question "Must We Have Her?'' arguing that "a
husband or a wife is a personal taste" that should not be forced on
others. She made a plea, therefore, for separate invitations as part
of "a new, less institutional, more personal form of intercourse."
"The separate invitation," she argued, "would contribute . . .
somewhat like the separate dressing room or the separate bank
account, to the establishment of personal decency and dignity"37

For Parsons, then, the most important role for science in bringing
about an "Unconventional Society" is by clarifying concepts and
questioning classifications. In this new society, "differences in
others will no longer be recognized as troublesome. . . . Nor will
presumptions of superiority or inferiority attach to differences per
se. Exclusiveness will cease to be a source of prestige. Blind efforts
to produce types . . . will be condemned. Intolerance will be a
crime. . . . Variation will be welcome. . . . Complete freedom of
personal contacts will be sought. [And] the play of personality
upon personality will become the recognized raison d'etre of
society instead of the greatest of its apprehensions."38
Parsons's feminist project in her writing from 1912 to 1917 was to
free the concept of the self from the prison of categorization. Judith
Ryan has demonstrated in The Vanishing Subject that the
fragmentation of the self was a major preoccupation of modernist
writers under the influence of Mach and William James.
Interestingly, it is the women Ryan discussesGertrude Stein and
Virginia Woolfwho were the most accepting of "the world without
a self." For Woolf, release from the "damned egotistical self" is a
liberation
 Page 184
that allows the development of a fluid subjectivity that is better
able to challenge patriarchy. 39
Parsons's life was, from 1910, a deliberate attempt to create a life
without a self; to reconstruct her own life as a new woman who
was unclassified and unclassifiable. She deliberately cultivated an
adventurous life physically, intellectually, and emotionally; a wide
range of experience; and a variety of unfamiliar situations that
forced her to interact in spontaneous, rather than conventional,
ways. Anthropological fieldwork provided her with the ideal
vehicle for the sort of multifaceted self she wanted to create. After
1911, when her sixth and last child was born, she spent at least part
of each year in the field, beginning with work in the American
Southwest that culminated in the monumental Pueblo Indian
Religion (1939); moving on to Mexico in the 1930s (Mitla, 1936);
and reaching, just before her death in 1941, to Ecuador (Peguche,
1945).40 Interspersed with these field trips were folklore-collecting
expeditions close to home along the Atlantic coast while her
children were young and later sweeping through the West Indies,
Egypt and the Sudan, and Spain and Majorca. These trips were
deliberately both physically and mentally challenging. And they
always combined work and play. Her fieldwork and her wealth
allowed Parsons to divide her life among several homeswinter in
New York; summer in Newport, Lenox, or Maine or somewhere in
the field. And she cultivated a wide variety of relationshipsas wife,
mother, lover, colleague, stranger, and friendallowing none of them
to dominate or interfere with the other.41
Parsons's practical experiment in destroying the concept of
"woman," and with it the idea of the unified self, was a difficult
one that met with considerable opposition, first of all from her
husband, and later from her lover Robert Herrick, who analyzed
their relationship negatively in his 1932 novel The End of Desire.
However, she found an understanding and supportive group for her
project among her anthropological colleagues. Although they
teased her about her "dual nature," pursuing social "propaganda'' in
the winter and anthropological research in the summer, they found
in her "propaganda" an expression of their own visiona vision that
had to be excluded from the dry factual reportage of their
"scientific" work. Franz Boas acknowledged the similarities of
their projects when he inscribed his photograph to her in 1936: "To
Elsie Clews Parsons, fellow in the struggle for freedom from
prejudice."42
Perry Anderson has suggested that modernism flowered in the
space between the still usable classical past, a still indeterminate
technical present, and a still unpredictable future. Mach's critical
positivism captured exactly the uncertainties and possibilities of
this space; and it is here that Parsons's
 Page 185
pragmatic feminism emerged, grasping the fragility and
indeterminacy of the self and turning this into a source of
emancipation. For Parsons, Mach's dissolving self was an
important resource through which she could reconstruct her life as
a form of permanent revolution, forever escaping definition and
imprisonment by the expectations of others. And the members of
her anthropological reference group, who understood and shared
her project, provided the supportive environment that helped her
sustain it. 43

In her presidential address to the American Anthropological

Association in December 1941, which, tragically, was read by her
friend Gladys Reichard after her sudden death two weeks before,
Parsons characteristically made an excursion into the "borderland"
between anthropology and social philosophy. In her usual
challenging manner, she tackled the question of current demands
on social scientists for prediction by pointing out its basis in fear of
uncertainty. "Delphic or Inca oracles, geomancy, astrology,
scapulamancy, throwing seeds, bones, shells, cards, or apple peels,
palmistry, more politely called chiromancy, games of chance
played to a system, dream lore, weather signs, omens and auguries
of an infinite variety, pyramidology, Bible prophecy, all ideologies
and practices concerned with life after deaththe urge to know what
is going to happen penetrates and colors culture deeply and
variously," she points out. ''Uncertainty is painful, the hardest of all
things to bear, a panic breeder, which may be why concepts of faith
and preordainment develop, why both science and divine revelation
are popular, and why statesmen, particularly in wartime, give so
many assurances of what is, or is not, going to happen next year or
a thousand years hence." Refusing to submit to panic, Parsons had
devoted herself to what could be called a sociology of uncertainty:
what she herself, in her presidential address to the American
Folklore Society in 1919, called "The Study of Variants." Too
much social science expressed, in her opinion, "group will-to-
power, the desire to have people like yourself or to have them
amenable to immediate group ends." If we want cultural
inventiveness and experiment, tolerance for group differences, and
appreciation of their value, she pointed out, we have to understand
why certain cultural variations or inventions "take" and others do
not; and to do this we have to pay as much attention to
differentiation as to similarities.44
In her lifelong study of cultural variants, Parsons relied heavily on
folklore and ceremonial as windows into what she called "the
mental processes in the culture." But she turned increasingly to
biography as a means of seeing a culture from the inside and
understanding its variability. In "The Imaginary Mistress," written
in 1913 during her period of personal anguish,
 Page 186
she turned her ethnographic gaze inward onto her own obsessions
and fears. In her anthropological work she continually
experimented with ways of incorporating accounts of the lived
experience of the people she was interacting with into her more
"objective" descriptions of ceremonial. From the beginning she
conveyed a sense of the contested nature of the "reality" she was
reporting through footnotes detailing the different points of view of
her various informants. By 1920 she was incorporating a section on
"Town Gossip" in her Pueblo studies; in it she drew sharply
observed portraits of community members in the process of
constructing and reconstructing that "reality" In Peguche,the study
of an Ecuadoran Indian town she was engaged on at her death,
Parsons vividly portrayed the changing culture of the town through
the eyes of Rosita Lema, the young woman who was "the most
enterprising person in all Peguche.'' Fittingly, Rosita's story was left
unresolved at Parsons's death. Parsons was able to analyze the
factors that helped Rosita to change, adapt to, and capitalize on
new circumstances and those that kept her chained to old ways; but
Parsons was not able to predict whether the outcome was going to
be a triumph or a tragedy. 45
Throughout her life Parsons wanted passionately to be "a carrier of
culture, not its freight." With William James, she felt that the only
certainty was that "man engenders truths" on a "malleable" world
"waiting to receive its final touches at our hands." Convinced that
"in our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative," her
sociology of uncertainty used biography to explore the processes of
invention and innovation; and she saw biographies as human
documents that allow us to extend our experience beyond the safe
and the familiar. By forcing us out of the mold of our
preconceptions, and opening us to new possibilities, biographies
were, to her, one important means of inventing ourselves and
creating the future.46
It was the willful sense of an invented self that attracted me to
Parsons when I saw her photograph on the cover of Rosenberg's
book fifteen years ago. That still resonates to me now. But what I
have learned to appreciate through a close study of her life and
work is the social responsibility of her constructive and fearless
approach to the fragmented, discontinuous, and rapidly changing
nature of modem life. As James pointed out, the pragmatic way
adds "both to our dignity and our responsibility as thinkers" (and,
Parsons would add, as livers of lives). Unlike the young Diana
Trilling, whose life had grown, to borrow William James's words,
"into one tissue of impossibilities," Parsons's anger and despair
carried her "over the dam" of conscience and convention, allowing
her to seek creative solutions to contemporary problems with an
experimenting intelligence. Coolly and deliberately, but with a
deep underlying passion, she used her life and work
 Page 187
to engender on the world the truths she thought important. Parsons
is obviously not me; nor am I a new version of the young Trilling.
But Parsons has helped me over the dam by introducing me to a
more self-consciously pragmatic approach to life and scholarly
work that seems to suit my lifelong role as stranger and exile. If
novelist Michael Ondaatje is right that we live in an age of
migrants, in which most of us are in a place we did not come from,
Parsons has reminded me forcefully of the possibilitiesand
responsibilitiesinherent in that role. Perhaps, with her help, I can
help create "the new composition." 47
Notes
1. Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of
Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), pp.
3-4.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. For the 1950s model of emphasized femininity, see Ann Game
and Rosemary Pringle, "The Making of the Australian Family,"
Intervention 12 (1979): 63-83; Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle,
"Sexuality and the Suburban Dream," Australian and New Zealand
Journal of Sociology 15 (1979): 4-15; and R. W. Connell, Gender
and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 226-228
4. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation
(New York: Basic Books, 1977). Miles Franklin's My Brilliant
Career (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1901), which Gillian
Armstrong made into a well-known movie, is a classic account of a
similar failed attempt at a career in turn-of-the-century Australia
5. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1971).
6. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman,
Culture, and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1974), was the most important book in my induction into social
science. I seriously considered going into anthropology, but my
apprenticeship in sociology made it easier to continue in graduate
work in that field.
7. John Higley, Desley Deacon, and Don Smart, Elites in Australia
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
8. These women continue to be an important part of my
international "invisible college." R. W. Connell, Ruling Class,
Ruling Culture: Studies in Conflict, Power; and Hegemony in
Australian Life (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1977),
was the bible of the New Left intellectuals when I first began
reading sociology His extremely influential reinterpretation of
Australian history, written with Terry Irving, Class Structure in
Australian History: Documents, Narrative, and Argument
(Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980), and his Which Way Is up?
Essays on Sex, Class, and Culture (Sydney: George Allen and
Unwin, 1983), provided me with both a model and a target in my
graduate work. An Australian dissertation is examined by three
outside examiners who have had nothing to do with its preparation.
Bob Connell was the chair and only sociologist on my examining
committee. The other members were feminist social historian
Marian Aveling (Quartly) and civil service historian Brian Dickey
 Page 188
9. See Desley Deacon, "Political Arithmetic: The Nineteenth-
century Australian Census and the Construction of the Dependent
Woman," in Barbara Laslett, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Helen
Longino, and Evelynn Hammonds, eds., Gender and Scientific
Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 103-
123; and Desley Deacon, "State Formation, the New Middle Class,
and the Dual Labor Market," in Gwen Moore and Glenna Spitze,
eds., Women and Politics: Activism, Attitudes, and Office-holding
(Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), pp. 247-266. These two
articles won the Australasian Women and Politics Prize in 1983
and 1984.
10. However, Bob Connell was, justifiably, still not satisfied with
my treatment of masculinity.
11. Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle
Class, and Women Workers, 1830-1930 (Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
12. See Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern
Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Rosalind
Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern
Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982);
Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces (Conference Press, 1940),
p. 27, quoted in Bruce Kellner, Introduction to Bruce Kellner, ed.,
A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 4. My other important
companions have been the community of feminist scholars, who
have read my work (even when it was about Australia), helped me
get travel money and fellowships, asked me to write papers, and
generally welcomed me and my biography.
When I began work on Parsons, her grand-nephew Peter H. Hare
had recently published A Woman's Quest for Science: Portrait of
Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus
Books, 1985), based on Parsons's private papers, which he had
deposited in the American Philosophical Society Library. For
Parsons's life and work, see Barbara A. Babcock and Nancy J.
Parezo, eds., Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and
the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980: An Illustrated
Catalogue (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988),
pp. 14-19; Barbara A. Babcock, Introduction to Barbara A.
Babcock, ed., Pueblo Mothers and Children: Essays by Elsie Clews
Parsons, 1915-1924 (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1991), pp. 1-
27; Barbara A. Babcock, Foreword to Elsie Clews Parsons, Tewa
Tales, ed. Barbara A. Babcock (1926; Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1994), pp. v-xix; Paul Boyer, "Elsie Clews
Parsons," in Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S.
Boyer, eds., Notable American Women (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 20-23; Desley Deacon, "The
Republic of the Spirit: Field Work in Elsie Clews Parsons's Turn to
Anthropology," Frontiers 12 (1992): 13-38; Mary Jo Deegan,
"Elsie Clews Parsons,'' in Mary Jo Deegan, ed., Women in
Sociology: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 320-326; Judith Friedlander, "Elsie
Clews Parsons," in Ute Gacs, Jerrie McIntyre, and Ruth Weinberg,
eds., Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 282-290; Ramón Gutiérrez,
Introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, vol. 2
(1939; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. v-xix;
Louis A. Hieb, "Elsie Clews Parsons in the Southwest," in Nancy J.
Parezo, ed., Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the
Native American Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 63-75; Barbara Keating, "Elsie Clews
Parsons: Her Work and Influence in Sociology," Journal of the
History of Sociology 1(fall 1978): 1-10; Alfred L. Kroeber, "Elsie
Clews Parsons,"
 Page 189
American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 252-255; Louise Lamphere,
"Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons,"
American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 518-533; Nancy Oestreich Lurie,
"Elsie Clews Parsons," in International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Morris
Opler, "Elsie (Worthington) Clews Parsons," New Encyclopaedia
Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943-1973);
Gladys Reichard, "Elsie Clews Parsons," Journal of American
Folklore 56 (1943): 45-56; Leslie Spier, "Elsie Clews Parsons,''
American Anthropologist (AA) 45 (1943): 244-251; Pauline Turner
Strong, Introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons, Pueblo Indian
Religion, vol. 1 (1939; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996), pp. v-xxvii; Leslie A. White, "Elsie Worthington Clews
Parsons," Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner,
1932-1964), pp. 581-582; Rosemary Levy Zumwalt, Wealth and
Rebellion: Elsie Clews Parsons, Anthropologist and Folklorist
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
The American Philosophical Society (APS), Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, holds two Parsons collections: (1) Ms. Coll. #29
contains the bulk of her personal correspondence, some
professional correspondence, manuscripts, financial papers, and
photographs; (2) 572/P25 contains professional correspondence,
notebooks, and manuscripts. A third collection of personal and
professional papers is held in the Parsons Family Papers at the Rye
Historical Society, Rye, New York.
13. Elsie Worhington Clews, "On Certain Phases of Poor-relief in
the City of New York" (A.M. thesis, Columbia University, 1897);
Elsie Worthington Clews, Educational Legislation and
Administration of the Colonial Governments (reprint, New York:
Arno Press, 1971). For her students' fieldwork, see Elsie
Worthington Clews, "Field Work in Teaching Sociology,"
Educational Review (September 1900). Elsie Clews married
Herbert Parsons on September 1, 1900. Her daughter Lissa was
born August 1901 and her son John, August 1903. For the
Columbia milieu, see Robert W Wallace, "The Institutionalization
of a New Discipline: The Case of Sociology at Columbia
University, 1891-1931" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1989).
For women's colleges, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma
Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their
Nineteenth-century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf,
1984). For settlements, see Allen E Davis, Spearheads for Reform:
The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984). For
settlements and social science, see Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams
and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 (New Brunswick,
NJ.: Transaction Books, 1988).
14. Katharine married Stanley McCormick, the youngest of the
brothers who controlled the International Harvester Corporation in
1904. When Katharine was preparing to enter graduate school in
1906, Stanley began to display acute signs of mental instability. He
was hospitalized and remained in confinement until his death in
1947. A sensitive man brought up by his puritanical mother never
to touch his body, he was so troubled by masturbation that he had
rigged up a harness to prevent his hands from touching his genitals
while sleeping; and he had apparently been unable to consummate
his marriage with Katharine. Katharine's direction and funding of
scientific work in an attempt to find a cure for Stanley led to the
development of the contraceptive pill sixty years later. See James
Reed, "Katharine Dexter McCormick," in Barbara Sicherman et al.,
eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 440-42; and Ellen
Chesler,
 Page 190
Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement
in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 429-452.
15. Elsie Clews Parsons (ECP), "A Plan for Girls with Nothing to
Do," Charities 13 (March 4, 1905): 545-549; "Girls with Nothing
to Do: A Rejoinder from Mrs. Parsons," Letter to Editor, Charities
15 (October 28, 1906): 124-125; "Penalizing Marriage and Child-
bearing," Independent 60 (January 18, 1906): 146-147; "Sex
Morality and the Taboo of Direct Reference," Independent 61
(August 16, 1906): 391-392; "Little Essays in Lifting Taboo,''
unpublished manuscript, pp. 1-4, APS. In 1900 sex reformer Ida
Craddock had committed suicide rather than face another prison
sentence for the publication of her pamphlet "Wedding Night," and
Moses Harman, editor of the anarchist Lucifer, the Light-Bearer,
had been jailed in 1905 for his pamphlet "The Right to Be Born
Well." For repression of discussion about sex, see Heywood
Campbell Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock:
Roundsman of the Lord (London: Wishart, 1928).
16. ECP, The Family: An Ethnographical and Historical Outline
with Descriptive Notes, Planned as a Text-book for the Use of
College Lecturers and of Directors of Home-reading Clubs (New
York: Putnam's Sons, 1906). See New York Herald,November 17,
18, 19, 1906; Evening Sun, November 17, 1906; Sun, November
18, 1906; New York Daily Tribune, November 18, 1906; and
World,November 19, 1906.
17. ECP, "The Imaginary Mistress" (1913), unpublished
manuscript; ECP to Herbert Parsons (HP), August 6, 1912; HP to
ECP, August 7, 1912, APS.
18. William James, "The Energies of Man," Philosophical Review
16 (January 1907): 1-20, esp. 13, 17-19; ECP to HP, March 19,
1907, APS. For "fear-thoughts," see ECP to HP, June 25, 1907,
APS.
19. See Deacon, "The Republic of the Spirit."
20. Notebook, "American Ethnology SW," APS.
21. ECP-HP corres., April 3-August 26, 1912, APS; ECP, "The
Imaginary Mistress"; Deacon, "The Republic of the Spirit." See
Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich
Village, 1912-1940, rev. ed. (Norwich, Vt.: New Victoria, 1986).
22. Paul Radin, "Robert H. Lowie. 1883-1957," AA, 60 (1958):
358-375; Robert H. Lowie, "Reflections on Goldenweiser's 'Recent
Trends in American Anthropology.' " AA 43 (1941): 151-163;
Alfred L. Kroeber, "Pliny Earle Goddard," AA 31 (1929): 1-8;
William N. Fenton, "Sapir as Museologist," in William Cowan,
Michael K. Foster, and Konrad Koerner, eds., New Perspectives in
Language, Culture, and Personality (Philadelphia: Benjamins,
1986), pp. 215-240 (for Goldenweiser).
23. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and
Historical Exposition of Its Principles (1883; Chicago: Open
Court, 1893); Robert H. Lowie, "Ernst Mach," New Republic, April
9, 1916, pp. 335-337; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv; Mach, quoted in Philipp Frank,
"The Importance of Ernst Mach's Philosophy of Science for Our
Times," in Robert S. Cohen and Raymond J. Seeger, eds., Ernst
Mach: Physicist and Philosopher (Dordecht: Reidel, 1970), pp.
219-234; Robert S. Cohen, "Ernst Mach: Physics, Perception, and
the Philosophy of Science," in Cohen and Seeger, eds., Ernst
Mach, pp. 126-164, esp. pp. 128-129.
24. Ernst Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, quoted
in R. von Mises, "Ernst Mach and the Empiricist Conception of
Science," in Cohen and Seeger, eds., Ernst
 Page 191
Mach, pp. 245-270, esp. p. 263. For feminism, see Nancy F. Cott,
The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1987).
25. Ronald W Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York:
World, 1971), pp. 37-39; Robert J. Thornton, "'Imagine Yourself
Set Down. . . . ': Mach, Frazer, Conrad, Malinowski, and the Role
of Imagination in Ethnography," Anthropology Today 1 (October
1985): 7-14; Cohen, "Ernst Mach," esp. pp. 156-160. For a
comparison of Mach, The Science of Mechanics and Mach,
Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations with Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Will to Power (London: Foulis, 1909), nos. 252,
289, 287, 291, see Frank, "The Importance of Ernst Mach," 232-
233. For Mach's influence on literature, see Malcom Bradbury and
James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European
Literature, 1890-1930 (New York: Penguin, 1991).
26. James gained an impression of "pure intellectual genius" when
he had four hours of "unforgettable conversation" with Mach in
1882. Mach dedicated Popular-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen
(Popular scientific lectures), 4th ed. (1910) to James. See Erwin N.
Hiebert, Introduction to Ernst Mach, Knowledge and Error:
Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry (Boston: Reidel, 1976), pp.
xiii, xxvi, xxviii, xxix. For reading group, see "Letters from Ernst
Mach to Robert H. Lowie," Isis 37 (1947): 65-68; Cora Du Bois,
ed., Lowie's Selected Papers in Anthropology (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1960); Robert H. Lowie,
''Relations with Boas," Robert H. Lowie papers, Department of
Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley; Robert H.
Lowie, "An Ethnologist's Memories," Freeman 1, 2 (August 11,
October 6, 1920): 517-518, 85-86; Robert H. Lowie,
"Reminiscences of Anthropological Currents in America Half a
Century Ago," AA 58 (1956): 955-1016; Robert H. Lowie, Robert
H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A Personal Record (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1959); Harry Hoijer, "Paul
Radin, 1883-1959," AA 61 (1959): 839-843; and Morris Raphael
Cohen, A Dreamer's Journey: The Autobiography of Morris
Raphael Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949).
27. Robert H. Lowie, "Social Organization," American Journal of
Sociology (AJS) 20 (July 1914): 68-97.
28. See Melville J. Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science of Man in
the Making (New York: Scribner's, 1953); and Theodora Kroeber,
Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). For Bunzel,
Goldfrank, and Reichard, see Babcock and Parezo, Daughters of
the Desert.
29. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (New York: Random House,
1943), 21, quoted in John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose:
Gertrude Stein and Her World (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1987),
p. 16; Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). For ECP on the
"Elders," see "Sex and the Elders," "A Warning to the Middle
Aged," and "War and the Elders," New Review 3 (1915): 8-10, 62-
63, and 191-192.
30. ECP, Social Freedom: A Study of the Conflicts Between Social
Classifications and Personality (New York: Putnam's, 1915), p. 1.
31. ECP, Social Rule: A Study of the Will to Power (New York:
Putnam's, 1916), p. 2; ECP, Social Freedom, p. 25.
32. ECP, Social Rule,pp. 54-55; ECP, "Feminism and
Conventionality," Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 56 (November 1914): 47-53, esp. 47-48; L. Lévy-
Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (How
na-
 Page 192
tives think) (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910). Herbert Parsons was a
leader of the male supporters of female suffrage.
33. ECP "Feminism and Conventionality," pp. 48-49. See also ECP,
"The Supernatural Policing of Women," Independent 72 (February
8, 1912), pp. 307-310. For Mach's observation that physics was
only experience arranged in economical order, see Raymond J.
Seeger, ''On Mach's Curiosity About Shockwaves," in Cohen and
Seeger, eds., Ernst Mach,pp. 60-61.
34. ECP, Fear and Conventionality (1914; reprint, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 205-218, esp. p. 210. For
fear of strangers as a contemporary psychosis, see ECP,
"Avoidance," and "Teknonymy," AJS 19 (1914): 480-484, 649-650.
35. ECP, "Journal of a Feminist, 1913-1914," unpublished
manuscript, p. 115, APS.
36. ECP, "Privacy in Love Affairs," Masses 6 (July 1915): 12. See
also ECP, "Sincerity in Love Affairs," unpublished manuscript,
(July 19151, APS.
37. ECP, "Friendship, a Social Category," AJS 21 (1915): 230-233;
ECP, The Old-fashioned Woman: Primitive Fancies About the Sex
(New York: Putnam, 1913); ECP, "Must We Have Her?" New
Republic 7 (June 10, 1916): 145-146.
38. ECP. Fear and Conventionality, pp. 209-210.
39. Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and
Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
p. 226. Woolf attributed this "damned egotistical self" to James
Joyce.
40. ECP, Pueblo Indian Religion; ECP, Mitla, Town of Souls and
Other Zapoteco-Speaking Pueblos of Oaxaca, Mexico (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1936); ECP, Peguche, Canton of
Otavalo, Privince of Imbabura, Ecuador: A Study of Andean
Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).
41. See Deacon, "The Republic of the Spirit."
42. Robert Herrick, The End of Desire (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1932). For Boas, see Zumwalt, Wealth and Rebellion,p.
122.
43. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," in Lawrence
Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 317-
333, esp. p. 326.
44. ECP, "Anthropology and Prediction," AA 44 (July-September
1942): 337-344; ECP, "The Study of Variants," Journal of
American Folklore 33 (April-June 1920): 87-90. ECP died
unexpectedly on December 19, 1941, following a routine
appendectomy She had just returned from a field trip to Ecuador in
apparent good health.
45. ECP, "The Study of Variants," p. 89; ECP, Peguche,p. 13.
46. ECP, "A Pacifist Patriot," review of Untimely Papers, by
Randolph Bourne, Dial 68 (January-June 1920): 367-370, esp. 370;
William James, "Pragmatism and Humanism," in Pragmatism: A
New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans,
Green, 1907), reprinted in William James: Writings, 1902-1910
(New York: Library of America, 1987), pp. 591-605, esp. p. 599.
47. James, "Pragmatism and Humanism," p. 599; James, "The
Energies of Man," pp. 3-5; Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient:
A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1992); Gertrude Stein, in Kellner, ed.,
A Gertrude Stein Companion,p. 4. For notions of stranger, outsider
within, traitorous identity, fractured identity, and exile, see Patricia
Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: HarperCollins,
1991); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); Sandra Harding, Whose Sci-
 Page 193
ence? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Mary Lynn Broe and
Angela Ingram, eds., Women's Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989). For the alternative
notion of interpreter, see Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and
Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity, and Intellectuals
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
 Page 194

Lesbian in Academe
Susan Krieger
Notlong ago, a graduate student called to interview me for a
master's thesis on experiences of lesbian and gay sociologists. She
was interested in the effects of being gay on their academic lives.
Was prejudice an issue? What happened in their universities and
over the course of a career? I agreed to do the interview, but I told
no one about it, for I felt I ought not to speak with her. Although I
do have relevant experiences as a lesbian, I have always felt these
experiences are not supposed to matter. Being a lesbian is,
internally, a source of strength to me, but I feel it is a private choice
I have made with full knowledge that this choice must often be
hidden. Although I know discrimination exists in academic
settings, and that I have experienced it, it feels to me as if it
violates a code to turn around and point this out. It violates the
code of accepting the conditions of my chosen status, and I fear
something awful will happen to me as a resultthe homophobia, or
discrimination, that affects me will get worse.
Such a fear of making things worse by calling attention to them
probably accompanies any stigmatized minority status or sense of
personal vulnerability With homosexuality and, in particular,
lesbianism, the secrecy aspect of the status stands out more than in
some other cases, for it is assumed that homosexuality can be
hidden, that an individual can pass (as straight), and often should,
thus disappearing as gay. One consequence of passing is that in
becoming invisible to the outside world, one often becomes
invisible to oneself. Lesbianism adds to the invisibility, since
lesbians are women, and women and their choices are often viewed
as unimportant and so they are not seen. When I seek to identify
experiences I have had as a lesbian that have affected my academic
career, I often feel I am pointing to something not there, or to a
factor that does not matter much, or that should not be pointed to
anyway because it is too private.
Initially, when I thought about speaking with the interviewer, I was
apprehensive because of the nature of the subject, although I was
inter-
© 1997 by Susan Krieger. A version of this essay appeared in The
Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women by Susan
Krieger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1996). Used by permission.
 Page 195
ested to speak about it. We scheduled a time to conduct the
interview on the phone long-distance. When the interviewer called
and our discussion began, I immediately became afraid, much as
people I have interviewed have become afraid. I feared what would
happen to me as a result of this research. Specifically, I feared
having it known in the outside world that I was a lesbian, odd as
that my sound, and worse, having it known that I had recently acted
like one.
My fear was particularly acute at that moment because of an
incident that had occurred the spring before when I had denied
permission to a hostile male graduate student to take one of my
courses. The class was a feminist research seminar. He was
opposed to studying women. He felt wronged by me and took his
case to university administrators and to the campus newspapers,
which published stories sympathetic to him. Several months later,
articles drawing from the story that appeared in the campus right-
wing newspaper were published in a national newsmagazine and in
a local city paper, disparaging me for denying permission to the
male student.
At the time of the incident, several feminist faculty members had
publicly criticized what I had done. The class to which I had denied
the male student access suffered internallymany of the students
were scared, and the process of learning was disrupted. Although I
had thought the controversy would be over when the course ended,
the next fall the campus ombudsperson called me into her office
because two women graduate students who had been in my
courseone of whom, I suspected, was a closet lesbianneeded to
pursue the matter. They had spoken with the ombudsperson, not
mentioning the incident of the male graduate student, saying only
that they wished to complain about my approach to teaching. That
winter, ten months after I had denied permission to that one man,
my teaching contract was not renewed for an upcoming three-year
term. The next spring, both of the courses I was teaching were
affected when the students in them were unusually homophobic in
their responses to me. Hard to prove as related to any of this, but
disturbingly coincidental, just when the male student's story hit the
campus papers, both my car and my lover's car began to be
repeatedly stolen and vandalized in front of our house. "Anyone
hate you?" asked the police officer who came out to investigate.
"Give any student an 'F' recently?"
When I spoke with the interviewer on the phone, all these events
were on my mind. Thus, I was afraid perhaps far more than the
situation of a master's thesis warranted. I was sure that people
would know it was me in the thesis the interviewer would write, or
in an article based on it, or
 Page 196
they would hear about me through researchers' gossip networks.
They would know I had said no to a man, and they would expect
the same, or worse, from me. I would be seen as a person who is
unsafe to hire, as a betrayer of the trust that holds up the system.
No one in the whole country, I felt, would ever hire me again if
they knew.
I may have had an exaggerated expectation of adverse
consequences from a master's thesis, but I did not, I think, have an
exaggerated fear. There are consequences of saying no to men. The
instance of my saying no to the male student had already unleashed
a set of them for me. This incident became controversial, in large
part, I felt, because it raised the specter of my being a lesbiana
separatist, a man-hater, not a male-aligned woman, a woman who
risks being denied male privileges and who is, therefore,
vulnerable. Even though I felt my lesbianism had affected what
happened to me, it was difficult for me at the time of the
controversy, and even after, to identify the consequences I
experienced as related specifically to my being a lesbian. For
example, during the more recent spring term, when I saw students
in one of my classes avoid looking directly at me at times when I
expected they would, or when they had trouble talking about the
content of The Mirror Dance, my book on lesbians, I thought I was
probably a bad teacher, or that I was feeling distant from the
students, or maybe the students were right that there was not much
provocative in my book to discuss. I did not think the students were
afraid of me because I was a lesbian, or that this fear was related to
the controversy of the year before when I had said no to the male
graduate student.
The previous year, after I denied the male student permission, I had
felt the silences that set in during class discussions, the
fragmentation of morale, and the various oppositions to me, and I
had thought, similarly, that I was not doing well as a teacher, or as
a person, that the students had really different values than mine, or
that they simply did not like me. I did not think, "I am a lesbian. I
have said no to a man publicly. They are scared of me, of being like
me, and of losing the support of men." When I heard the
conservative women faculty members at the meeting in which my
case was discussed asking, "What do you mean by woman-
centered?" and "Why didn't you take care of this man?" I felt hurt,
and I was not sure why they were picking on me. I knew I was a
lesbian and they were straight, and that this made a difference, but
exactly what difference was hard to determine when the challenges
were so indirect.
Now I told the interviewer about my fears concerning this still
troublesome incident and what might yet happen to me, and she
agreed to substitute another example when she wrote her thesis and
article, rather than
 Page 197
saying what I had actually done. I felt cowardly requesting her to
hide my situation, and I hoped such a change would not harm the
truth. We next discussed the many more usual circumstances when
it is not clear to me whether my being a lesbian is affecting
responses I receive. When I see women secretaries and
administrative staff in university offices looking at me, for
instance, I always wonder, Am I attractive to them, or frightening?
Do they see me as a woman, or a lesbiana mannish woman? What
difference is it to them? What about the male administrators who
pass judgment on my hirings and interview me, do they see a
woman who is a lesbian and, therefore, threatening to them? Do
they assume that because I am a lesbian, I will not do their bidding,
and, therefore, who needs me? What about male studentsis it only a
facade when they defer to me, or seem to like me? Do they fear
that because I am a lesbian, I will not like them? What about other
women faculty, whether friendly on the surface, or formal and
distantdoes my lesbianism scare them? No one speaks of these
things. The women students, who am I to them? "Are you afraid of
me because I am a lesbian?" I asked one woman student who kept
challenging me in class this past spring. "No," she swore up and
down, she was not. Some of her best friends were lesbians. That
just could not be.
When I did not get my teaching contract renewed, the obvious
reason was that the university was having a budget crisis and
lecturers were easy to eliminate. It seemed to have nothing to do
with my being a lesbian, maybe it had something to do with my
being a woman, certainly nothing to do with my having said no to
the male student the year before. Usually when my contracts are
not renewed, they say it is because of the nontraditional nature of
my work. When I am not hired, that is also the reason given. I have
found it is very hard to put a finger on anything important that has
ever been denied me as a sociologist and say, "This is because I am
a lesbian." There always seem to be other, better reasons. The
lesbian part of the picture always disappears, as it does, for
instance, when gay people say, "We are just like you. We have
families. We raise children. We want to be loved." Yet we are
different, or else why the consequences? Why the choice to be a
lesbian in the first place?
When our cars were repeatedly stolen and vandalized, the police
finally decided it might be a hate crime, but the hate crime squad
never came out to get the facts. The threat hung there, unsolved.
This type of crime, we were told, was usually impossible to pin
down. If my hostile male graduate student had any link to our cars
being attacked, I concluded, I was not going to find out. I was not
of the mind to send the cops after him. Why stir up the
antagonism? The police, were they to question him,
 Page 198
would probably find nothing to link this shy, ivory-tower, third-
year graduate student to car thieves.
So I said to the woman interviewer, feeling very tense just then
about my prospects for another job, thinking about the cars, and
wondering about the ways I sometimes think people look at me in
hallways, "I might as well walk around in black leather and chains.
I might as well rub it in. Maybe that would be better than being
nice about it." She laughed. We both laughed. It was the highest,
most intimate moment of the interview. I felt the interviewer, too,
had had this thought. She was also a lesbian, as well as a good
interviewer. It was a funny imagethe two of us who had never met,
talking on the phone, each imagining the other in black leather and
chains walking around her relevant university wearing a sign
saying, "lesbian (hates men, rejects being feminine, seeks to seduce
other women)," or with a star symbol conveying the same meaning
emblazoned on her forehead. We discussed how we each tried to
hide it, but we always felt other people knew.
During the interview, I wished not to remember facts of my past.
The interviewer tried repeatedly to get me to go back through the
experiences of my career in a chronological way, beginning with
graduate school, to trace the effects of lesbianism or discriminatory
treatment related to it. I was reluctant to trace myself in that way.
Instead, I felt mostly the jeopardy of my present. We did, however,
identify some events of the past. There again, it felt to me like
secrets I was not supposed to tell, for fear others would think I was
betraying the system or acting improperly by speaking. My secrets,
however, are probably not uncommon. On my first job, for
example, as a visiting assistant professor, a senior male faculty
member wrote me a note after my interview. It was on a pretty little
card with a pressed, dried flower included in it. I figured he had
some sort of fantasy, and that it was harmless. When I arrived to
take the job at the start of the fall term, he picked me up at the
airport and drove me around to look at houses. The damage was
soon done. The first night, when he offered, I refused to stay with
him at his house. Two days later, when I took an apartment that he
drove me to see, I again refused his offer to spend the night with
him, explaining that I was a lesbian. He quickly disappeared. Later
in the semester at a faculty and graduate student party, I remember
the rose-colored sweater I was wearing and how he kept looking at
my breasts. Not long after that, the faculty of my department
considered the continuation of my appointment. He strongly
opposed it and his senior position helped to put an end to me at that
university. Of course, other reasons were giventhe nature of my
work, for instance.
 Page 199
I am not saying that sleeping with male faculty members is a way
to get ahead. I am saying I think it might have helped had I been
wearing black leather and chains. At least, the betrayal element
would then be missing. This man would have known who I was
from the start. But then, again, men do not always accept what they
see.
From that first job, I moved to a position at another university,
again as a visiting assistant professor. I remember I did not attend a
faculty party at the start of the year. The night of the party, I
wondered whether I should have gone. Generally, I did not
socialize with the members of my department in a way that
suggested it mattered to me, and at that university such socializing
might have mattered, since the faculty were unusually young; they
were all my age or younger. But I was a lesbian. Moving to a new
town, I had sought out other lesbians for my social life. When I
finally went to a faculty party late in the fall, I came and left
quickly. I still remember the dark interior of the male faculty
member's house where the party was held. The living room was
crowded and I was not interested in meeting people's wives. I had
another party to go to that night, at a gay woman's house, and I had
a lesbian lover who was waiting to go there with me. I walked
through the straight faculty party quickly and did not engage
anyone in conversation of more than a few syllables. I was glad not
to have to take all that very seriously.
At that second university, there was, again, a senior male faculty
member, although he was younger than the senior male at the first
school. He came over to my house one night after a preliminary
show of interest. I knew why he was coming and I planned to tell
him I was a lesbian. I hoped we might be friends. That was my first
experience with a man who takes it as a challenge when told that a
woman is a lesbian. After I informed him, there was some
wrestling on a bed that served as a couch in the living room, and
finally he gave up.
Three of us had been hired that year as visiting assistant professors.
One of us would be kept on. It was not me, and it was not the nicer
of the two men. It was a man who had a dark brown beard, and
who, when he got dressed up, wore a white linen suit, and whose
wife had recently left him. There was nothing particularly wrong
with him. He was more like the man who had come over to my
house than like anyone else on the faculty
The man who came over that night was one of the three male
faculty members who formed the committee that decided on who to
hire permanently for the organizational position. They made their
decision before Christmas, although the appointment would not
start until the next academic year. For some reason, they wished to
make a decision quickly I
 Page 200
remember walking to my car one day not long after I was told that I
would not be hired, thinking that if it took a dress to get a job, I
would wear one to my next interview. I would ask people I knew if
a dress would make a difference, and if so, I would do what I had
not been willing to do before and get one. As it turned out, I did not
wear a dress to either of the job interviews I went to that year, and I
did not get either job. I never took seriously wearing a white linen
suit like the bearded man who got the job in my department, but a
vision of myself in a white suit, looking just like him, often
occurred to me.
At one point, I visited each of the three men who formed the
committee that made the hiring decision, and asked them why I did
not get the job. I was told that the bearded man was more
conventional. He was more the straight-line organizational type and
could bring members of the nonuniversity community into the
department's organizational program. I had brought nonuniversity
people into my courses as guests, and I felt hurt that what they
were saying was not true of me. I had probably already brought in
more nonuniversity people than he had, but that was not the point.
These are blatant examples, two cases where a man I rejected
sexually later rejected me in an institutional sense. Most cases are
less clear. The clear ones, it seems to me, are less hurtful. At least
they are less hurtful emotionally at the moment of their occurrence.
In the long run, however, any rejection, or loss of a job, has
consequences. In the second university, the job I did not get was
one I very much wanted. I had developed attachments to people
there and to that part of the country. I still think about how my life
might have been different had I been able to stay. By this second
time, too, I was beginning to feel that I should expect rejection
when people got to know me, as they do when one is a visitor
rather than a set of credentials on a curriculum vitae. Whether or
not I was rejected because I was a lesbian, I felt I had been rejected
because I was myself.
There are other less clear examples of experiences in which my
being a lesbian has been tied to rejection, or to my being held at a
distance by others. I have taught temporarily at a variety of
universities, for instance, and I have noticed that my social circles
are not those of the heterosexual women around me. They have
husbands and I do not, and this often seems to be the problem. I
sometimes feel hurt because the lesbian/straight divide limits the
friends I can have at any place. The effect is not necessarily
institutional disadvantage, since women do not have great
advantages in universities. Mostly, I feel a loss. I notice the
lesbian/straight divide and I never
 Page 201
like it. It is another invisible presence, something supposedly not a
matter of gay and straight, but of personal choice, and assumed not
to be of much importance. Yet it is important to me, for I lose
relationships with other women.
Another kind of example concerns my research, since I have done
work on the subject of lesbians in The Mirror Dance and in articles
about lesbian identity and about researching lesbians. 1 When I
think about my work, I usually do not think it is marked by the fact
that I have studied lesbians. However, it must be and, of course,
this must make a difference. What if I had studied something else?
Banks, for instance, or government, or men and women in high-
technology industries? When I first did the research for The Mirror
Dance, I felt I had a great advantage: here was a fascinating
community of lesbians, and as a member of it, I had access as an
insider. I did not think that a study of lesbians, because it is about a
"marginal" group of women, would have marginalizing
consequences for me within sociology. Yet even in feminist and
women's studies, I would find the study of lesbians would set me
apart, carrying with it the same discomforts that lesbianism does: a
discomfort with sex between women, a fear of being called man
hating, and a fear of losing ties with men and of losing privileges
from men.
I would discover that there is a deep-seated fear, which can lead to
hostility, both in women's studies circles and elsewhere, as if
lesbians would take over the institution if granted more than
minimal courses to teach and minimal faculty positions. When
known to be an academic couple, lesbians are often closely
scrutinized, more so than heterosexual couples in the same
university. I have found such scrutiny to be intimidating, especially
when used as a device of institutional control. It has seemed to me
a shocking invasion of privacy But then the boundaries of women,
whether as individuals or as a couple, are often not respected.
Unfortunately, I think, it still pays to be invisible, whether for
financial reasons or to defend against the hostility and homophobia
of others entering into one's private life. Self-protectively, I have
tried to be quiet and to keep to myself in the institutions where I
have worked, but I have not been able to be invisible.
If studying lesbians, and studying them as I dovisibly, like a
woman, speaking in the colloquial, dealing with the personalhas
disadvantaged me, however, I have tended to overlook that
disadvantage. What I study, and how I study it, has seemed to me
so much my choice, and my virtue, that I have a blind spot when it
comes to thinking that others might devalue my work because of its
subject, or because of my own life. But they
 Page 202
do. After one hiring meeting, in particular, which occurred a few
years after The Mirror Dance came out, I was told that the faculty,
all men but one, did not find my work interesting or exciting. No
wonder, I thought.
If I have been marginalizeddisregarded, devalued, pushed aside
because I have studied lesbians, I have never felt I could do much
about it, which may be one reason I have ignored it. I have also felt
that judgments about my work that reflect a bias against lesbians
are not judgments about methat they do not really affect me
personally, or cause me to think less well of myself. However, that
is probably not true.
Responses to my work are responses to its style and contentand to
mewhich sometimes confuses me, and often obscures the lesbian
issue for me. Yet I do think that my experimenting with narrative
form is related to my perspective as a lesbian. The Mirror Dance,
written in an unusual multiple-person stream of consciousness
stylefrom the points of view of the seventy-eight women I
interviewedreads like gossip, like overhearing women in a small
town talking about themselves and each other: ''There was a lot of
gossip, said Emily. It was not ill intentioned. It was Hollywood-
type gossip, infatuation'Last night she was seen with her.' She make
hopeless attempts to control it sometimes." 2 There is a lesbian feel
to this gossip, joined with a sense that The Mirror Dance breaks
barriers of convention by inventing its own style of expression, as
do many lesbians, and as I did in attempting faithfully to depict this
lesbian community.
My subsequent study, Social Science and the Self,which argued that
the social scientific observer should be acknowledged more fully in
our studies, dealt, too, with lesbianism, but in a more indirect way.
In large parts of Social Science and the Self,to illustrate my thesis, I
spoke about my personal experiences related to my work, and I
spoke about being a lesbian. This study was unusual in that it
combined my self-reflections with discussions of self and
knowledge by women artistsGeorgia O'Keeffe and Pueblo Indian
potters. The book concluded with discussions by eight feminist
scholars whom I interviewed about self-expression in their work.
Four of these eight scholars were lesbians. Except for one,
however, I did not identify them as lesbian in the book, in part
because they did not mention it when I interviewed them, and in
part because I thought identifying them would cause readers to
discount what they said. I feared readers might view their
comments as the peculiar views of lesbians, rather than as more
broadly relevant. I do not know if I would closet my choice of
subjects again, but that I did so bears noting because it illustrates
how easily lesbianism becomes invisible. It seems not to matter, or
it seems to be something that should not be singled out for fear of
adverse consequences.
 Page 203
The issue of closeting lesbianism aside, Social Science and the Self
raised questions about narrative form: how is this study to be
categorized? How does valuing self-expression and originality
change a sociological work? How does speaking from a woman's
view change social science? Although I did not explicitly discuss
the issue of a lesbian approach to knowledge in Social Science and
the Self,I think that being a lesbian and seeking women's
perspectivesespecially nonconforming onesgo together for me. To a
significant extent, both The Mirror Dance and Social Science and
the Self are lesbian expressions. They break away from male
academic forms and seek to use an inner female voice in ways that
challenge conventional expectations. The Mirror Dance presented
a collective lesbian voice. In Social Science and the Self,I
articulated my own individual voice more, and I sought out
individual statements from others. In both studies, I was concerned
with the difficulties of women's efforts to create their own forms of
expression. 3
Recently, I have been asked by people who know my work and its
concern with lesbianism, "Given the current rage for lesbian and
gay studies, why don't you have a regular job by now?" I was
startled, at first, to be asked this question. It caused me to think
about why I have not been swept up in this wave of popularity.
Although I am a lesbian, I am not a particularly trendy or
entrepreneurial one. I think that the current vogue for gayness in
academia, including the interest in "queer theory," will further other
women who play the male academic game far more so than I do,
and those who already have security, or a high status, at a
university It is deceptive, I think, to see those few token lesbians
who are rewarded for studying lesbians, and then to assume that
everyone will be rewarded, or that I will be.
As a writer and scholar, I am marked by who I am. Although I wish
it were otherwise, I may never become a conventional success in
terms of salary, position, and popularity. In part, this is because, for
me, being a lesbian is part of a desire not to fit a mold. My
lesbianism, which is central to my work in general, has different
value premises than those aimed at proving I can do as others do.
Queer theory, like much that becomes popular in academic circles,
is male theory, which may account for its appeal.4 I wish to express
a female sensibility Further, it seems to me that any trend in
scholarship, whether female or male, brings with it its own kind of
standardization. I may always be slightly too different from what is
standard to be fully embraced in the academic world, even as a
representative of a minority My lesbianism, in some way, stands
for my difference. I do not mean by this to understate the costs to
me of that difference. I have sought to follow my own values in my
work, but I have never wanted to be penalized for doing so.
 Page 204
Finally, I wish to speak of homophobia. It runs through all my
experiences like an invisible thread. It seems not to determine
something major, like whether or not I receive a job, but rather to
consist of small slights toward which I try to turn the other cheek.
Yet the small slights have a way of building. Last spring, for
instance, I heard, by word of mouth, a piece of anonymous gossip
about a woman graduate student I knew and liked. It was
introduced to me as something too horrible for the student herself
to speak of. The item was this: a senior male faculty member on the
dissertation committee of the woman studentwho may, or may not,
have been a lesbianhad suggested that the student seek my advice
for some part of her study because it was about lesbians, and I was
a lesbian. The awful part, according to the gossip, was the way the
faculty member referred to me when he made his suggestion. He
spoke with his hand held up to his face, looking off to the side, as if
he were speaking of something dirty, and in a snide tone. "You
know," he said of me, "she's an out lesbian," with the emphasis on
"out." When I heard this story, I was not horrified but, rather, I felt
let down. So what? I wondered. What is wrong with being known
as a lesbian? The student, however, was so hurt and frightened by
the remark that she never came to ask me for advice.
I usually think it is not the gestures like this man's, in which the
scorn is on the surface, but those in which the scorn is covered up
that are more serious in their consequence. The covered-up affronts
are more difficult to identify and thus to deal with. I tend to think I
am more hurt by the student in a classroom who sits across from
me in silent distrust because she wishes not to be homophobic, but
still is, than I am by the man in the background who disdainfully
tells a graduate student to look me up, and also, I suspect, votes
negatively on my hiring. However, the two are related. The student
keeps her distance because the man is there. The man speaks his
mind because no one stops him. I may not be hurt when told of the
man's scorn, but I am hurt by the graduate student when, in not
seeking my advice, she seems not to value me. Homophobia has a
hidden nature because it is a fear. Acts that stimulate that fear are
interrelated. They are also, I think, disabling. I have found the
repeated job rejections I have experienced to be disabling, not only
externally, but internally, in terms of my self-confidence and ability
to do my work. However, I know that those who attempt to
conform, to be invisible, also are disabled by not being able to be
themselves in their work.
When I think about hurts of the academic system, I do not usually
think I have been hurt because I am a lesbian. I think of things I
can see more easily, and of explanations that have nothing to do
with my choosing
 Page 205
women. My main hurt in academia is lack of a regular joba full-
time, full-status position. I also think I have been hurt because of
the ways people have spoken to me over the years about my not
having such a job. They make comments such as: "I wish I could
have all that time off." "If you just were willing to move." "You are
happier this way." "You would not be so productive if you were
full-time employed." "You don't do mainstream work, what do you
expect?'' meaning, of course, "you deserve what you get." I feel
hurt by these words, to the point of tears, every time I hear them.
Over time, however, I have learned to speak back to the words and
eventually to focus on the insensitivity of the speaker: "This person
does not realize, she does not know. I do deserve. I would be more
productive. I am not happier. I have reasons for not moving, and
for not taking just any job." Yet the hurt continues.
I have learned to think of my hurt in the academic world as very
much related to the nature of my workto my unconventional
choices about what my work is, and where I do it. I have also
learned to see this hurt as related to a larger economic circumstance
that has existed since the time I completed my degree. I did my
graduate work at a time of plenty. The academic world
subsequently became more constricted, and it came to have less
room for people like me. Such an economic explanation seems, at
times, very clear to me. I see it with pain, but I see it.
What I almost never see is that my choice to be a lesbian is
significant in all this. I can see that being a lesbian is an element in
the whole bundle that is me, but it is hard for me to feel that this
lesbian element is more important, say, than my refusal to keep
moving for a job, or my penchant for doing things my own way.
However, I now think I must take into account how I felt in the
interview with the master's student, how great my fear was, how
strong my denial, how shocked even I was by my own constant
dismissal of the facts of my past and present. By the end of the
interview, I was sweaty and tired and I wanted to stop early. "These
are things I do not like to think about," I kept telling the
interviewer. "These are things I do not want to know," and yet I
know them.
In the past, I have viewed parts of my lesbian experience as
incidents not to be spoken of in the same breath as I speak of my
academic career. 5 I have feared I would be making the situation
worse for myself by speaking of events that are too petty or too
private. I feared that just as I dismiss the importance of these
events, others would too. Yet my being a lesbian is not a private, or
separate, part of my life. It is not separate for me, nor for those who
respond to me. It is not unimportant for any of us. As a lesbian, I
choose women over men, I align myself with women, and I often
deny
 Page 206
men access to me. To the extent that I do so, I am alternately
vulnerable, threatening, and disposable in a system where male-
based choices and alliances are the important ones. My experience
is not that of every lesbian, but there may be elements of it that
others may share, such as the sense of having a stigma that is
accepted, and a pain that is not felt, or of having a wish that black
leather would solve the problem, or simply wishing that the system
had other rules.
Notes
A version of this essay also appears in Susan Krieger, The Family
Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 155-68. The
Family Silver includes essays on feminist teaching, lesbian
experiences in work and family settings, and the sociology of
gender. For conducting the interview described in "Lesbian in
Academe," I want to thank Nicole C. Raeburn; for editorial help, I
thank Estelle Freedman.
1. In addition to The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's
Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) and
Social Science and Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), my other
previous works dealing with lesbianism are "Lesbian Identity and
Community: Recent Social Science Literature," Signs 8:1 (1982):
91-108; and "Beyond 'Subjectivity': The Use of the Self in Social
Science," Qualitative Sociology 8:4 (1985): 309-24, reprinted in
Social Science and the Self,pp. 165-83. Lesbian community
responses to The Mirror Dance are discussed in "Snapshots of
Research," in Social Science and the Self, pp. 150-64.
2. Krieger, The Mirror Dance, p. 25.
3. Lesbian bases for theories of knowledge are discussed in Sandra
Harding, "Thinking from the Perspective of Lesbian Lives," Whose
Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 249-67; Diana Fuss,
"Lesbian and Gay Theory: The Question of Identity Politics," in
Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New
York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 97-112; and Teresa de Lauretis, The
Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), which offers a
theory of lesbian subjectivity as part of an exploration of the inner
psychic roots of lesbian desire and sexuality. In my view, all works
that seek to identify ways that lesbian existence, subjectivity, or
social life are unique point to bases for lesbian theories of
knowledge. For a review of other lesbian scholarly literature, see
the notes to The Family Silver.
4. A discussion of "queer theory as male theory" can be found in
Terry Castle, "A Polemical Introduction; or, The Ghost of Greta
Garbo," in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and
Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp.
12-15; says Castle, "When it comes to lesbians, many people have
trouble seeing what's in front of them" (p. 2). Teresa de Lauretis,
similarly, notes "a failure of
 Page 207
representation, an enduring silence on the specificity of lesbianism
in the contemporary 'gay and lesbian' discourse," Differences 3:2
(1991): vii. Donna Penn speaks of a queer "erasure" of lesbian
experiences in "Queer: Theorizing Politics and History," Radical
History Review 62 (1995): 24-42. Jacquelyn N. Zita discusses
potential dangers for women in "the attempt to create an
interdisciplinary area of queer studies," including the silencing of
women's views and the "camping up of gender and the gutting out
of feminism" (p. 262). She suggests that perhaps ''a new rebellion
of bride resisters is in order" (p. 271), in "Gay and Lesbian Studies:
Yet Another Unhappy Marriage," in Linda Garber, ed., Tilting the
Tower: Lesbians, Teaching, Queer Subjects (New York: Routledge,
1994), pp. 258-76.
A similar concern with the invisibility of women appears in
Marilyn Frye, "Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement:
Another View of Male Supremacy Another Separatism," in The
Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, Calif.:
The Crossing Press, 1983), pp. 128-51. Frye says of lesbians and
gay men, "we deviate from very different norms" (p. 130) and
points out that gay male effeminacy, and the male impersonation of
women, displays no love of women, but rather is a "casual and
cynical mockery of women." For women, "femininity is the
trapping of oppression," while for men, it is more often "a
naughtiness indulged in . . . by those who believe in their immunity
to contamination" (p. 137).
5. For discussions of experiences of other lesbian faculty, some of
them similar to my own, three recent important collections are Toni
A. H. McNaron, Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics
Confronting Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1996); Beth Mintz and Esther D. Rothblum, eds., Lesbians
in Academia: Degrees of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1997);
and Linda Garber, ed., Tilting the Tower: Lesbians, Teaching,
Queer Subjects (New York: Routledge, 1994); see especially Mary
Klages, "The Ins and Outs of a Lesbian Academic," pp. 235-42, for
a discussion of job interview experiences. An important earlier
collection is Margaret Cruikshank, ed., Lesbian Studies: Present
and Future (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1982); see
especially Jane Gurko, "Sexual Energy in the Classroom," pp. 25-
31, for a discussion of "particular sexual dynamics set off by a
lesbian teacher" and of a pattern of unusually high student
expectations that a lesbian teacher will be an especially good
mother, often followed by a letdown (pp. 29-30). An important
overview based on a recent study of sociologists is Verta Taylor
and Nicole C. Raeburn, "Identity Politics as High-Risk Activism:
Career Consequences for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Sociologists,"
Social Problems 42:2 (1995): 252-73, including a discussion of
how engaging in lesbian and gay scholarship has affected
individual careers.
Additional personal accounts by lesbians include: Elenie Opffer,
"Coming Out to Students: Notes from the College Classroom," in
R. Jeffrey Ringer, Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication
and the Construction of Homosexuality (New York: New York
University Press, 1994), pp. 296-321; Judith McDaniel, "Is There
Room for Me in the Closet? Or, My Life as the Only Lesbian
Professor," in Margo Culley and Catherine Portuges, eds.,
Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching (Boston:
Routledge, 1985), pp. 130-35; Rebecca Mark, "Teaching from the
Open Closet," in Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds.,
Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 245-59; Jacqueline
Taylor, "Performing the (Lesbian) Self: Teacher as Text," in Ringer,
Queer
 Page 208
Words,pp. 289-95; and Ruthann Robson, "Pedagogy, Jurisprudence,
and Finger-Fucking: Lesbian Sex in a Law School Classroom," in
Karla Jay, ed., Lesbian Erotics (New York: New York University
Press, 1995), pp. 28-39.
Henry Abelove discusses dilemmas posed by postmodernism for
the teaching of lesbian and gay subjects, in "The Queering of
Lesbian/Gay History," Radical History Review 62 (1995): 44-57;
the idea of queering is also explored in Julia Wallace, "Queer-ing
Sociology in the Classroom," Critical Sociology 20:3 (1994): 176-
92. For accounts of teaching at many levels, see Kevin Jennings,
ed., One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their
Stories (Boston: Alyson, 1994). For experiences of students as well
as of a-lesbian teacher, see Harriet Malinowitz, Textual
Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of
Discourse Communities (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook
Publishers, 1995).
 Page 209

Telling Tales out of School: Three Short Stories of a

Feminist Sociologist
Sarah Fenstermaker
Ithas always troubled me that in most sociological analysis, once a
story is told, there appear to be no lapses, few apparent
contradictions, and no loose ends. Such is the nature of all stories, I
suppose, but it has always seemed to me that sociological
storytelling should reflect a bit more of the complication,
confusion, and misfirings that are so characteristic of human
affairs. Social life is complicated, after all, in its endless collision
of structure and accident. And yet as I am called on to account for
my own life, I find two very different but nonetheless equally
tempting approaches to take. The first packages the life neatly,
where both event and motive are explained, employing some tidy
frameworkbe it psychological, historical, developmental, or what
have you. My traditional sociological training makes me easy with
this one. The other approach is to resist such neatness and to tell a
life as largely orchestrated by circumstance and opportunity and
informed only a bit by contemplation and self-reflection. But at
once the scholar resists: "Don't bring me field notes, I hear myself
(and the ghosts I carry with me) saying. "Tell what's really going
on. Tell a story."
The tension between the two approaches of course recapitulates the
quandary for all sociological analysisthe value of life historyand
poses one compelling question for this volume: what is the relation
between individual biography and history, the connection between
individual agency and social structure? Philip Abrams suggests that
the quandary is not solved until what he calls a "sociology of
process" supplants our old dualities of action and system. He
writes, "Society must be understood as a process constructed
historically by individuals who are constructed historically by
society." 1 Individuals, the history that makes them, and the history
they make are unique not because they emerge at particular
moments, or
Copyright © 1997 by Sarah Fenstermaker.
 Page 210
because they are crafted in specific fashion, but because they are
the outcome of a unique process, itself a product of individual
action and social structure. I will offer up three stories of a single
lifethree strandsthat simultaneously and reciprocally construct the
unfolding of a historically situated set of individual experiences.
Each strand highlights one autobiographical themethe emotional,
the political, or the intellectual. Each serves as context for the next
and moves the whole forward. Within each operates the
institutional backdrop for the individual experience told, as well as
the telling itself. Together they will form the next storytold another
timean as-yet-unrealized unfolding.
An Emotional Story
As I begin this story, I am struck by the fact that the person about
whom I write feels no longer to be "me." She is the one who did
most of the achieving to make my story solicited, and she is the one
on whom this strand must center. But I think of her now as an
earlier selfpresent, sometimes even palpably, but no longer visible,
and no longer in control. But I remember her very well. Up until a
decade ago, virtually all my life choices were fundamentally
influenced by a crippling fear of being discovered, found out,
called to accountand abandoned. Today the symptoms might be
labeled agoraphobia. Then the fear took whatever courage I could
muster to mask and control it. It shaped my occupational and
marital choices, my political identities, and also all the qualities I
value in myself that now remain as its legacy.
A boy from an upper-middle-class Indianapolis family, my father
studied engineering at Purdue and later studied law for a time.
Eventually, the Depression and the wishes of a domineering father
compelled him to join the family firm, which sold concrete-
reinforcing steel. He remained there and in his seventies retired as
CEO. My mother, the product of a Norwegian immigrant who was
(I am told) an exceptionally charming vaudevillian/inventor/drinker
and a working-class girl from Long Beach was raised in
Depression Manhattan by her mother and a widow friend. My
grandmother, having separated from her "good-for-nothing" actor
husband worked as New York City telephone operator (by night),
while "Aunt" Alva worked as a New York public school teacher
(by day). Together they made a family My mother spent her
childhood days at the movies or in the New York Public Library,
with the goal, simply, to read all its books. And perhaps she was
dreaming of the secure life she was to win when, in college in the
Midwest, she met and married my very "steady" father. An
unhappy
 Page 211
housewife, mother, and (always) transplanted New Yorker, my
mother began writing when I was in elementary school. (She
remembered with great fondness when I returned from school one
day and informed her that I had on some form designated her
occupation as "writer.") She published a number of short stories,
one novel, and two volumes of poetry. She died recently, at
seventy-five, still active as a short fiction critic and poet.
I always wanted to be a doctora real doctor. When I was growing
up in the 1950s, most people didn't query white upper-middle-class
girls about their aspirations beyond wife and motherhood. But I
remember that beginning about the age of three I told anyone who
asked, "Pediatrician." All things medical fascinated me. My own
pediatrician was a rather forbidding-looking womanwith the most
gentle touch imaginableand looked every inch the pioneer she
needed to be when, newly minted from Cornell Medical School she
opened her pediatric practice in 1927. By the time she treated me,
she had a vastly successful but not particularly lucrative practice in
the sleepy, provincial Indianapolis of my childhood.
I was often ill as a child, plagued by asthma, allergies, and
uncontrolled eczema. I spent enough extra time at Dr. Souter's
office to decide that doctoring kids like me was the most exalted of
adult activities. I am sure now that this aspiration was in large
measure my seeking out the most powerful adult position
possiblethe beginning of a much longer search for buffers to the
vulnerabilities I believed life imposed. 2 (I also wanted to be a boy,
no doubt for the same reason.)
My illness, and the stultifying life package my mother confronted
day to day, made her communicate extraordinary ambivalence,
guilt, and excessive indulgence to me, her last and most troubled
child. An insidious emotional dance resulted: as I demanded more
of my mother's time, she deeply begrudged more time in the
process. With that came her guilt, and indulgence of me, and so it
went. I read this bundle of always unspoken but powerful multiple
realities, but their constant denial made the emotional ground very
unsteady. I reacted with debilitating anger, depression, and
crippling dependence. By the age of seven, I was the officially
designated "difficult" child, acting out every emotion apparently
forbidden to my parents and my older brother and sister.
My siblings' emotional inheritances are different, and both carry
scars from our brand of family dysfunction. For me, this early
drama carried with it a certifiable case of schoolphobia, complete
with a private tutor and no clear sense of what was bothering me or
when it would stop. It was around then that I realized that no adult
would save me. I was either going to kill myself or hide the fear
and reenter the world. For twenty years
 Page 212
thereafter, I carried the secret fear that someone would find out I
wasn't entitled to that decision to be in the world. It was at that time
that my parents recall that I justthankfully"improved." 3
Since things were invariably what they seemed and not what they
seemed, I was bequeathed a fascination with and some talent for
discerning the "hidden" realities, the variety of "real" truths, and
the ambiguous message. This fascination has fueled my interests in
sociology and specifically the powerful sociological vantage of
social construction, the nature of stigma, and the backstage
qualities of anythingespecially work organizations. In all of that, it
is always the process of it that is so compelling to me. The
outcomes are visible, but the hidden realities lie elsewhere. Or so it
appeared. I also came away with a good comic sense, and the
ability to make people laughboth to control and to deflect attention
from what I feared they would see: the awful reality I always
imagined was obvious without such distractions.
A Political Story
My discovery of inequality and my sense of myself as a political
person illustrate the complicated dovetailing of institutional
structure, historical period, and individual personality. Race
inequalitya reality hidden with the help of white denialcompelled
my interest in a very personal way in high school. My father, a
Republican moderate, and my mother, a liberal Democrat, sent my
older brother and sister, as well as me (in the mid-1960s), to the
oldest (and most venerated) public high school in town. My father
himself had attended that school, and since its founding as
"Indianapolis High School" just after the Civil War, Shortridge
High School boasted of its students' achievements: many National
Merit scholars, one of only a handful of student-run daily
newspapers, a world-class choral music program, a state
championship basketball team, and many distinguished alumni.
During the 1950s and 1960s, it was also situated in the middle of
the black community and was pointed to with pride as a successful
"experiment" in racial integration. But it was an embattled time for
the school, with its African-American population increasing and
many parents taking their children elsewhere, to "safer," whiter
high schools. Its practical and indelible contribution to my political
socialization came in its defensive packaging of school pride with
an unlikely analysis of the need for racial equality, equal rights, and
the possibility of social change, made with others.
Since that time I have met no one else who experienced such
notions reinforced during their high school pep rallies or any who
were called on
 Page 213
to defend her or his school against racist attacks. But for me and
my classmates, it was certainly a moment of political imprinting
that in one way or another affected each one of us. Thereafter,
nearly every other Left political idea that came my wayfrom the
now tame notion of interracial dating, to Malcolm X (before the
movie), to antiwar protests, to the Black Panther Party, to the
Women's Liberation Movement and guerrilla theaterall seemed in
some way to be a simple extension of those early messages about
racial justice.
Much prodded by a radical high school history teacher who thought
her alma mater perfect for me, I mustered what little taste for
adventure I had to go away to schoolGoucher College for Women,
just outside Baltimore. My most vivid memories of it are not of the
classroom but of dormitory rooms full of women analyzing,
planning, arguing endlessly about the Vietnam War. And the
soundtrack was rock and roll.
After a brief developmental stop at Gene McCarthy's "Children's
Crusade," ending the Vietnam War consumed most of our energies.
4 And with it came the wonderful first Marxist notions about class,
its connection to race inequality, colonialism, and American
imperialism. (No women, no thought given to gender equity. Only
invisibility.)5 During my sophomore and junior years at Goucher, I
attended meetings of the New University Conference (NUC), a
national organization for academics mobilized around antiwar/anti-
imperialism activities. Since Goucher had no graduate students,
undergraduates were invited to participate. This allowed me the
chance to watch (most of us undergrads were too intimidated to
speak) faculty from Goucher and Johns Hopkins plan, argue, and
build coalitions with other Baltimore groups around antiwar
politics. Baltimore was close enough to Washington to allow us to
be part of all the Student Mobilization demonstrations in 1968 and
1969, and from those we came away with not only an exaggerated
sense of our own political agency, but also a clear feeling that our
individual actions were indeed related to historical (and historic)
events. In no other political activity or political time since have I
felt that so strongly
Some exposure to feminism and women's liberation also came
during the end of my three years in Baltimore. Through NUC, I had
got to know Florence Howe, my academic adviser, and it was she
who first introduced me to the notion of gender inequality.6
Interestingly, the news of women's liberation had simply not got
out to my sociology classesalthough it sometimes creeped into
Alice Rossi's family seminars. When I began to really listen to
Florence, I responded immediately to the intellectual argument.
After all, I must have always known about power differentials; it
was no
 Page 214
accident that I had wanted to be a boy so long ago. I had also been
a good athlete in school and remembered my resentful confusion
over the state of affairs where once a girl reached high school, there
were simply no team sports available. But it was not until the next
year that the arguments for women's liberation would begin to take
on real meaning.
That same year, I met Richard Berkalso through NUCwhen he was
then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins studying with Peter
Rossi. A very short courtship (much of it during political meetings
or in the pizza parlors afterward) resulted in marriage that same
year. I followed Dick to Northwestern, where he took a job as
assistant professor in sociology and where I was to finish my last
year as an undergraduate. I always wince a little when I think of
1970: at age twenty finding a feminism that would direct me for the
rest of my life and marrying because I believed I was unable to live
on my own. I needed a champion, and Richard Berk was simply the
most powerful person I could imagine. Luckily, he thought so, too.
I also changed my name. It took all of a week to regret that
decision and seventeen years before I changed it back.
If my memories of Baltimore revolve around antiwar activity, my
memories of Evanston (and Chicago) revolve around the heady
days of "early" feminism. From the moment we arrived, I was
gratefully swept up into the activities of the new Evanston chapter
of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU, then two years
old). The CWLU was an extraordinarily successful model for
feminist organizing. Each of eight to ten chapters in Chicago met
weekly and determined its own agenda via the (then-new)
consciousness-raising, or "speaking bitterness" format. My
memories of this time, and via this method, are of developing an
ethical/ political framework for living as a feminist. Twenty-five
years later, that framework remains fundamentally unchanged.
Coupled with the consciousness-raising work, however, was the
expectation of the union that local chapters would engage in
("direct") political action. Located in Evanston, and drawing
largely from white undergraduate and graduate populations at
Northwestern, our chapter was by far the least diverse with respect
to class, age, and race. Other chapters had members with very
different sorts of experiences. Our membership in the union kept us
in touch and at least exposed, if not accountable to, a certain kind
of class- and race-conscious feminist-socialist politics that we
would not have explored on our own. 7 Second-wave feminism and
I were far too young to appreciate what the CWLU was
accomplishing, but now, years later, it remains for me the best
example of what feminist organizing and coalition building can
achieve. I will be forever grateful to every woman in that group for
what I learned
 Page 215
from them and for giving me a safe and stimulating place to first
explore feminist thought.
This early period in the CWLU's history was fraught with tension
surrounding the feminist "abandonment" of the antiwar movement
and the women who stayed behind to work in it. And even those of
us who continued to participate in antiwar work but who would no
longer commit to a "male-identified" movement were very
ambivalent. The end of the war resolved a great many of these
doubts, as my political identity as a feminist activist and my
intellectual identity as a sociologist developed simultaneously and
felt, for the time being, compatible.

An Intellectual Story
After I had completed my final undergraduate year as a "special
student" at Northwestern, my decision to enter graduate school was
surely based on the same "safety-first" principle I had employed
since I was three: namely, the greatest measure of security against
the possibility that my entitlement to take up space would be
questioned. I had already achieved some sense of security in
marriage, and this career choice seemed right. I did seem to be able
to fool my instructors very well. And sociology's puzzles were
compelling. As an undergraduate, I chose sociology because I was
at home with its focus on inequality. It was only later I understood
that my fascination with it came from the sense it gives of
revealing the secrets of social interactionanother sort of power I so
desperately lacked as a child.
Early 1970s Northwestern was just right for me. The faculty
welcomed me with open arms and set about determined to treat me
as a student and not a wifely appendage. I am grateful to that
collection of (mostly) unreconstructed men for what I now know is
quite a difficult undertaking, primarily since it must be done day to
day and by each individual. At twenty-two, I was far too young and
terrified to give the faculty much guidance myself. Throughout my
graduate career they did their best to make me feel that I was being
judged independently of Dick. As a result, I developed a glimmer
that not everything I achieved was a fluke or someone else's
misunderstanding of my true abilities.
This was likewise true of the graduate cohorts with whom I spent
time. Even though it was clear that my marriage to Dick meant that
I might have capitalized on a kind of privileged familiarity with
faculty that they did not share, I never got a sense of unease or
resentment about my position. And there were reasons for that. We
were all young and still very much in the 1960s mode of a studied
resistance to authority Equally important,
 Page 216
the last gasps of the War on Poverty provided enough money to
support fully almost all graduate students, and this kept the
relations among us relatively noncompetitive. Finally, my friends
were our friends, and our friends were primarily graduate students.
Dick was not a particularly social person, and I was still
intimidated by most faculty. Anita and Barry, Ellen and Jack, Mike
and Pam, Kate and Bruce, and Bill and Barb were all graduate
student couples or graduate students and their partners. All this
served to mute, and even mask, for all of us what privileges I
actually benefited from.
In the early 1970s, the Northwestern sociology faculty was
congenial, clever, quick, on the rise, and devoted to graduate
training. The faculty fancied themselves more creative than their
colleagues at Chicago and far more eclectic than the "factory" in
Madison. With the exception of my last years, when Arlene Kaplan
Daniels and Janet Lever were hired, the department employed only
one woman, Janet Abu-Lughod, a fine scholar, but one with whom
I had little contact. So I was left with a group of men who gave a
sort of training that was (unbeknown to me at the time)
characteristically "Northwestern" in character. For me, the
intellectual atmosphere was determined by my associations with
John Kitsuse, Howard Becker, Allan Schnaiberg, and Arnold
Feldman. John taught me how to think as a sociologist, Howie
taught me how to do sociology, Allan instructed me in method and
meaning, and Ackie schooled me in Karl Marx. Each had an
intellectual and personal history that placed him in the club, but not
quite of it. That alone made them fascinating teachers.
I worked with and for John Kitsuse for two years, completing my
master's thesis with him before he moved to UC Santa Cruz. There
was probably no other person who affected my early scholarship
more. From him I came to know what sociology's distinctive gifts
were and that sociology and sociologists do best when they limit
their vantage to the study of social life as a social process subject to
change, situated interpretation, and relations of power. In short,
John Kitsuse taught me the wonders of taking the "natural"
unfolding of social organization as the sociological problematic. It
was only a matter of finding the right tools for the problem.
At that time, the graduate program was marked by the legacies of
the older midwestern, pragmatic approach to sociological training.
The department required one quarter of qualitative methods in the
fall of a student's first year, taught by Howard Becker, intellectual
heir to Everett Hughes, to be followed by a two-quarter statistics
series, taught by Allan Schnaiberg, who had been a student of
Dudley Duncan at Michigan. Since ours was a theory-light
program, we were required only to take one quarter of classi-
 Page 217
cal theory with Arnold Feldman. Thereafter, students were strongly
discouraged from submitting secondary data analysis for a thesis or
doctorate. We had to get our hands dirty.
The presence of Howard Becker at Northwestern granted a central
role to qualitative methods both among the faculty and within the
graduate curriculum. This curriculum communicated to us that
qualitative methods had not only a legitimate but also an equal
standing in the profession. At Northwestern we came to believe
that methods should be driven by sociological problems and not the
other way round. Graduate students were admonished if it appeared
that they treated methodological techniques as tricks, toys, or
political statements. In fact, we were taught to look with disdain at
all researchers who ''unzipped" their tools before the problem was
found. Moreover, for many students there was an expectation that
our research would employ a variety of methods. This early
exposure to the issues surrounding problem and methodcart and
horsehas made a fundamental difference in my reaction to the
development of the discipline and to the work that I would craft as
feminist sociology.
Methodological tools and approaches change so rapidly, and, when
applied sensitively, are so subject to the exigencies of the problem
that the notion that one learns how to "do" qualitative or "do"
quantitative is just one more delusional notion from conventional
sociological practice. Our training was certainly traditional in many
respects, but it was cast as a social, shifting matter always subject
to dialogue and change. With so much organized doubt and
equivocation, I believe we came away with a productively
unconventional epistemological stance. Howard Becker and Allan
Schnaiberg taught not only a collection of techniques but also a
way of thinking about problems and a way of looking at social life.
Allan, who for his outlook we affectionately dubbed "Eeyore," saw
all methodological decisions situated with others, each with a
downside, each a product of compromise. There was no right
solution, only the one that seemed to solve the very worst problems
at the moment. From Howie we learned that nothing is as it seems
and that sociological meaning lies in the workings of the social
group; it is seldom derived theoretically.
This early exposure to ethnography, the privileging of experience,
and profound skepticism about social research I now believe
introduced us very early to how James Clifford described
ethnography: the "discipline's impossible attempt to fuse objective
and subjective practices." 8 Yet Howie Becker in particular
conveyed the thrill at the "discovery" or "unearthing" of an
unrevealed storyhidden in among the characters who inhabited
one's field site. After nearly twenty years of feminist exploration of
the relation
 Page 218
between subject and researcher, and the constructed nature of their
collaborations, whether I am using logit regression or an interview,
I have not fully shaken that feeling that I can discover a preexisting
social reality once hidden to everyone else. Since then, and in my
own teaching, I have elaborated on and greatly complicated those
early lessons, but they remain nonetheless a foundation for my
feminist scholarship in sociology, as well as a rationale for their
own critique. 9
As I reflect on this period, I am not sure how I managed to deny all
the inconsistencies that must have been so obvious in my life: I was
attending at least two meetings a week that involved women's
liberationeither consciousness-raising or some sort of political
action; soaking up the discipline of middle-class white men;
finding some way to accommodate to the idea (and practice) of
marriage; and meeting every two weeks with a number of graduate
women in sociology (among them Kate Berheide, Demie Kurz,
Eleanor Lyon, Pamela Richards, and Judy Wittner) to pose the
question, What would a sociology look like if women's experience
were really present in it?
At that time, any implications for my own life were lost on me: my
general acquiescence to the sociology I was being taught, my
heterosexual/ marital privilege as I moved effortlessly through a
department where my husband held power over all my friends, and
my newfound feminist consciousness, which I fancied was free
from political or personal contradiction. The intellectual was
political, but there, in suburban Evanston, as I pulled age, race,
class, and heterosexual privilege around me like a blanket, the
personal was political only for other women. This was hardly a
time when I could confront such contradictions. I was functioning
in the world. I was fooling everyonestill my most difficult and
absorbing accomplishment.
Individual struggles aside, I believe there is a cohort of white,
baby-boom academics like myself who, being younger in the early
1970s, were swept into feminist scholarship without the wisdom
that came from the day-to-day adversities experienced by older
women. Perhaps for us, feminism and the decision to be feminist
scholars came first and were based largely on intellectual
excitement and an aversion to inequality, felt deeply, but
theoretically. When adversity came later, it was then experienced in
the context of a feminist analysis of where it came from and why.
In short, it was as if the "problem with no name" was named first
and the problem came later.
My study of household labor was begun in graduate school.
Richard Berk, Catherine Berheide, and myself received funding
from NIMH's Cen-
 Page 219
ter for the Study of Metropolitan Problems, administered by the
late Elliot Liebow. It was Elliot who took a chance on granting
major funding to our national survey of four hundred women and
their husbands on the content, allocation, and affect surrounding
household labor. In retrospect, I cannot imagine how Elliot
marshaled the arguments to defend the funding of that study. In
those days the topic was not only treated as unfit subject matter for
the sociology of work but was also very often greeted by male
sociologists with a level of resentment and anger that simply could
not be fathomed by taking the subject matter at face value. When
looked at as work, household labor and its division were
sociologically illegitimate and downright unspeakable. 10
At that time, the sociological study of household work was only
mentioned with any frequency in the old family studies of "power"
and marriage. Who does what in the household was conceptualized
as one more set of indicators of power. It was always assumed that
if one did housework and child care, one had less power than if one
didn't, presumably because no one with any power would ever do
any.11 Among feminists, only Mirra Komarovsky's, Helena
Znaniecka Lopata's, and (in a new vein) Ann Oakley's research had
treated the subject in any but the most condescending way.12
The Cornell school of "old" home economics, led by Kathryn
Walker, has a distinguished history of studying the "nuts and bolts"
of housework. It is unique for the way in which it takes the work of
women on its own terms, and it is to that work that we initially
turned for guidance.13 At this time, too, the "wages for housework"
flurry in Great Britain was picking up steam, only to have its
moment a few years later on U.S. daytime talk shows. Its academic
counterpart was developing a fascinating debate within the Marxist
community about the status of household work under capital. We
did not become aware of this literature until we were well into our
study, and mainstream sociology barely gave it a passing nod. Ann
Oakley's work and. our project had much in common, despite their
differences in scope, methodology, and locale. In both projects,
housework was work and thus subject to a sociological analysis
informed by the experiences of other work and workers. This was
hugely important from a theoretical point of view, for this made it
possible for household work to be viewed as something that is not
derivative of or inseparable from the family With this shift,
household work could be studied within the family as a particular
work context. And following that, once the work was made visible
as work,the women who do such work were made visible as
workers.That they were also wives and mothers could then became
the theoretical context in which the
 Page 220
experience of those workers could be analyzed. There were many
such insights that emerged from our project begun in Evanston. But
it was Ann Oakley who first distinguished between (husbands')
"help" and (wives') "responsibility" as the way in which men and
women view their household labors. 14 It is a seemingly simple
distinction but ultimately proved to be an analytically powerful
entry into women's actual experience of their work lives.
If my sociological training at Northwestern left me fascinated with
the organization of work and the power relations implied in it, if it
encouraged looking backstage, if it gave me a variety of tools to
study work experience and a healthy skepticism about data, then
the study of household labor was certainly what I was prepared for.
And what I have found over the last twenty years is that it was the
invisibility, illegitimacy, and isolating qualities of household work
itself that drew me to both the scholarship and the feminism I
developed around it.
It was no accident that Kate Berheide and I would begin a study of
household work with an ethnography. We were doing what we had
been taught, both by Northwestern-style sociology and by Chicago-
style feminism. We reasoned that since we knew so little about
what the work was, who did it, or how people felt about it, we
would observe and interview household workers. We talked to
women, and we watched them work.15 I had yet to understand that
from a professional point of view I was far from the mainstream
because for me sociology was about method, rigor, and creativity
From that early fieldwork, and the intensity with which the women
spoke to us, however, I understood that I was revealing a hidden
realityone that existed side by side with the ones that were so
obvious. At the age of twenty-four, and for the first time, I was
discovering the culture of adult women. And it felt as if we were
writing some of that culture out of its invisibility.
I was also forced to look behind my own carefully crafted
privilege: at women like my mother and their frequent bouts of
despair, at poor women who faced agonizing choices each day but
who could never reveal their struggle, and at the women of color
who cleaned one house by day and another by night. From this
early work we developed an elaborate survey instrument and two
diary instruments for the national study, but for me that beginning
"in the field" helped keep all the other methods accountable to
women's experiences.
I will not recount the substance of that research for this essay or the
way in which Richard Berk and I worked to make a productive
collaboration to write about household labor. I will end this story
by describing a
 Page 221
crisis in my attempt to complete the major product of the work
begun in 1974. I believe the struggle I went through marked the
beginning of my independence as a feminist scholar and firmly
connected me to the feminist project thereafter.
When Dick Berk and I arrived at UC Santa Barbara in 1976, I
intended to plunge into the business of getting tenure. Instead, I
had to win back the job I had been promised initially. The year
before, Dick and I had both interviewed for the available jobs at
UC Santa Barbara, at full professor and assistant professor,
respectively. Things went well, and we returned to Evanston
believing that the department was very enthusiastic about our
appointments and that we would be given job offers. Unlike other
places we had considered, the faculty at UC Santa Barbara seemed
able to discern my talents as distinct from Dick's and appeared to
be enthusiastic about what I would bring to the department. That
same week Dick Flacks called with verbal offers. Three weeks after
that he called again. This time it was to convince me that for the
sake of "expediency" I should sign a one-year contract for an
appointment to lecturer. He explained that the extra departmental
reviewers had expressed misgivings about granting a full
professorship to someone as young as Dick, and because I was his
wife, my appointment to assistant professor would further
complicate matters. Flacks assured me that it would be "no
problem" to change my status to assistant professor, even before
the end of that first quarter. Knowing nothing about UC or the
yawning chasm between ladder and temporary appointments, I
trusted the process, and with the Oath of Allegiance to California, I
also signed a contract to be a lecturer.
What followed was a year reaping the consequences for what I had
done. In response to campus review agents' "concerns," my work
was subjected to another complete review, and senior members of
my department would grill me (sometimes at odd hours and places)
to establish exactly how much of my own dissertation I had
written. In addition, my dissertation committee was called on
individually to testify in writing that I had actually done my own
work. A full year later I was appointed to the job for which I had
interviewed. Moral: real institutional mistreatment at the hands of
bullies teaches lifelong lessonsif one survives.
During the next few years, Dorothy Smith often made wintertime
visits to UCSB Sociology to consult with our two resident
ethnomethodologists, Don Zimmerman and Thomas Wilson. She
would talk about her own work in progress with whomever seemed
interested. My breathless reaction to her work and my fervent wish
for Dorothy's good opinion made me return to an earlier
incarnation as a shy and quite inarticulate graduate student.
 Page 222
But after those visits, her ideas stayed with me as I struggled to
speak more bravely through my own work. 16 At that time I read
"A Sociology for Women" and, later, "On Sociological
Description" as one lost returns home.17 There the real
problematics of feminist research are addressed directly: it was the
first thing I had read that actually articulated how a feminist might
work as a researcher; it voiced the discomfort we feel whenin the
name of sociologywe so distort the experiences of women that they
are later unrecognizable, even to us; and not since I had first read
Marx had I had such a strong feeling of truth revealed and my
thinking forever altered. This might have been a tremendously
liberating intellectual moment, but to return to an earlier story, my
own reticence as a scholar overwhelmed the guidance Smith's work
offered to me. So I resisted its effect on me, even as I began to
rethink my own way of working.
In the early 1980s (just after I was awarded tenure), I was
anxiously trying to complete the analysis of "who does what"the
allocation of household labor and employment time.18 The
statistical analysis was finished, complete with an elaborate set of
footnotes wherein I worked through all my methodological
ambivalences and doubts. And I was satisfied with it. The
theoretical chapter, which had taken me months to write, was
exhaustive and critical, if a bit tentative. What was not written was
the punchline. Howie had always asked us, "What is this story
about?"I had dutifully revealed the dimensions of what I called a
"gendered" allocation system. I had used some novel methods and
relatively sophisticated quantitative techniques and had come up
with original findings. I had employed a microeconomic model of
the household and in critique of it had painted an empirical picture
of gender inequality that at least one feminist reviewer would later
criticize as "too gloomy." I had said that there is less to
the division of labor than the system that we may fancy it to be: one
marked primarily by rational specialization, substitution, and
cooperation. . . . Men and women may share a work environment but
do not share much of its work; they may share a living space, but the
maintenance of that space affects primarily wives. Thus, [there is] an
intimate relation between work and gender that is revealed through
the division of household and market labors.19
But however arduous and complicated the trip had been, I was
simply not convinced it had been necessary. I could not fathom
why, regardless of every biographic characteristic I could tease out
of the data, wives did so damn much work and by their own report
thought it was fair. I was stuck. I had run out of answers since the
only answer offered by my own
 Page 223
discipline was "norms." I thought it was at least faintly ridiculous
to go to all the trouble I had to analyze the dynamics of the
allocation of household labor and end the story with the
explanation that "norms made them do it." There are certainly
worse shaggy dog stories in sociology, but I didn't want the shame
of adding another. Moreover, I knew that one couldn't explain a
variable with a constant. But to have answers of my own was far
too threatening, for they required a self that was simply not equal
to the task. I lost a year: writing and rewriting, waiting and waiting.
My revelation did not come in a blinding light, but it came
nonetheless. I had been talking about and teaching Dorothy Smith's
ideas, particularly about the research processrepeating questions in
however many ways I could imagine to whomever would talk to
me about them: How does one, as feminist and scholar, place
oneself in the process and keep allegiance to those with whom one
constructs and reconstructs their lives? What does the researcher
actually do in a sociology for women? What does "beginning from
the standpoint of women" really mean for the practicalities of
research? I had slowly come to feel, if not articulate, that my own
private notions about the practice of feminism as a way of living
held clues to how scholarship might be done in its goal to begin
from the standpoint of women. There, one's vantage begins from a
new centerwomen's experiencesand returns ultimately to that
center.
What this meant for me in the darker moments with my own
research is that I had lost the point where I had begun so long
agowatching women straighten their living rooms, boil hotdogs for
the kids, and fold the laundry. It felt like a "lost" reality, but in fact
I had given it away through the process of analysis and in my need
to avoid the costs of speaking in my own voice. And I was paying
the price, for now I had no satisfactory reference point with which
to return to the questions on which my work turned. As a feminist,
I knew only that I could not conclude that my respondents had been
"falsely conscious" or simply irrational.
I resolved to suspend my own (and everyone else's) sociological
judgment and assume that if women had told me that the division
of household labor was "fair," I must assume that it was fair. My
question then had to be, What reality determined that to be a
rational response? The question put this way provided the shift in
vision I had been seeking, and it was compelling enough
intellectually to counter my reticence. The result was the
application of some powerful theoretical notions (at that point, in
1983-1984, unpublished) from Candace West and Don Zimmerman
that we, and especially Candace and I, have been engaged with
ever since. 20 I was able to conclude that
 Page 224
because gender relationsthe doing of dominance and submissionare
an everyday proposition, then gender may serve as a warrant for
household members' claiming particular relationships to, or stances
toward, household labor. When the time comes to allocate household
members' labor, there are available a host of "good reasons" that
husbands, regardless of other considerations, should be market
specialists, and wives either household specialists or modern-day
generalists, devoting time to both work sites. Ultimately then, and
from day to day, work and gender combine, and the division of
household labor becomes the activity around which each can
determine and capacitate each other. It is within these two interwoven
structures that household members make their choices and get the
business of living done. 21 This was really the scholarly beginning
where I first risked a voice.
What I was saying seemed to affirm, rather than violate, the truths
of the hidden realities I had become so adept at perceiving,
whatever the reaction from others or the consequences of voicing
them. It was an intellectual stance that was not motivated by the
familiar fears. Risking this sort of vulnerability was very new, but
it was liberating and loaded with possibility. The emotional, the
political, and the intellectual were for a moment, in some sort of
balance, a single story.
Afterward/Afterword
It is now more than a decade since that liberating lesson about
feminism, method, and voice. A child, a divorce, the experience of
mothering, the worst isolation I have known, the company of
women from many disciplines, and a progressive working of fear
to a closing have all followed. With that sort of rebuilding and
struggle has also come a new sense of the possibilities when the
emotional, the political, and the intellectual are in greater harmony.
By way of conclusion, the example of my efforts in my campus
Women's Studies Program should illustrate.
As I became a more senior feminist in my own department and on
my own campus, I began to be called on to work in more
interesting ways for women. Over time this generated a partial shift
in my own activism away from the community outside the
university and toward the one within it.22 I learned not only that I
had some facility for administration, but also that those
predilections were very much connected to my old sociological
fascinations: for backstages, work and organizations, and collective
action.
This refocusing of my energies enhanced the other greatly preoccu-
 Page 225
pying work that my feminist colleagues and I began in 1986: the
establishment of a multidisciplinary undergraduate program and
major in women's studies. About fifteen to twenty primarily senior
women faculty and staff from a variety of humanities, science, and
social science departments began to meet regularly to discuss the
prospect of such a program. Over the prior decade, we had all
received requests from students to establish a major, and every
once in a while we would come together to review the notion and
reject it. Because of UC Santa Barbara's unique development from
a conservative postwar teacher's college, the campus was very slow
to appoint women on the ladder faculty and even slower to promote
them. We token appointments, working away in our own
departments and disciplines to establish feminist footholds, never
felt we could mount the sort of program that would offer us
anything but the guarantee of overwork, burnout, and further
isolation. This situation meant, however, that once we did believe
there was a critical mass of faculty to staff a cross-disciplinary
program, there were feminist curricula in many departments on
which the program could be founded, and the faculty who would
propose and run such a program were senior, influential, and
networked. Such a delay worked to great advantage. 23
The abiding lesson from this "Judy come lately" development is
that in large measure we established this program for ourselves as
feminist scholars. We reasoned that, after all, we had full-time jobs
and we were already overworked, so anything like a new program
that would partly divert us from the struggles in our mainstream
departments would have to be unique to the campus and uniquely
satisfying to us. It is this that informed the goals of the program: to
bring feminists across the disciplines into a scholarly dialogue that
was relatively unfettered by the male-defined departmental cultures
we had suffered under; to allow for the development of a
multi(even inter) disciplinary and cross-cultural curriculum that
excited us as teachers; to provide a rigorous, affirming intellectual
experience for women's studies majors; and, finally, to develop a
program supported well enough by the campus community to make
us want to lend our energies to it.
In the year prior to the approval of the program, I emerged as the
likely candidate for chair, and so I spent a great deal of time
shepherding the proposal through the necessary gatekeepers and
securing money and permanent positions to get us up and running.
Thereafter, I served as chair of the Women's Studies Program for
three years, later as associate dean of the Graduate Division, and I
am now serving as vice chair of our Academic Senate.
Each success, small and large, and each moment of productive col-
 Page 226
laboration, whether with college secretaries, vice chancellors, or
chairs of other departments, confirmed a growing sense of my own
agency, my ability to communicate vision, and the compelling
intellectual rationale for cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship.
Most important, however, such experiences have left me with a
belief in possibilities that I only pretended as a younger persona
belief in things yet imagined in myself and in the future of feminist
scholarship.
Notes
Thanks to Howard Becker, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Ann Goetting,
Valerie Jenness, Ursula Mahlendorf, Robyn Posin, and Candace
West for their valuable suggestions. Thanks also to Patty Forgie,
Ellen Lopez-Gomez, and Holly Unruh for clerical assistance.
1. Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1972), p. 227.
2. I abandoned the aspiration to be a doctor one day in high school.
I remember I discovered that a great deal of math was required in
medical school, as well as something called organic chemistry. I
was convinced I couldn't manage the math. With barely a ripple,
and with no one noticinglet alone refutingmy conclusion, I let go of
any notions of a medical career. I have never had another career
aspiration quite like that one; all subsequent ones were bound to
the limitations imposed by my fears or subject to the complicated
maze of opportunity, accident, and logistics.
3. In retrospect, and with the help of a more removed analysis of
the situation, I see that it is likely that my response to the perils of
the outside world were manifested fears projected by my mother.
Here, birth order, the sensitivities of a precocious youngest child,
the politically predatory 1950s, and my mother's own fears of the
world fundamentally fixed my first set of disabilities and
compensations.
4. In 1968 when Eugene McCarthy, Democratic senator from
Wisconsin, entered the Democratic presidential primary race, he
ran as the most progressive candidate and enlisted a large corps of
young people to stump for his antiwar candidacy. Dubbed the
"Children's Crusade" by the press, we proved to be quite a fickle
group. Very late in the primary game, Robert Kennedy entered the
race and readily wooed and won the support of most young
McCarthy supporters. But it was Gene McCarthy who took the
initial risk and framed the issues.
5. I should qualify this point by saying that the experience of a
woman's school was among the most significant to my
development as a feminist. The environment at Goucher, where
women's intellectual growth was the business of the institution,
allowed us to feel entitled to our own education, very often for the
first time. I knew countless women who came to that college with
virtually no sense of their own intellectual worth and left forever
changed.
6. The summer before I left Baltimore, Florence hired me to begin
the work that was to became the Feminist Press.
 Page 227
7. I do recall, however, that the Evanston chapter had a certain sort
of ''radical" reputation for taking a tough stand on the membership
of Marxist-Leninist women and for urging the CWLU to confront
the issue of "sexuality" (i.e., lesbianism).
8. James Clifford, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1986) p. 109.
9. The anxiety surrounding Howard Becker's methods class has
bound Northwestern graduates to each other like no other
experience. Twice a week the incoming cohort sat in a circle with
Howie where we discussed our field projects, about which most of
us were terrified. We were expected to have our first set of field
notes at the second week's class meeting and every week thereafter
until the final project was due ten weeks later. And, to my students'
horror today, he did not allow us the use of tape recorders for
interviews. I still marvel at our being able to establish a project,
spend most of our waking hours working on it, and turn in a
substantive analysis at the end of ten weeks. How did he get us to
do all that? Many master's theses were born this way, mine among
them, and not a few dissertations. Class time was spent discussing
particular ethnographic issues that we were facing at that moment
in the field. Each problem would bring some sort of parable from
Howie to illustrate whatever lesson he wanted us to learn. These
were typically based on his own ethnographic workusually either
Howard S. Becker, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical
School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); or Howard
S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New
York: Free Press, 1967)but sometimes on any of the Chicago crowd
who worked with Everett Hughes. I loved these stories and the
romantic connections they made from me to the discipline. After
all, I reasoned, this bridge to the Chicago School very quickly got
me from Becker to Hughes or from Becker to Blumer to Mead!
10. I am still searching through my office to find a copy of our first
ASR review. Berk, Berheide, and myself had submitted our first
piece on who did what in the household. It was rejected outright.
See Catherine White Berheide, Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, and
Richard A. Berk, "HouseholdWork in the Suburbs: The Job and Its
Participants," Pacific Sociological Review, 19 (fall 1976): 491-518.
I do remember that one of the reviewers sounded furious as he
explained all the things he did around the house. Later, of course,
household work came of age and mainstream sociology repackaged
it as "hot." For examples, see Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler,
Work and Personality: An Inquiry into the Impact of Social
Stratification (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1983); and Denise D. Bielby
and William T. Bielby, "She Works Hard for the Money:
Household Responsibility and the Allocation of Work Effort,"
American Journal of Sociology 93 (fall 1988): 1031-1059.
11. Robert O. Blood Jr. and Donald M. Wolfe, Husbands and
Wives: The Dynamics of Married Living (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press,
1960).
12. Mirra Komarovsky, Blue Collar Marriage (New York: Random
House, 1962); Helena Lopata, Occupation: Housewife (London:
Oxford University Press, 1971); Ann Oakley, The Sociology of
Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
13. See, for example, Kathryn E. Walker and Margaret E. Woods,
Time Use: A Measure of Household Production of Family Goods
and Services (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Family of the
American Home Economics Association, 1971).
14. Oakley, The Sociology of Housework.
15. For discussion, see Sarah Fenstermaker Berk and Catherine
White Berheide, "Going
 Page 228
Backstage: Gaining Access to Observe Household Work,"
Sociology of Work and Occupations 4 (winter 1977): 27-48.
16. I will never forget one moment in the hallway outside Don
Zimmerman's office, I believe in 1979. There I was
uncharacteristically revealing my fears to Dorothy and Don about
an invitation I had received to present a paper on household labor
to a very small group of eminent sociologists in Washington, D.C.
(see Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, "Some Behavioral Consequences of
Women's Labor: A Nonrecursive Model," in Ida H. Simpson and
Richard Simpson, eds., Research in the Sociology of Work,vol. 2
[Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1983], pp. 33-67. I got very useful
words of wisdom from each of them. Don said, "Just do what you
do." Dorothy said, "Just remember they're all baboons.'' I did and
they were.
17. Dorothy Smith, "A Sociology for Women," in Julia A. Sherman
and Evelyn T. Beck, eds., The Prism of Sex, (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1983); and Dorothy Smith, "On Sociological
Description: A Method from Marx," Human Studies 4 (Winter
1981): 313-337.
18. Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, The Gender Factory: The Allocation
of Work in American Households (New York: Plenum, 1985).
19. Ibid., p. 165.
20. Candace West and Don Zimmerman, "Doing Gender," Gender
and Society 1 (Winter 1987): 25-151. For examples of later work,
see Sarah Fenstermaker, Candace West, and Don Zimmerman,
"Gender Inequalities: New Conceptual Terrain," in Rae L.
Blumberg, ed., Gender; Family, and Economy: The Triple Overlap
(Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1991), pp. 289-307; Candace West and
Sarah Fenstermaker, "Power, Inequality, and the Accomplishment
of Gender: An Ethnomethodological View," in Paula England, ed.,
Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory (Chicago: Aldine, 1993),
pp. 261-279; and Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker, "Doing
Difference," Gender and Society 9 (winter 1995): 516-523.
21. Fenstermaker Berk, The Gender Factory,pp. 205-206.
22. This may be a pattern, particularly for white academic
feminists, where as one gets more senior and influential, one's
political work is focused more narrowly on the academic
community We do, after all, wish to work where we believe we can
make the most difference. There are stultifying downsides to such
choices, of course, but they can sometimes effectively blend one's
intellectual and political struggles.
23. Sometimes the compulsive good citizenship that women
academics are known for can pay off. In the decade before, many
of us had accumulated both significant goodwill and political
capital (from across the campus and its mix of political
persuasions), which we could now cash in on behalf of the
program. Just as our intellectual talents varied, so, too, did our
spheres of influence: whereas some had friends in administration,
others had influence in the Academic Senate, and so on. As a
result, the entire campus community publicly supported the
program's establishment.
 Page 229

Sisterhood as Collaboration:
Building the Center for Research on Women
at the University of Memphis
Lynn Weber, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill
This essay explores the connections between the development of
the University of Memphis Center for Research on Women and the
personal biographies of its three founders: Bonnie Thornton Dill,
Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Lynn Weber. 1 From its inception in
1982, the center was distinctive among women's research centers.
Two of its founders were African-American women and one was a
white southern woman. It was the first center funded by the Ford
Foundation at a regional comprehensive state university rather than
at an established research university. Its central missionto examine
the intersections of race, class, and genderwas a direct outgrowth of
our scholarly pursuits, as well as of our biographies. All of us are
sociologists and have realized the vision for the center through
collaborating on both sociological research and teaching that are
centered in an agenda for social change.
We begin this essay with a discussion of several themes that
characterize our common scholarly visions, action strategies, and
personal histories. This presentation is followed by biographical
vignettes and substantive discussions of our scholarly works and
our activism through the Center for Research on Women.
Themes in Our Biographies, Theory, and Practice
Several themes characterize the collective vision of race, class, and
gender that we developed and nurtured in conjunction with many
other teacher/ scholar/activists around the nation. These themes so
powerfully contributed
Copyright © 1997 by Lynn Weber, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and
Bonnie Thornton Dill.
 Page 230
to each of our biographies that when the Ford Foundation gave us
the opportunity to propose a women's research center in 1982, we
had no problem articulating our broad mission and goals.
First, we each knew at a deep personal level that race, class, and
gender are power relations of dominance and subordination that are
socially constructed and historically specific and that are primary
forms of social organization. We knew this because these truths
were central to our lived experiences of multiple dimensions of
oppression as African-American and working-class women and to
the social histories of the post-World War II period, when we came
of age as sociologists. We each, in fact, pursued sociology to
understand and to change the injustices we abhorred. The fact that
by 1982 no existing women's research center or research tradition
had yet articulated such a stance meant only that we had a greater
challenge. We never doubted the correctness of this basic belief.
Second, we knew our mission would be to validate and promote the
views of women of color, working-class women, and other groups
that experienced oppression along multiple dimensions. To
understand the nature of race, class, and gender, we needed to
encourage and promote scholarship about oppression by many
individuals and groups that had faced oppression and been silenced
in dominant culture scholarly traditions, as well as in the newly
emerging scholarship on women.
To us, gender had always been significant within the context of
race and class: it was never salient in isolation from race or class as
a source of our own sense of what structures our worlds, limits our
options, or provides opportunities. The opportunity to establish our
center provides a case in point. In 1981, the Ford Foundation
extended an invitation to Bonnie to develop a proposal for a center
for research on women at the University of Memphis. It seemed
apparent to us that a combination of factors, including Bonnie's
scholarly work, her race, her gender, and her location at a southern
university at a particular historical moment, rather than any single
factor, influenced this invitation. Notwithstanding the significance,
perhaps primacy, of race and class in our worldviews, our scholarly
production and activism have most forcefully affected and found
acceptance among the now very large community of feminist
sociologists and women's studies scholars.
Although our articulation of race and class occurred within this
gendered context, white middle-class women's experiences and the
scholarly positions articulated from their standpoints rarely
resonated with our own. When we found them useful, it was most
often as a counterpoint that clarified our own places by
demonstrating differences in perspective produced by race and
class privilege among women. The preoccupation among
 Page 231
many white feminists with finding "common ground" or a set of
"universal" women's experiences to "bind us together as women"
was never, and is not now, an exercise we deemed worthwhile. 2
We never doubted, however, the necessity and value of working
together with many diverse groups to gain scholarly insight and to
promote social change. We shared a desire to learn from groups
different from our own. A basic mistrust of a power structure
whose portrayals of our groups rarely conformed to our
experiences led us to question dominant culture images of other
subordinate groups.
We are aware of the power of individualism, status rankings, and
competition in shaping the worldviews, career paths, and personal
goals of the U.S. middle class.3 By the time all three of us met, we
had already successfully survived college and graduate school, had
attained faculty status, and had thus been exposed to the reward
system in academia that paralleled that of other middle-class
occupations. However, our working-class, African-American, and
female socialization had taught us to value collaboration, collective
action, and social justice, values that find few legitimized outlets in
academia.
Although as director Bonnie was the most visible representative of
the center to foundation officers and university administrators, as a
mother of a two-year-old son and newborn twin girls she knew that
she could not and did not want to envision and create a unique
research center single-handedly. Instead of acting alone, she
collaborated with Elizabeth and Lynn, and they consulted other
women-of-color scholars and collectively created the vision for the
center. Even after the proposal was developed and the center was
well established on the basis of a strong alliance and shared roles
and responsibilities, it took a number of years for people to see that
the center was always the product of a collective effort of the three
of us, our staff, and our national network.
All three of us had fairly extensive experience in crossing social
barriers, building coalitions, and standing up for principles we
believed inas presidents of our high school classes and student
bodies and as leaders in many organizations and arenas from civil
rights to sports. We had learned to accept and appreciate difference;
to use our marginality, "outsider-within" statuses, and multiple
memberships to bridge social divides; and to be especially critical
of stances that emanated from privileged standpoints or stances that
each of us might take that emanated from our own privilege.
Finally, even though we each experienced painful restrictions on
our lives based on race, class, and gender, we also experienced
uncommon levels of direct involvement with white middle-class
and elite worlds. We not
 Page 232
only crossed the race, class, and gender social boundaries that most
of our young cohorts did not, we also learned to function well in
those places where we stood out as different because of our race,
class, and/or gender.
In the discussion that follows, we hope to illustrate some of the
ways that these themes emerged through our lives and shaped both
our scholarship and the character of the Center for Research on
Women.

Historical Context for Development of the Center

In 1982 when the center was established, there were approximately
twenty-five other women's research centers nationwide. Most had
been started with Ford Foundation funding as early as 1972. By the
early 1980s, the field of women's studies had made important
inroads into the academy, but its impact had been most visibly and
forcefully felt in the humanities, particularly in English through the
Modern Language Association. Women of color offered
sophisticated critiques of the white middle-class male biases in all
fields, including sociology, but sociological scholarship on race
relations, social class, and gender continued to develop in almost
complete isolation from each other. Race relations scholarship
explored race from the perspectives of men, gender scholarship
explored gender from the perspectives of white women, and social
class scholarship explored class from the perspectives of white
middle-class men. All obscured the perspectives of workers and of
people of color. 4 The irony of ignoring groups whose experiences
typically reflected the confluence of all three major dimensions of
inequality was captured in the oft-cited title of one of the first
anthologies about black women's studies: All the Women Are White.
All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's
Studies.5
In the early 1980s, black women were beginning to make their
voices heard in discussions of women's lives.6 Bonnie Dill was
among the first black women scholars whose critical perspective on
race and gender was published in a major feminist journal.7 Her
presentation at the Seventh Scholar and the Feminist Conference at
the Barnard College Women's Center in 1980 gained the attention
of the Ford Foundation program officer for women's studies,
Mariam Chamberlain. A version of Dill's keynote address later
appeared in Feminist Studies.8
Chamberlain and Dill began discussions about establishing a
research center at the University of Memphis as part of the
foundation's dual interest in developing centers in southern
universities that addressed race and gender. Bonnie initially
received a small grant to support the work of the Inter-University
Research Group Exploring the Intersection of Race and
 Page 233
Gender. 9This group laid much of the groundwork for the center.
Later Bonnie and Lynn, in collaboration with Elizabeth, applied for
and received an initial three-year grant from the Ford Foundation
for core support for the Center for Research on Women at the
University of Memphis. At the same time, a center at Duke
University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and
one at the University of Washington were established with Ford
Foundation funding. The Women's Research and Resource Center
at Spelman College was established around the same time through
a grant from the Mott Foundation. Each of these centers identified
race and gender as central components in their missions, but each
center developed a distinct, yet complementary approach.10

Biographical Statements: Growing Up

By the time we met one another, we had each become highly
skilled at negotiating the boundaries of race and class. Our
biographies are replete with experiences in which we were
outsiders, an "other," different from the majority of people in the
particular settings of school, work, or sports. Through these
experiences, we became adept at crossing class and racial borders
and at communicating with diverse groups of people, including
white middle-class men and women. We were each acutely aware
of the pain and isolation that accompany being seen as outsiders,
but we also knew the basic human desire for connection and
belonging.
When we first sat down to think about this article with one another,
we discussed our lives or, more accurately, reminded each other of
life stories we had shared over many years of friendship. We did
make one rather funny new discovery about ourselves: Bonnie had
been the president of her high school senior class, and Elizabeth
and Lynn had been the presidents of their all-girls high school
student bodies. Furthermore, we each attributed those elections at
the time, as well as many other leadership roles we played later in
our lives, to our marginality and to the border-crossing skills we
had developed to survive on the margins.
Elizabeth Higginbotham
I grew up black and working class in New York City. I was the
second of five children and the oldest daughter. My father was a
bartender at a jazz club in the Village and later a waiter in hotels,
where he served at various functions, such as weddings, lunches,
breakfasts, and dinners. In his younger years, he had been a
Pullman porter, riding back and forth across the country.11 My
mother entered paid employment after I entered junior high. She
had a retail sales job at a
 Page 234
department store and later was a secretary with the New York
public school system.
My father often talked about his work, his working buddies, and the
class relationships of the job. When I was in the second and third
grades, I vividly remember my father's friend Larry coming by the
apartment every day to travel with my father to work. It seemed so
nice that I have since always felt that work should be shared with
your friendsan aspect of working-class life that I wanted in my
middle-class position. In fact, I was shocked by the isolated nature
of academic life when I began my first full-time faculty position at
the University of Pittsburgh. I made the decision to move to
Memphis so that working with my friends Lynn and Bonnie would
become a reality in my professional life. Lynn shared this distinctly
working-class view of work with me, and we often fondly referred
to taking our lunch pails to work in the center's factory" together.
My family moved from Harlem to lower Manhattan when I was
five. Childhood summers were spent in Pittsburgh with my
grandparents and extended family, and later moves (family and
individual) took me to other neighborhoods and regions. These
moves were important in my life since they meant entering different
settings where I had to learn what was expected of me and to
exhibit appropriate behaviors.
My formal education began in a public elementary school on the
East Side of Manhattan in 1953. This neighborhood, now the East
Village, was overwhelmingly working class but ethnically and
racially mixed. Even though I grew up outside the black
communities of New York, I was very aware of race since I was
often the only black student in my classes. This early experience
also exposed me to other people of color (Puerto Ricans and Asian
Americans) and a host of first- and second-generation white ethnic
students.
After Thanksgiving in 1960, my family moved to the Upper West
Side of Manhattan, where my world grew to include middle-class
young people. This neighborhood had a mixture of racial and
social class tensions and intimacies. I transferred to Joan of Arc
Junior High School and spent the remainder of the seventh grade
in a diverse classroom. There were middle-class and working-class
students, as well as students from a range of racial and ethnic and
cultural backgrounds. I enjoyed this class, where my propensity to
challenge myself by reading the longest book, memorizing the
longest poems, and tackling major projects was appreciated by all,
even those students who selected an e. e. cummings poem, "The
Fog," over Robert Frost's "The Wall." Our English/social studies
and homeroom teacher, Mrs. Witte, made us all feel appreciated
and welcomed.
It was in that junior high school that I was "selected" by teachers
and administrators for mobility. In eighth grade, another black
classmate, William, and
 Page 235
I were taken out of our diverse class and moved to a predominantly
white class. For the eighth and ninth grades, William, Evelyn, and I
were the three black students in an "enrichment track" class. This
meant crossing many borders, but I enjoyed the educational
challenges, as well as learning about the lives and families of other
students. The classroom was a cooperative setting where we
worked together on course projects, committees, and field trips.
Even though I was always conscious of representing the race in
this very small fishbowl, I appreciated the community of teachers
and administrators who exposed us to classical music, museums,
plays, and musicals and encouraged us to see the city as a resource
for us all.
I decided to attend the district all-girls high school, Julia Richman
High School, because it was reputed to have a very solid college
preparatory program. Over my three years in high school, I
watched the high ability academic courses become more white and
middle class, as even I drifted into the regular academic program
in my senior year. As a senior, I took advanced placement history
and fought to gain access to college preparatory English. In
retrospect, I can see that I was disengaged from many courses
because of the way they were taught, and I therefore put my
attention elsewhere. I became involved with New York High School
Friends of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee),
and that made the high school years tolerable and provided me
with an important way to connect to race issues. I also developed
my leadership skills in this arena. In my high school, I was active
in the Human Relations Club and very visible as a political person.
As a senior, I was elected president of the student government
organization. 12
With a mixed high school record and a consistent ability to botch
standardized tests, I started college at the Borough of Manhattan
Community College in 1966. This was an exciting year since I was
able to connect with students from around the city who, like me,
were smart but alienated by the routines and memorization of high
school. I had wonderful teachers, and often my classmates and I
took discussions out of the classroom to the coffee shop, located on
the ground floor of the office building that was then our campus.
After one year, I transferred to City College of New York. Open
enrollment did not come to the City University until 1971, so
during my three plus years on campus, I was one of a few students
of color. Again, I felt highly visible, but in retrospect I can see that
my New York public education and years of working gave me a
broad experience. I moved into and out of working- and middle-
class settings and across racial and ethnic lines. Although this
experience generated many questions about social systems, it also
fostered a comfort with being different and an ability to build
coalitions and communities in different settings.
 Page 236
Bonnie Thornton Dill
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s taught me a
lot about race and class. Both of my parents were professionals
who had grown up in Chicago; like many of their contemporaries,
they were the first in their families to have the opportunity to
complete college and a professional education. My father was a
pharmacist who owned his own business; my mother, a
schoolteacher, later owned and operated an independent nursery
school. Although both my parents were products of the Chicago
public schools, my mother's experiences as a teacher there
convinced her that she wanted a different kind of education for me.
So beginning in nursery school and continuing through twelfth
grade, I attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School.
Although my classmates were overwhelmingly white, my
neighborhood community, church, and social life were
unmistakably rooted in African-American culture until high school.
Through these sources I learned black history, culture, and social
life. At the dinner table and at social gatherings, I heard
discussions about improving conditions for "the race." The names
of notable African Americans, such as Ida B. Wells, Percy Julian,
Benjamin Mays, Paul Robeson, and Mary McLeod Bethune,
became familiar to me at an early age. There was no questioning
that education was the key to achievement, that contributing to the
improvement of the race was expected, and that I had a rich legacy
to inspire and sustain me.
The nurturance and pride with which I learned about race in my
family and immediate community contrasted sharply with the ways
I learned about race from living in Chicago. Chicago in the 1950s
was a racially divided city. My parents purchased a home in a
section called Englewood in 1944. They were among the first
African-American families on the block. Within a few years all the
whitepeople had moved out. This was a typical pattern in the so-
called integration of Chicago: block busting, distinct racial and
ethnic neighborhoods, and white flight. In fact, the block just north
of us was divided in the middle by elevated railroad tracks. Only
white people lived on the other side of the tracks. Interestingly, my
mother told me of a conversation she had with a white woman who
resided in that area and boasted that the Catholic parish had
bought up vacant homes in that neighborhood in order to ensure
that no black people moved in. Even if apocryphal, this story
conveys the racial divisiveness that characterized the city. I never
rode through that neighborhood without feeling apprehension and
a sense of threat. As children out at play, we never ventured over
there.
Another incident that is my earliest personal remembrance of
racism occurred at the neighborhood swimming pool. I was
perhaps six or seven at the time, and one hot summer afternoon my
mother took me to the local public pool to swim. I joyfully jumped
into the water; and soon there was a group of white
 Page 237
teens yelling at my mother to get me out of the pool before they
threw me out. My mother looked at me and told me not to move. So
I didn't move, but I must admit that at that moment I would have
preferred to be any place else but there. Eventually we left, but that
night my mother wrote letters and made phone calls to the mayor
and numerous other local public officials. By the following summer,
the pool was integrated Chicago style: black folks swam there, and
white folks left.
There were many aspects of my early life that made me keenly
aware of class differences in the African-American community. My
extended family consisted of mostly working-class and a few
middle-class individuals. Those differences were the source of
conflict and jealousy within the family at the same time that they
were a source of pride and defined patterns of family support and
assistance. Our neighborhood, too, although consisting of mostly
stable working-class and middle-class African-American
homeowners, was not without tension. The oldest girl from one of
the least stable families on the block teased and taunted me about
attending a private school. I now recognize this as class anger and
resentment, but it sometimes made neighborhood play unpleasant.
On a broader scale, many of the problems of joblessness and low
income that my parents and their friends discussed and sought to
address were problems resulting from both racial discrimination
and lack of economic resources. My parents believed strongly in
cooperative economics and had been founders of a consumer
cooperative that ran a grocery store and a savings and loan
association and now operates a senior citizen housing complex.
Being one of a few African-American students in a predominantly
white private school was not as alienating as it might be today,
partly because I had such a strong and rich family, community, and
social lifeparticularly during elementary school. In high school,
however, I became acutely aware of the two separate and
conflicting worlds in which I lived and the challenges of trying to
maintain both of them. My conflict became palpable, as most high
school conflicts do, around the lunch table. I had many different
friends in high school and ate lunch with different peoplesometimes
with my African-American friends and sometimes with my white
friends. One day, however, my black friends informed me that they
were having a private club meeting and that I couldn't join them.
After that happened repeatedly, I began to eat lunch regularly with
my white friends. Although I remained friendly with the African-
American girls and continued to be involved with them socially
outside of school, I was not in their inner circle, nor were they in
mine.
My access to and engagement with white friends at school exposed
me to a variety of life experiences. My best friend's family was
Jewish and had escaped from Poland through France during World
War II. Another friend's father was a rabbi. Several other friends
had parents who were faculty members at the
 Page 238
University of Chicago. My connections with groups of both
African-American and white students was an important factor in
my being elected senior class president.
Lynn Weber
Early in life I developed a strong image of life as the interplay of
insiders and outsiders: as an Irish Catholic raised in
predominantly Protestant Nashville, Tennessee; as a student in an
extremely rigid mission elementary school; as a working-class
state champion tennis player in the middle-class world of tennis;
and as a straight A student and leader in my all-girls working-class
high school. Adult experiences in college and in my career as a
sociologist remade my worldview in some ways, but notions of
power and privilege, exclusion and oppression were already there
to be named and refined, but not to be denied or doubted
My daddy was a steamfitter and my mom a secretary at the Internal
Revenue Service. Although he was never active in union politics,
my father was a union member, a fairly uncommon experience in
the working-class South. Both my parents worked very hard to
provide an opportunity for me and my younger brother and sister
to ''get ahead," and college attendance was the route they
encouraged.
Catholics in Nashville were very aware of our outsider status. I
grew up knowing that "we" (my family and others) were in hostile
territory surrounded by Protestants (they were generically all alike
to me) and a mysterious organization called the KKK that put us in
the same despised category as "colored people" (with whom I had
some experience) and Jews (with whom I had absolutely no
experience).
My schoolmates were all white, though ethnically quite diverse,
and so were my best friends: Lucia was Irish, Debbie was
Lebanese, and Cheryl was Italian. But our greater reality was the
common thread of our differentness from the larger community.
Because we went to school on different buses (from public school
children) and wore uniforms, we were easily spotted as outsiders in
our neighborhood. But the outsider pain of exclusion and derision
by the dominant culture was coupled with a strong insider sense of
community belonging and moral rightness.
At my elementary school, a mission school taught by French
Canadian nuns whose only other mission school was in Africa, we
observed a strict code of silence. Except when we were outside at
recess, we never spoke unless called on by a teacher, and then we
were required to stand whenever we spoke. Whenever an adult
entered our classroom, the entire class stood and remained
standing until given permission to sit. Our conduct was constantly
monitored by teachers or by designated students when teachers
were not present. We were punished for ever speaking: on the bus,
in the bathroom, in the cafeteria, in the hallways, in the church,
and, of course, in the classroom. Our parents reinforced the rigid
 Page 239
authoritarianism of the schools. Misbehavior at school also
brought punishment at home.
During elementary school, I wanted desperately to be good, to
avoid breaking the rules, and to avoid punishment. At the same
time, the system fostered in me an "us" (students) versus "them"
(adults) mentality. I walked a fine line between these worlds: to
conform and thus to please teachers and when that conformity
brought the desired and dreaded designation as monitor, not to rat
on my classmates. To become a turncoat who betrayed other
students was both a reward for good behavior and a threat to
solidarity and friendships. In contrast, my brother rebelled and
faced daily punishment. Thus, very early in life I began to see that
things simply weren't always fair and that young people could do
very little about it. At the same time, the Catholic emphasis on
racial and economic justice heavily influenced my worldview. My
decision to attend college seemed, in fact, somewhat like a copout,
the Peace Corps or direct social service being the more worthy
routes (short of entering a convent).
Sports was, for me, a source of great enjoyment and
accomplishment and was ultimately a ticket to visit the middle
class. I began my interest in sports as the only girl in my
neighborhood play group of six. We played all the major sports in
season: football, basketball, and baseball. As I got older, even
though my father was a coach, I was excluded from Little League
Baseball because I was a girl, despite several coaches' pleas to the
national association to let me in. My family's response was to
enroll me in free tennis (a sport for girls) clinics in the public
parks. I was good at tennis, too. From the age of twelve,
competitions pulled me into a world of rich, white, country-club
people all over the South. I experienced this world in a very
different way than my middle-class contemporaries did. My tennis
friends and competitors never came to my side of town to practice.
Instead, along with black women domestics, I often rode the bus an
hour across town. As city and state champion for several years, I
traveled and stayed with wealthy people all over the region who
housed tournament participants for free. During those years from
twelve to twenty-three, I constantly crossed the boundary from
working-class home to middle-class school and to middle-class
country club almost daily. No middle-class friend or competitor
ever crossed my way.
Biographical Statements: Entering Sociology
We each entered graduate school in sociology in the 1970s to
pursue our dual commitments to promoting social justice and to
securing decent middle-class employment. We knew, however,
from our personal experiences and from the social movements of
the times that the formal educational system could not be counted
on to embrace our perspectives and
 Page 240
meet our needs. We would have to make these things happen on
our own. We each entered our programs with primary interests in
race and class. As we pursued our degrees, courses in gender were
only beginning to be offered on the graduate level. Bonnie and
Elizabeth each took a graduate seminar focused on gender issues.
Bonnie read early feminist literature in her course and realized that
it did not speak to women's realities as she knew them. For
Elizabeth, a few of her sociological seminars included feminist
social science works. She also participated in a research seminar on
gender where other participants studied the lives of white middle-
class women, while the two women of color focused on the lives of
women of color.
Our graduate schools provided us with skills and credentials, but
these were not settings where we flourished. Gender and race
barriers were firmly entrenched in our graduate departments, which
had lifted barriers of admission but did not embrace the
perspectives that women, working-class people, and people of
color used to understand social life.
Elizabeth Higginbotham
I squeezed my undergraduate degree at City College in between the
various part-time jobs necessary for my survival. Therefore,
graduate school was a unique opportunity for me to finally have
the time for the reflection and interaction with other students that
my peers in graduate school had had in their college years.
Bringing skills and interests from my political work in SNCC in
1971, I organized a racially integrated women's consciousness-
raising group. Later I pulled together a support group of women-
of-color graduate students in the Boston/Cambridge area. In
addition to helping each other survive and write dissertations in
overwhelmingly white graduate departments, we openly discussed
our families, schooling experiences, upward social class mobility,
and relationships across gender, race, and class. In these peer
networks I learned far more about issues that were important to me
and critical to my survival than I learned from graduate faculty at
Brandeis.
Although many of the white graduate students at Brandeis did not
attend regional and/or national professional meetings until they
were looking for jobs, I was encouraged by an undergraduate
professor to begin attending these meetings early in my graduate
career In this way I followed developments in the study of U.S. race
relations, content that was missing in the graduate curriculum at
Brandeis. I also established a network of relationships with
graduate students of color at other institutions and received
encouragement and support from senior black colleagues in the
discipline. Their support and encouragement were critical to my
survival as a graduate student.
My part-time teaching experiences and interaction with students
and fac-
 Page 241
ulty at the University of Massachusetts at Boston motivated me to
complete a doctorate. But it was my interactions with other people
of color that actually gave me the social, emotional, and
intellectual resources to secure that goal. While building and
operating within a network of graduate students of color, I met
Bonnie Thornton Dill, a graduate student in New York who was
also working on black women. Initially, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes,
then a graduate student at Northeastern University and now
associate professor at Colby College, heard Bonnie Dill deliver a
paper at the 1975 annual meetings of the American Sociological
Association in San Francisco (that year my meager earnings did
not permit me to travel to the annual meetings). Cheryl, excited by
the work of this sister graduate student, made copies of Bonnie's
paper for members in our Boston group. I contacted Bonnie, and
we met at the 1976 ASA meeting in New York City. Our budding
group of black women sociologists nurtured and guided each
other's work in the absence of senior mentors in our institutions
knowledgeable about gender and race. We organized panels at
regional and national meetings to present our work and expand our
network. In 1979 we took pride as four in our group completed
dissertations. 13 We continued to support each other as we
launched our careers.
Bonnie Thornton Dill
I entered graduate school in sociology at New York University in
1972 after working for seven years in New York City. My first job
after college was with the federal Office of Economic Opportunity.
I continued to work in the War on Poverty at both the federal and
local levels for several years. After earning a master's degree in
human relations, I became a counselor in the SEEK Program (the
special admissions program for African-American and Latino
students of the City University of New York) at Bernard M. Baruch
College. My work in organizing community corporations, setting
up family planning programs, and counseling students of color had
given me hands-on experience with the problems that sociological
theories purport to address. I came to graduate school looking for
theories that would help me understand and make sense of what I
had learned about racism and poverty. I also came to sociology
because I knew I had a different story to tell about African-
American families than the one that was sweeping the country at
the time under the title of the "Moynihan Report."
I began my work in sociology as a part-time student, convinced
that if I did not like it and if it did not provide me with a way to
address the issues I was concerned about, I would not continue. I
had been an English major in undergraduate school and was
unfamiliar with the discipline of sociology. Once I read C. Wright
Mills, however, I was hooked: hooked on the idea that biography
and history were keys to understanding people in society. I entered
the field when conflict theory was displacing functionalism, and
that shift explained a lot of the
 Page 242
world as I came to know it. It also fit with my desire to use
sociological theory as a tool for social improvement and social
change.
I entered graduate school determined to study African-American
families, but I did not expect to find much expertise about them
within the institution. I knew from the outset that I would have to
build my own support networks. As I became more engaged in the
field, I sought other graduate students who shared my interests.
Several of my efforts to exchange work and get feedback were
unsuccessful, but once I met Elizabeth Higginbotham and Cheryl
Townsend Gilkes, I found myself among a group of developing
young scholars who became career-long allies, colleagues, and
friends.
Through graduate school, I learned to be part of a long-distance
network and to use the annual sociology meetings as a point of
connection. When I moved from New York to Memphis, I took my
network and networking ideas with me. From the start, Lynn Weber
and I got along. Like me, she had gone to graduate school with
interests that could not be fully accommodated there, and she had
created her own concentration in race. Her scholarly and personal
interest in race was our first point of connection, and over the
years we discovered many others. It was inevitable, then, that when
Elizabeth came to Memphis in 1979 to visit, she, Lynn, and I would
begin to work together.
Lynn Weber
I changed majors eight times in my four years of undergraduate
work at Memphis State, trying biology, math, social work, and
psychology before settling in on sociology the semester before I
graduated in 1971. I pursued sociology to understand some of the
tremendous social issues of the time: racism, war, and poverty.
During work on my master's at Memphis State and my doctorate at
the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, my attitude toward
graduate school was that it was a necessary evil en route to a
secure job and decent pay in afield I liked. I looked on it as an evil
because I was acutely aware of the political nature of the process
and the way it influenced every aspect of graduate education from
entry to exit.
Early in my M.A. program, for example, the new chair of the
department of sociology actively campaigned to deny tenure to a
faculty member. Although I was unaware of these men's struggles, I
was the only student called by both sides to testify in an appeals
committee hearing. I saw the whole sordid affair as an exploitation
of relatively powerless students in the petty, foolish, and
unnecessary power games that faculty play. I still feel the same way
about most university politics today.
My class, region, and gender were each explicitly presented as
barriers to
 Page 243
my continuing down one path or another throughout my education.
For example, my undergraduate professors told me that because an
undergraduate degree from Memphis State was a liability, only
after completing a master's would I be able to compete with
undergraduates from top universities to get into a "good" doctoral
program.
When I did enter the University of Illinois, my advisory committee
in the second semester indicated that I would need to take more
coursework than other graduate students because my
undergraduate institution was southern and its faculty was
"unknown." My faculty advisory committee made this decision after
I had completed my first semester with four A's, no incompletes, a
fellowship, and a part-time job. At the time, I had already begun to
systematically study inequities of power within the classroom. As a
participant-observer and unbeknown to the faculty, I conducted a
power analysis of a team-taught theory seminar. The results clearly
showed the ways that the frequency and content of communications
varied with the status of the speaker
Despite my being a straight-A student in graduate school, I never
wanted to revel in or repeat my educational experiences, so I set
my mind to getting out as fast as I could. Even though I had studied
race and worked on a study of social class identification, it was not
until I met Elizabeth and Bonnie that I first began to see clearly the
connections between my work and my self.
I will never forget my deep-seated feeling of liberation as I came to
know Bonnie Dill after she joined the Memphis State faculty in
1978, two years after I had. I came to feel what I had never
imagined possible before: that there could be a
sociology/professional colleague who frequently shared my views
and interests. More important, when we did not agree, I learned
from her different perspective. She was the first colleague I had
ever had who related to me as an equal with respect. The
relationship meant so much to me that I grew in leaps and bounds
in self-confidence, in intellectual creativity and risk-taking, and in
productivity.
The relationship affected me in ways that I did not comprehend.
When Bonnie was absent for a semester after the birth of her twin
girls in 1980, for example, I carried on my daily work much as I
had before she came. I had no soulmate at the office, but I
frequently visited her and the children at her home and helped with
regular outings. The first week after her return, we entered the
sociology building after having lunch. An African-American
woman on the housekeeping staff proclaimed down the entry hall
for all to hear: "It sure is good you [Bonnie] got back. She was
sosad while you were gone! She's smiling again." I had no idea that
my feelings were so different and visible. I had discussed them with
no one. Of course, it was not my faculty colleagues but a member
of the housekeeping staff who saw the change in me and reflected it
back.
 Page 244

Points of Connection/Building the Center/Intellectual Vision

As we came to know each other across our diverse backgrounds,
our intellectual interests in social inequality, our critical
perspectives on power structures, our desire to be scholar activists,
and our multiple experiences of oppression all became central
points of connection among the three of us. The people we were
and the instincts we followed led us to trust one another in our
critical stances toward the mainstream of sociology as a discipline
and of the academic institutions where we worked.
The Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis, where
Lynn began her career in 1976 and which Bonnie joined in 1978,
was overwhelmingly white and male. And virtually all of the men
had wives who bore primary responsibility for home and family
lives. During her first few weeks on campus, Bonnie was invited to
lunch by three of her male colleagues. When they arrived at the
cafeteria, all three of them pulled out lunch bags with sandwiches
their wives had prepared. Bonnie recalled: "I was astounded to
think this was supposed to be my professional reference group.
Every morning before I went to work, I was getting food and
formula together for my five-month-old son, and my husband was
busy going to work himself. There was no one to make lunch for
either of us."
Bonnie and Lynn supported each other's efforts to manage the
demands of family while maintaining scholarly productivity and
quality teaching. Many early meetings to plan the center's work
were conducted at Bonnie's house while feeding and caring for
babies. When Elizabeth moved to Memphis in 1983 and joined the
center she had helped to frame, she needed support as a single
woman to keep endless work demands from consuming her entire
life. Our everyday lives in the department mirrored our places in
the discipline, and the encouragement we gave each other to value
our personal lives while pursuing our careers was so important to
our survival that we knew it would be key to the survival of other
women. We had already become good friends before we initiated
the center, but as we shared our work and lives over time, we
became sisters.
Our center's collective vision was developed through interactions
among ourselves and other members of our intellectual and activist
communities at the University of Memphis, in the city of Memphis,
and across the nation. By sharing our individual wishes, assessing
our strengths, and identifying our communities' needs, we set out to
nurture a national and local community of scholar-activists
working for social change for women of color and working-class
southern women. Because we are soci-
 Page 245
ologists, our center was then, and remains, grounded in a
sociological perspective.
The process through which we came to an understanding of our
common vision for the center and for our individual roles within it
was much more chaotic and ambiguous. Because we were clearly
creating a new kind of institution in a unique location, we found no
models that guided us very far toward our goals. When Elizabeth
and Lynn, for example, wrote a proposal to the National Institute of
Mental Health (NIMH) for research on upward mobility among
black and white women, no one at the University of Memphis State
had ever before submitted a successful research proposal to NIMH.
The Office of Sponsored Programs gave us the closest examples
they had on file: two National Institutes of Health grant proposals,
one on hearing aids and a second on blood hemoglobin.
At that time, much of what we attempted, either in our scholarship
or in other projects, felt like walking into a void. Who knows how
you'll get through it or where you'll be when you do? Many of the
things we did as a nationally focused, externally funded program
had never been done before at the University of Memphis. Often
new rules and procedures were developed as a result of our actions.
During the first five years of the center's operation (1982-1987), for
example, the university had no written procedures or standard
practices for such common grant issues as allocation of indirect
costs, faculty buyouts, obtaining of space, and renovation of space.
Each grantee negotiated in private with several levels of higher
administration (chair, dean, vice president for sponsored programs,
vice president for academic affairs), and it was never clear exactly
with whom we should negotiate. Frequently, we would reach an
agreement with the dean of arts and sciences only to learn a few
months later that the vice president for sponsored programs would
not carry through on some aspect that involved (or came to
involve) his office. Because administrators rarely agreed to put
anything in writing, we constantly faced crises as issues we thought
were settled arose when someone's paycheck was not cut or travel
not approved. And even though administrators appreciated the
money and the visibility of the grants that we brought to the
university, they did not believe that our center, or women's studies
as a whole, would survive for five years. So they were never
willing to invest in our operation the way that they did in other
centers on campus, such as the Center for Earthquake Research and
Information (CERI) or the Manpower Research Center. As we
sought to figure out how to negotiate the system, the director of
CERI was, in fact, quite helpful and was also very frustrated with
the uncertainties in the system.
 Page 246
Given this high degree of uncertainty, the processes we developed
reflected the creative tension of oppression and activism as we
experienced it in individual and collective ways. In a system that
had historically devalued our people and our work, we acted
because our individual and collective survival depended on it.
Regularly sharing our personal experiences and studying the
histories of oppressed groups were means through which we found
in an uncertain world one certainty: the necessity and value of the
struggle for justice.
Because of the limited resources available to us at the University of
Memphis, we decided that our mission had to be narrowly focused
and clearly defined. We knew that we and others sharing our vision
needed a place that would give priority to a social structural study
of race, class, and gender. We sought to legitimate the academic
and activist pursuits that we and many others had engaged in for so
many years.
In 1982, with Bonnie Dill as director and Lynn Weber as associate
director, we formally announced our mission in our first newsletter:
"This Center's first commitment is to advance, promote, and
conduct research on working-class women in the South and women
of color in the nation." We further stated that our enterprise would
be defined through our actions. "Our activities of our first eleven
months reflect the ways in which we see ourselves vis a vis the
community of researchers, writers, and teachers who make up our
target population, the University community in which we hope to
become an increasingly important unit, and the Memphis
community in which we live and work. 14
During those first eleven months, we hosted a one-day workshop
on women and work in the South; established a national advisory
board; initiated a clearinghouse of scholars conducting research on
women of color and on southern women; with local community
activists, cosponsored a women and religion conference; produced
a newsletter and a national and local mailing list; sponsored
meetings of the Inter-University Research Group Exploring the
Intersection of Race and Gender; planned our first summer
institute, hosted our first visiting scholar, Elizabeth Higginbotham;
started a series of working papers; established ties with many
groups across the country; and began to develop research grant
applications. We also provided a minority voice in the development
of the National Council for Research on Women, a new coalition of
twenty-eight centers for research on women.
On the home front, we also dealt with the institutional bureaucratic
and political demands of hiring staff, identifying and renovating
space, and establishing ourselves as a new unit on our campus. We
also maintained
 Page 247
our involvement in campus committees and programs (e.g.,
women's studies and black studies) and taught two courses a
semester.
Through the challenges of our first years, our intellectual vision
became ever more focused and clear. We maintained our
commitment to studying social structural systems of inequality
embedded in race, class, and gender relations and their
ramifications for social life. Examining the diversity of social
experiences across systems of oppression was a natural outgrowth
of this focus. Through this process we demonstrated the importance
of multiple perspectives representing the views/insights/voices of
those in different relations of power for a more complete and
accurate understanding of social reality. The basic truth of this
principle was reinforced in our everyday lives as we struggled
together to develop our careers and build the Center at the
University of Memphis.
Scholarship
Because we wanted our scholarship to reflect the complexities of
the social world as we experienced and observed it, we sought to
find new ways to develop insights, design and conduct research,
and write within a perspective integrating race, class, and gender.
Thinking and writing together were two of the ways we gained
clarity. And we did this in an academic environment that favored
individual achievement over collaborative efforts.
The Inter-University Group Exploring the Intersection of Gender
and Race opened the dialogue about gender and race. Within this
groupBonnie and Elizabeth, along with Cheryl Townsend Gilkes,
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Ruth Zambranawe rethought the
influence of racial oppression on women's lives by examining
various groups of women in different racial-ethnic communities.
Lynn was often an informal participant in this group and played a
critical role on the faculty of the center's first summer institute on
women of color in 1983. That summer institute brought together
graduate students and faculty, most of whom felt isolated in their
respective institutions because they lacked colleagues with whom
to share their work on women of color. 15
We agreed that in feminist circles we often found ourselves
surrounded by middle-class white women who were unwilling to
confront the racist assumptions of women's studies. Even though
we had each learned a lot through placing women in the center of
scholarly analysis, we were dissatisfied with the position of women
of color and working-class women, who were still on the margins.
Along with Maxine Baca Zinn, a visiting scholar at the center
during summer 1984, we wrote a critique of exclusionary practices
in women's studies that was published in Signs.16 We hoped that
 Page 248
making white feminists aware of their biases would prompt them to
take issues of race and class more seriously. 17
Extending the critique of white middle-class biases in women's
studies was just one step on our scholarly journey. We also found
ourselves critiquing work within several other subfields of
scholarship. Although we found useful insights in historical and
contemporary work in ethnic studies, male biases pervaded these
fields. And even though scholarship on working-class women was
growing, it was mostly historical and focused more on the
employment and social lives of white women. Through careful
analysis, critique, and selection, however, we used each of these
scholarly traditions in our work.
We integrated our focus on race, class, and gender into this
scholarship. We did not agree with the critique of the family as
completely as many women's studies scholars did at the time, for
example, because this paradigm ignored important aspects of
family life for people of color. In some respects our families did
constrain women, but we often felt more constrained by patriarchy
in the public sector. Additionally, our families had often been
sources of strength and refuge in a hostile society. Because racism
and discrimination often pushed women of color out of the
household and into the marketplace, we became particularly
interested in employment, especially in the segmented labor
systems in which women of color were found. Bonnie's research on
black women domestics explored the working conditions, as well
as the economic survival strategies, of these women.18 Elizabeth
and Evelyn Nakano Glenn looked at patterns whereby women of
color performed reproductive work inside and outside of individual
homes, often enabling middle- and upper-class white women to
avoid this work.19
We were also interested in the ways in which state supports and
private-sector benefits extended to families varied by race and
class. Racial oppression made the history of motherhood for
women of color decidedly different from that of white middle-class
women.20 This thinking provided the intellectual framework for
Bonnie's exploration of female-headed families in mid-South rural
counties. Bonnie, along with Michael Timberlake and Bruce
Williams, secured funding from the Aspen Institute to examine the
relationship among family structure, state supports, and community
resources in the coping and survival strategies of low-income
single mothers.21
Both Elizabeth and Lynn began to look to sociology to help them
understand the upward class mobility struggles that they and other
colleagues shared. In dissertation research, Elizabeth had been one
of the first people to study social class differences among educated
black women. Lynn was
 Page 249
just completing a major project on American perceptions of class.
22 Both of those projects, in combination with life experiences, left
them with many questions about the ways that race and gender
shape the mobility process.
At the time, little was known about the social mobility process for
white women and even less for black women and other women of
color. They were typically either excluded from the research, or
race and class were confounded in the same study; most often
studies of minorities were on poor and/or working-class
populations, and studies of white people were on middle-class
populations. So Elizabeth and Lynn designed a joint research
project to explore variations in the process of educational and
occupational mobility in a wide range of areas, including the
current work, family life, and health of black and white women
professionals, managers, and administrators.23
They organized a team of graduate assistants and conducted
focused life history interviews with two hundred black and white
women of the baby-boom cohort (ages twenty-five to forty) who
were employed full-time as professionals, managers, or
administrators in the Memphis metropolitan area from 1985 to
1987.24 Successful completion of this project was possible, in part,
because the center had developed such strong ties to our local
community, especially among black women. As we recruited
participants, we called on women contacts and friends across the
city to assist us in providing the contacts and assurances that black
women were much more likely to need to feel comfortable in
participating. Our study of the differences in methods required to
recruit subjects is reported in a Gender & Society article that has
been widely reprinted.25
The experiences of these black and white professional and
managerial women have certainly painted a different picture from
the dominant culture image of the mobility process based on
research on white males. First and foremost, these women are not
detached, isolated, or driven solely by career goals. Relationships
with family of origin, partners, children, friends, and the wider
racial community significantly shape the ways they envision and
accomplish mobility and the ways they sustain themselves as
professional and managerial women. For these women, for
example, social mobility involved not only competition but also
cooperation, community support, and personal obligations.26
Teaching
In addition to our scholarship, our commitment to creating space
for multiple perspectives extended to our teaching and our
relationships with students. We each desire to change education,
making it more relevant to people
 Page 250
like ourselves. With funding from the Ford Foundation, the Fund
for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, and the
University of Memphis, we sponsored nine national workshops
and/or summer institutes that highlighted the new scholarship on
race, class, and gender. Most participants have been social science,
history, and humanities educators, scholars, and graduate students.
We established an online database of bibliographic citations to
social science research on women of color and southern women
and continue to make this information available in printed
bibliographies. We also maintain resources for curriculum change,
publish working papers on curriculum issues, and biannually
publish a newsletter that seeks to teach people about new
scholarship. Center professional staff, primarily Lynn and
Elizabeth. consult with other universities, colleges, and community
colleges to aid in faculty development.
Through this combination of action/experience and research, we
seek to ''transform the curriculum," to develop a more inclusive
curriculum by expanding the guiding vision, disciplinary
knowledge base, and pedagogical strategies. In our work with
faculty, we provide access to new race, class, and gender
information that is relevant to their work; a broad vision of what an
ideal, inclusive curriculum might contain; and pedagogical
strategies to develop classroom climates that are open and positive
for the diverse students in them.
We recognized the need for strong links among peers, and
Elizabeth designed a model for our summer institutes and
workshops whereby participants share their research and teaching
issues in small groups, as well as in larger forums. Because we
knew that people supporting each other as they develop research
and teaching agendas was important, we facilitated exchanges
across race, class, and gender among faculty so that faculty could
do the same for their students. In this work, we have been trial-and-
error learners, grateful for concrete feedback from workshop
faculty and participants.
Lynn used her long-standing interest in classrooms and power to
develop methods of promoting positive race, class, and gender
dynamics in the classroom. She began work in this area in graduate
school and extended it early in her teaching career to examine
relationships between white faculty and black students. Building on
experience and scholarship on race relations and small groups, she
developed a variety of strategies for promoting positive race, class,
and gender dynamics in the classroom. 27 They include ground
rules for classroom discussion that acknowledge the presence of
hierarchies in the classroom and ask students to show respect for
 Page 251
one another in their communication. This work has helped many
faculty around the nation understand how they can use their power
in the classroom to establish the type of climate that would support
learning across diversity
Building an Institution: Collaborative Work and Rewards
Because we were committed to work that incorporated the multiple
perspectives of those in different power relations along race, class,
and gender systems, we employed a collaborative model for our
practice, as well as for our scholarship. And because collaborative
work is often devalued in academia, where the ideal scholar is an
isolated man working alone to write some great work or make
some discovery, our collaborative practice is often deeply
problematic within university hierarchies where issues of
professional recognition and reward are concerned.
In developing the center, we were committed to sharing power and
responsibility, yet little about the institution allowed for this model
of functioning and organization. The lack of fit between our vision
and the institution's structure proved to be a constant source of
strain and tension. So it was critical for us to clarify and resolve
issues among ourselves in order to present a united front to
administrators and colleagues in the Department of Sociology and
Social Work. Our resolve was based on our shared vision of goals
for the center, our individual and collaborative research, and our
commitment to our personal growth. Often achieving unity among
ourselves meant challenging each other to be the best that we could
be. Submitting grant proposals and being evaluated, for example,
were never pleasant for anyone, particularly for Lynn, whose sense
of fatalism made it difficult for her to believe that major granting
agencies would fund us rookies. Yet Elizabeth realized that part of
preparing a grant proposal was providing the emotional support to
collaborators so that they could do their best writing: "I often had
to find optimism I did not know I had." Together we pushed one
another to do our best work, and as rookies we took reviewers'
comments seriously and prepared a proposal that was initially
funded for two years. After we completed data collection, we
applied and secured an additional two years of funding. This
commitment to one another, to getting through difficulties by
resolving issues among ourselves, was central to our ability to
build the center within the university
As we worked together, we watched and learned as each of us
faced different treatment from University of Memphis faculty,
administrators, and students. Daily we went out from the safe space
we created for ourselves in the center and later reported to each
other the reactions we received from
 Page 252
all quarters. We analyzed these encounters for their race, class,
gender, and regional content and planned our next actions
accordingly. This process was informal but systematic and
necessary to our survival in a system that we often experienced as
hostile and obstructionist. The process also solidified our
friendships and commitment to one another and our goals.
The tension between our vision for the center and the structure of
the institution played itself out in many ways throughout the years.
Our institutional location and reporting structure, for example,
changed four times in ten years. The University of Memphis
administrators' ongoing ambivalence about where our unit should
be located was reflected in the initial decision to establish the
center as an independent unit reporting directly to the dean of arts
and sciences and equivalent to departments and yet to exclude us
from meetings of heads of departmental units and from routine
administrative communications on the grounds that since we were
not a teaching unit, much of the discussion at the meetings would
not be relevant to us. It was not until 1987, our fifth year, that we
received any base budget support from the institution.
From the beginning, Bonnie, the founding director, and Lynn, the
associate director, attended all meetings with university
administrators together to represent the center, the only unit in the
institution to do so. As soon as we received a nominal base budget
from the university, however, the center was moved into the
Sociology Department, and we were told that only one person
could now report to the dean. We were not invited to meetings with
arts and sciences chairs and directors. We were sometimes dealt
with directly, sometimes through the sociology chair, and
sometimes not at all. As a result, we became much more vulnerable
to an increasingly hostile Department of Sociology. 28 We
continued to request and receive meetings with the dean but were
not fully informed of all administrative issues and processes. It
took critical changes in higher administration for our status on the
campus to improve.
In 1991, when V. Lane Rawlins became president of the University
of Memphis, he recognized the importance of women's studies as
an interdisciplinary fieldand as a labor economist, he
acknowledged the realities of race and gender discrimination.
Because he wants the university to serve the greater metropolitan
area, including a central city that is 50 percent African American,
the new administration is more appreciative of our programming,
curriculum work, university service, and research publications
focused on race, class, and gender than were past administrations.
As the climate shifts, we become more involved on the campus in
efforts to re-
 Page 253
cruit and retain women faculty and faculty of color. We have also
clarified our administrative location and routinized lines of
reporting.
Over the years our personal and professional issues frequently
clashed with the way things were done at the university. What
made a difference for us in confronting these obstacles was that
because we supported one another, these struggles were not as
isolating and devastating as they could have been and typically are
for faculty who lack colleagues to communicate with about their
problems and who have a structural analysis from which to critique
their situations.
In 1993 we received two major awards from the American
Sociological Association: the Jessie Bernard Award, in recognition
of how our collective work had enlarged the horizons of sociology
to fully encompass the role of women in society, and the
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. We were
nominated by our colleagues, people who had worked with us
and/or attended our institutes and workshops. These awards
acknowledged the impact of our work and research on the teaching
of groups that are traditionally devalued and marginalized. And
they recognized the legitimacy of the collaborative model we had
worked so hard to develop and maintain. We appreciated this
acknowledgment that we had successfully achieved one of our
major goals: to create a place where work on race, class, and
gender was unquestionably viewed as not just legitimate but also as
crucial to the development of social theory. Unlike our experience
as isolated graduate students, we are now secure in a large network
of scholars who actively support one another in their work.
Finding a true voice to represent a self-defined standpoint is critical
to the survival of oppressed groups. Finding this true voice is
equally important for the survival of individual members of those
groups. Our own experience of oppression and the skills we
developed over our lifetimes guided us in our quest to find our own
standpoints. We worked together to create a community centered in
Memphis. We listened to and worked to help one another find our
own unique lenses for viewing the world. We know all scholars,
regardless of race, gender, and social class, need communities
where they are insiders, where they are cherished for who they are
and how they see the world, and where they are encouraged to
share that vision and perspective with colleagues, students, and
other communities.
 Page 254

Notes
We wish to thank Jean Bohner, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Barbara
Laslett, Barrie Thorne, and Lynet Uttal for their comments on an
early draft of this essay We also appreciate the efforts of Melissa
Fry in preparing the final copy for publication.
1. The University of Memphis was named Memphis State
University until July 1994. In the text of this essay, we refer to the
new name of the institution, but to be historically specific and
retain the flow of the biographical narratives, we use the old name
in these statements.
2. Ironically it is that very search for a "common agenda as
women" that leads many white middle-class women to continue to
see the inclusion of oppressed groups as necessary at the same time
that they cannot fully incorporate those groups. The very basis for
the inclusion is the search for a way to ignore the race and class
realities of the lives of women of color and working-class women.
These efforts often lead to mistrust and ill will, certainly not to a
common agenda.
3. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon, The American
Perception of Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).
4. Ibid.; Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Betsy Lucal, "Class
Stratification in Introductory Textbooks: Relational or
Distributional Models?" Teaching Sociology 22 (1994): 139-150.
5. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the
Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are
Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist
Press, 1982).
6. Toni Cade, The Black Woman (New York: Signet, 1970); bell
hooks, Ain't I a Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1981);
LaFrances Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman (Beverly Hills,
Calif.: Sage, 1980).
7. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Dialectics of Black Womanhood,"
Signs 4 (1979): 543-555.
8. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for
an All-inclusive Sisterhood," Feminist Studies 9 (spring 1983):
131-150.
9. This initial research group was composed of Dill, Higginbotham,
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Ruth
Zambrana. The grant from the Ford Foundation provided them with
funding for books, summer stipends, and travel for three group
meetings held between 1981 and 1983. Afterward, in 1984, the
group had a Problems of the Discipline Grant from the American
Sociological Association.
10. For a discussion of the Spelman Center, see Beverly Guy-
Sheftal, "A Black Feminist Perspective on Transforming the
Academy," in Stanlie M. James and Abena PA. Busia, eds.,
Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black
Women (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 77-89.
11. By World War I, Pullman employed approximately twelve
thousand black people, making it the largest single employer of
black workers in the country, according to William Harris, Keeping
the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P Webster; and the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1937 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991). These men were employed as
sleeping car porters. Led by A. Philip Randolph, the Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters struggled for better working conditions.
Many
 Page 255
of these men and their wives, often working in Ladies Auxiliaries,
became key leaders in their communities and many worked in the
early civil rights movement in the North and South. For additional
reading on the topic, see Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of
Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1989).
12. Deborah Gray White succeeded me in that position. She is
currently a professor of history at Rutgers, State University of New
Jersey, and author of Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the
Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).
13. In addition to Higginbotham, Gilkes, and Dill completing
dissertations in 1979, Regina Arnold, now associate professor at
Sarah Lawrence College, also finished her doctorate from Bryn
Mawr.
14. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Director's Comments," Newsletter
Center for Research on Women, Memphis State University 1
(December 1982): 1.
15. In addition to the members of the original research group and
Lynn Weber, the faculty for the first summer institute on women of
color were Esther Chow, professor of sociology, American
University; Leith Mullings, professor of anthropology, Graduate
Center for the City University of New York; Maxine Baca Zinn,
professor of sociology, Michigan State University; and Lea Ybarra,
professor of sociology and an administrator at California State
University, Fresno.
16. Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Costs of
Exclusionary Practices in Women's Studies," Signs 11 (winter
1986): 290-303.
17. This article, which was designed to speak directly to white
feminists, was encouraged by Barbara Gelpi, then the editor of
Signs.
18. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Means to Put My Children
Through: Child-rearing Goals and Strategies Among Black Female
Domestic Servants," in Rodgers-Rose, ed., The Black Woman, pp.
107-123; Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and
Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female
Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1994).
19. Elizabeth Higginbotham, "Laid Bare by the System: Work and
Survival for Black and Hispanic Women," in Amy Swerdlow and
Hanna Lessinger, eds., Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of
Control (Boston: Hall, 1983), pp. 200-215; Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
"From Servitude to Service: Historical Continuities in the Racial
Division of Paid Reproductive Labor," Signs 18 (1992): 1-43.
20. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief: Racial-Ethnic
Women and the Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family
History 13 (1988): 415-431.
21. Bonnie Thornton Dill and Bruce Williams, "Race, Gender, and
Poverty in the Rural South: African American Single Mothers," in
Cynthia M. Duncan, ed., Rural Poverty in America (New York:
Auburn House, 1992), pp. 97-109; Michael Timberlake was a
professor of sociology at the University of Memphis until 1991; he
is now professor and chair of the Department of Sociology,
Anthropology, and Social Work at Kansas State University. Bruce
Williams is an associate professor of sociology at the University of
Mississippi.
22. Vanneman and Cannon, The American Perception of Class.
This earlier work was important in clarifying our vision of social
class as a complex economic, power-based relationship with key
structural and psychological consequences.
23. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental
Health Grant MH38769.
 Page 256
24. This research experience was key for graduate assistants on the
project. Our institution offers only a master's in sociology and other
social sciences. Thus, this study was a unique opportunity for
students to actually participate in a major research project. They
were trained in interviewing and issues of confidentiality of human
subjects. Then they participated in design, testing, recruiting,
collecting data, and cleaning the data for analysis. Their insights
were helpful in coding data for quantitative and qualitative
analysis. Furthermore, the actual interviews with middle-class
black and white women in the city provided students with insights
into what was behind the success of individuals who could be role
models. Several graduate assistants from the project continued their
education beyond the master's.
25. Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Marianne
Leung, "Race and Class Bias in Qualitative Research on Women,"
Gender and Society 2 (December 1990): 449-462. This article
describes a methodology that is a model for conducting research
that does not confound race and social class. The article has been
reprinted in two anthologies and is widely cited by people
interested in multiracial research.
26. For a longer discussion of the race, gender, and traditional
mobility research, see Elizabeth Higginbotham and Lynn Weber
Cannon, "Rethinking Mobility: Towards a Race and Gender
Inclusive Theory," Research Paper 8 (Memphis, Tenn.: Center for
Research on Women, Memphis State University, July 1988).
27. Lynn Weber Cannon, "Ground Rules for Classroom
Discussion," Women's Studies Quarterly 14 (spring-summer 1990):
126-134.
28. Several members of the department became hostile to many
new developments in sociology, including the emphasis on
improved undergraduate teaching and progressive scholarship in
areas such as world systems and stratification, as well as in race,
class, and gender.
 Page 257

A Second-Generation Story
Marjorie L. DeVault
Iam not a feminist pioneer. My intention in beginning this way is
not to indulge in self-deprecatory apology but to provide a
statement of historical context. As an early "daughter" of second-
wave feminist scholars, my work and career have developed within
a fragile, uneven, but steadily strengthening feminist community in
the academy In many ways, I have worked with a kind of comfort
that I recognize as part of the privilege of coming later: I have been
helped by feminist scholars before me, socialized into the
profession by powerful mentors who are also feminists, and
supported (for the most part) in my attempts to resist disciplinary
tyranny I have also learned to accommodate to the demands of the
profession, and my adjustments to an academic career often sit
uneasily beside my feminism. The community that supports my
work often seems dangerously fragile. Finding a place in the
discipline felt like a risky bet until quite recently; the fact that I
have entered the field successfully is a source of pride and also
cause for reflection on why I have been sorted in rather than out. I
try to tell a story here that examines my historically situated self
and that displays some of the conditions of my entry into both
feminism and sociology.
Growing up: Cultural Contradictions
I was born in 1950 to white middle-class parents who had
constructed a traditional family of the era. 1 My parents, raised in
mostly rural midwestern environments, valued education. My
father, who went to college to become a music teacher, was
encouraged to continue with graduate work and soon became a
college teacher specializing in mathematics education. My mother,
whose college work in art had been interrupted by their marriage,
took up the work of a faculty wife (enthusiastically at first, I think,
and then with increasing ambivalence). I was their first child,
obedient, smart, and shy I was much loved and, for better and
worse, shaped by the values of the
Copyright © 1997 by Marjorie L. DeVault.
 Page 258
prevailing culture of my era and class. A kindergarten evaluation
(preserved in my mother's lovingly detailed record of my
development) encapsulates the contradictions of middle-class
girlhood in that time: "Marjorie is extremely well-adjusted. I have
never seen her cry or get upset, though she sometimes sucks on her
skirt."
I was encouraged to apply myself academically, to think of myself
as "special," and to make my own decisions. But it was never very
clear where that decision-making might lead. For a while (during
the Kennedy era), I remember that I aspired to what seemed a very
influential post: politician's wife. I was a responsible, intelligent,
and conscientious student, drifting toward a promising, if hazy,
future. Gender patterns in this sort of middleclass family were just
beginning to fracture: I remember, in my early teens, overhearing
adult voices in heated discussion of The Feminine Mystique.Soon,
a wave of painful divorces would begin in such families.
Politically, I grew up alongside the 1960s, just a bit too young (and
too timid) to participate fully in the movements of the time. Off to
college in 1968, I watched the activism of the period mostly from
the sidelines, drawn away from classes and out to the streets only at
moments of crisisspring 1970, for instance, when U.S. troops
invaded yet another Southeast Asian country and students like me
were killed by soldiers on their campus.
I rememberjust barelythat during those years "women's liberation"
came to our campus one day: a group of slightly older activists
from somewhere in the East, traveling through the country with a
workshop for women. I remember, dimly, that I attended, with my
roommates, that we sat on the floor and talked. And I remember
that the discussion continued back in the dorm well into the night. 2
This early appearance of feminism was anomalous in my life,
however. I was about to slide into marriage to my high school
sweetheart, too early and far too blithely. It didn't take long to
discover that this marriage would not work. I struggled with
various accommodations: I became domestic, tried to suppress my
ambition. And I wish I could say that I rebelled and left, but in fact
it was his unhappiness that finally moved me along. I hadn't yet
learned to be angry in any effective way.

Discoveries
In my first year of college1968I discovered social science in an
introductory psychology course taught by a very young woman
faculty member. (I remember this young woman very vividly and
sympathetically: in the image I retain, she sometimes trembled
while lecturing. She was one of
 Page 259
the four faculty women who taught me in that college, each of
whom I can visualize now in precise detail. Significantly, I
remember in this vivid way hardly any of the faculty who were
men.) We were to write term papers, and after choosing the topic
"subliminal perception," I went to look for the material referenced
in our textbook, articles in a journal so esoteric sounding that I was
sure the school library wouldn't have it: the Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology.Of course, I found it, on the fourth floor, in
a little garret at the top of what seemed a very musty branch of the
old library.
My discovery in that garret was what captured me for social
science and, eventually, sociology. I discovered that scholars
argued back and forth about topics such as subliminal perception
and that psychologists engaged in the most interesting exercise:
they designed experiments to convince each other of their views. I
spent many hours working on my paper, poring over dirty old
journals, tracing debates back and forth. It was a time of private,
intense emotion, an awakening to the excitement and creativity of
scholarly work. I sensed then that scholarship could be a kind of
conversation, and I wanted to be part of it. The tone of slightly
illicit pleasure in this account captures the edge of ambivalence I
felt in this discovery. I was still caught in the dilemmas of my
socialization, unwilling to fully acknowledge my ambitions but
equally unwilling to put them aside.
A few years later, around the time I was divorced, I discovered
feminism. I did not join a consciousness-raising group or engage in
political action. Instead, I encountered the women's movement in
its academic context. I was then pursuing a master's degree in
curriculum and instruction, with the idea of becoming an
elementary school teacher (one of the failed strategies for
accommodation to my marriage), and faculty members at my
institution, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, were just
beginning to bring feminist content to the teacher training program.
I read about gender stereotyping in children's readers, began to
think about my own life, and experienced that profound feminist
"click" of awakened consciousness. I began to get angry, andmore
importantI had a theory to explain why I learned, for example, that
women were socialized into a double bind: that being a "normal
woman" was incompatible with being a "normal adult." And that
men expectedand would demandthat women serve as audience for
men's actions rather than becoming actors themselves. I remember
long, solitary walks during that time, when I tasted these new
insights and emotions and considered what they meant. And I
remember discovering feminist writings that spoke directly to these
feelings: Judy Chicago, Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy, the
alternative journal Country Women,and others. I began to work on
becoming a conscious, independent woman, and I found this
project tremendously energizing.
 Page 260
With other women in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, I began to explore what feminist scholarship might be.
In the early 1970s, I was a member of that department's first
graduate course in women's studies, ''Issues in Sex-related
Differences in Curriculum and Instruction," a seminar offered by
Elizabeth Fennema, who had already begun to challenge the
prevailing wisdom about girls' mathematics performance. 3 We had
a wonderful time, but there were lurking anxieties; it seemed odd
and a bit risky, then, to give serious attention to women and girls.
Several times, I heard Liz, in the course of telling about the
seminar, offer a laughing apology. Well," she would say, "these
students have to take the blame for all this." Smiling, we would
correct her: credit, not blame! But I was struck by the sense of
vulnerability that produced this kind of nervous joke.
Abandoning my plans for elementary teaching, I wrote a master's
thesis that analyzed students' experiences in the university's two-
year-old introductory women's studies course.4 And then I left
school, uncertain what would come next. By that timethe late
1970sfeminism had touched everyone in my family of origin. My
parents were divorced, and my mother was establishing herself as a
painter. She and I were especially close during this time; we
encountered feminism together and shared books, friends, and
ideas about our work and our fledgling careers. My sister Ileen was
also becoming a feminist scholar: she was one of the first women's
studies majors at the University of California, Berkeley (Judith
Stacey, whose essay appears elsewhere in this volume, was one of
her first women's studies teachers), and she is now a feminist labor
historian.5 We developed these common interests in different ways
and times: she was radical while I was married, then moved toward
labor studies when I was discovering feminism. But we finished
our graduate work at nearly the same moment, found jobs at
roughly the same time, and published books in successive years.
Now we live in the same region and share professional networks,
as well as the puzzles and frustrations of writing, teaching, and
institutional politics. I suspect that my siblings and I were all
looking for some integration of the implicit gender split we
observed in the family: while Ileen and I followed our father into
academic work, our brother became a musician and is active in the
feminist men's movement.
Learning a Discipline (and Resisting It)
My feminism, then, was in place before I became a sociologist. In
fact, I chose sociology rather casuallyit was one among several
possible fieldsand in 1978, with little knowledge of what it would
mean, I entered the
 Page 261
Ph.D. program at Northwestern University. I knew only that I
would do feminist scholarship, that the "sociological imagination"
seemed relevant (I'd read C. Wright Mills), and that the department
seemed hospitable. 6 I met briefly with Arlene Kaplan Daniels,
who would later become my thesis adviser, and she extended an
enthusiastic invitation. We talked about her research on women as
volunteer workers and an ongoing study of returning women
students. "I'm just having a great time," I remember her saying,
"and you're welcome to run alongside and join the fun!"
This sense of joining a collective project captures my experience of
feminism in sociology during those years. Some might assume that,
coming in a second generation, I had "training" to be a feminist
sociologist, but it didn't feel that way. When I think of my
development as a feminist scholar, I do not think primarily of
coursework and mentoring relationships (these seem much more
crucial for my development as a sociologist). Instead, the story I
construct from those years is one of lessons learned from the
"hidden curriculum" of my graduate program and of a collective
intellectual project of resistance to the discipline in its traditional
construction. This project was supported by an emerging feminist
community, but it often felt like a private struggle.
In many ways, Northwestern provided a most congenial
environment. I remember, with gratitude, that faculty gave us lots
of freedom, took student work seriously, and insisted that we take it
seriously, too. I saw the faculty as engaged and productive scholars
who paid attention to each other's work. There were classroom
experiences that are still vivid for me, as well as the extended
student discussions over coffee that are so central to most graduate
study. It was a program that left room for challenge to the
disciplinary canon, and I found among the faculty and my graduate
student colleagues a willingness to listen sympathetically to my
questions about how women might be made more visible in
sociological work.
I can also easily recall becoming aware of a pervasive and
frightening atmosphere of sexism. I watched as two outstanding
junior faculty women, Janet Lever and Naomi Aronson, were
denied tenure, and I noticed that the two senior women were
curiously distant from the centers of the graduate curriculum and
departmental decision-making. Slowly, I began to see the
institutional pressures that excluded women and the questions I
wanted to ask. I was cheered and inspired by the presence of
women faculty: I watched Arlene at work and learned from her
example, and I was moved by Janet Abu-Lughod's elegant and
forceful address to the Northwestern faculty, "Engendering
Knowledge: Women and the University."7 But as I came to know
women faculty, I shared not only ideas but also their experiences of
 Page 262
discomfort and marginalization as sociologists. The lives of junior
faculty women were especially frightening; I wondered, often, if I
could survive in the profession and if survival would be worth the
pain that seemed inevitable.
During my time at Northwestern, the formative collective
experiences for graduate students were Arnold (Ackie) Feldman's
classical theory course and Howard Becker's fieldwork seminar. In
the theory course we read Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Antonio
Gramsci. I entered the program with virtually no sociology and
began to read the first volume of Capital. I remember the sense of
wonder that Ackie's close readings of this text could produce and
my pleasure in discovering that sociology could dissect inequality
with such precision. In the fieldwork seminar, we simply began to
work. "Go out there and start writing field notes," Howie told us.
"Just write down everything you see." So we went out, wrote
voluminous notes, and then came back to class to work on making
sense of them.
These were very different classroom experiences. I remember
Feldman pacing in front of the class, delivering extremely dense
lectures that we tried to transcribe as completely as possible. It was
difficult for most of us to formulate questions; usually one or two
students (often Marxists from other countries) were prepared to
grasp the point quickly enough to discuss it, and the rest of us
struggled just to keep up. We were taught to read Marx and Weber
as complementary, completing each other's analyses so as to
encompass both class and status inequalities. We did not hear much
about gender (though we could ask or write about it, and some of
us did). And theory appeared to be men's territory. It was almost
always men who participated in the extra reading groups and who
went on to work with Feldman. Nevertheless, the two courses I
took with him were important for me. I was challenged to produce
a rigorous kind of analysis that really explained something,
showing how it happened. And I was given a set of theoretical
tools. For several years I started every project with a ritual
rereading of the several hundred pages of notes I had produced in
these classes.
Becker's fieldwork seminar met in a special classroom furnished
with dilapidated easy chairs. He began each class as if he had no
plan at all: "So what's been happening?" he might ask. And from
whatever we had to say, he would make a lesson in fieldwork.
Some people were frustrated by this style of pedagogy, feeling that
nothing much was happening, but I found these sessions utterly
enchanting. As the weeks went by, we could see projects
developing, analyses arising from our confusions in the field.
Howie pushed us; there were simply no excuses for not getting
started. He conveyed a tremendous respect for the work we were
doing, finding the seeds of
 Page 263
significance in our beginners' attempts at observation. He insisted
that it was all very simple: we could just figure it out and write it
down. And he pointed out that no project was really complete until
it had been written up for publication. Here, too, gender did not
appear unless we asked. Howie was impatient with the idea that
one might come to a project with a feminist agenda; he didn't
believe in agendas and didn't want to talk about them.
Some students veered toward one or the other of these approaches;
many of us yearned to "have it all." Given this foundation (and this
desire), I was more than ready for Dorothy Smith's visit to
Northwestern in winter 1983 as guest lecturer for a quarter. Several
of us had been reading her work with great interest, and women
faculty in the department had arranged a visiting lectureship. We
organized a seminar and Dorothy taught her own work, week by
week, laying out for us the development of her thought about
sociology, its problems, and the promise for women of a revised
and stronger form of sociological analysis. With several friends, I
studied this material in a nearly fanatical way. We met early to
prepare for each class and again later to discuss what had happened
in each session. Laboring over Dorothy's dense prose, I copied long
excerpts into my notebook and composed lists of questions to ask
in class. Whenever Dorothy spoke, I was there.
During Smith's visit, I began to envision a sociology that was more
satisfying than any I'd known: it would build on materialist
principles, retain a commitment to the world as people lived it, and
insist that women's varied situations be kept in view. Dorothy's
approach, more than any other, seemed to offer possibilities for
moving beyond feminist critiques of established sociology and
beginning to build something new. There were lessons in the
hidden curriculum as well. For example, one of the startling
revelations of the seminar lay in discovering its meaning for
Dorothy: that this was her first opportunity to present her work so
thoroughly as a unified body of thought and that she needed our
response as much as we wanted to hear her words. The experience
also supported my sense of feminist scholarship as collective
project. One day in class, when I'd asked another earnest and
anxious question about how to do this kind of sociology, Dorothy
just smiled for a moment. "Well, Marj," she finally said, "I don't
have all the answers. You'll have to figure some of this out for
yourself."
My research topic, the invisible work of "feeding a family," arose
from the feminist theoretical agenda I'd brought with me to
sociology, as well as from questions about my own gendered
experience. I'd been fascinated by the feminist idea that women's
absence from most scholarly writing had shaped the assumptions
and concepts of every discipline. I wanted to study
 Page 264
aspects of life that "belonged" to women and to consider what it
would mean to take those activities and concerns as seriously as we
take the perspectives that arise from men's experiences; for this
reason, I began to think about housework. There were, at that time,
several sociological studies that took housework seriously,
applying the perspectives that sociologists of work applied to paid
jobs. 8 I was enormously grateful for these early studies, but I also
tested them against my own experiencea fundamental feminist
moveand felt that something was missing.
I was living at that time in a stormy, exciting, and ultimately
disastrous relationship with a man who had become quite
incapacitated by chronic depression. During the years we spent
together, he became increasingly helpless; I was terribly
ambivalent about the partnership but strongly committed to caring
for this person I had loved so intensely. Life felt very difficult
during those years; I brooded a lot about how to respond to his
troubles, and I remember in one moment of reflection thinking that
the womanly experience I wanted to capture in my work was this
incredibly delicate craft of caring for others.
I did not go directly to my typewriter. Instead, I muddled along
wondering if I would ever develop an acceptable thesis topic,
experiencing a prolonged period of depression myself, and slowly
beginning to write about women and food. I couldn't say what I
was up to: I wrote about supermarkets, the health food movement,
dietitians, food stamps, and food journalists. And I kept coming
back to the household work of providing food. Stubbornly, I held
onto my own experience and my intuitive sense of topic, which
didn't seem to fit with the topics available in the discipline. My first
clear statement of my topic came from my reading outside
sociology, when I was able to point to Virginia Woolf's novel To the
Lighthouse and say: It's what Mrs. Ramsay does at her dinner
party! Of course there isn't a name for itthat's the whole point." I
wrote an essay about Mrs. Ramsay, and finally I was able to begin
an ethnography of the unpaid work of "feeding a family" with
some confidence that I might capture what made it so compelling
for women.9
I wanted a feminist as my thesis adviser, and I chose to work with
Arlene Kaplan Daniels. We shared a central concern for excavating
those womanly activities rendered invisible or trivialized by social
theory derived from the concerns of privileged men. Arlene's own
work at that time was concerned with the "invisible careers" of
women volunteers who became civic leaders.10 This study was
leading her toward a more general analysis of varieties of "invisible
work," which she presented as her presidential address to the
Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1987.11 In that
 Page 265
piece, she synthesized writings by feminists (and others) about a
wide range of nonmarket activities, arguing for an expansion of the
concept of work as a crucial step in the project of including
women's contributions more fully in sociological analyses of work
and the social order.
Arlene's writing on invisible work displays the kind of strategically
doubled vision that I absorbed from working with her and that I
now see as crucial to my development. As a feminist, Arlene saw
the promise of rethinking the grounding concepts of the discipline;
as a sociologist, she conceptualized the innovative work that
feminists were developing in terms that located it in relation to core
questions of the discipline. Perhaps because she had long been a
student of the professions, Arlene insisted on the importance of
placing oneself firmly and clearly inside the discipline; she insisted
that I write a dissertation that was not only innovative but also
acceptable in the terms of the discipline. 12 These lessons were
sometimes uncomfortable: I confess that I was often impatient
when she counseled me cheerfully to become an "occupations and
professions man"; I understood, but could not quite accept, the
conditions that produced this advice (see her account elsewhere).13
But I do believe that to steer the tricky course between innovation
and acceptance is the most essential task for a feminist scholar:
even though our aims may be transformative, innovative writing is
recognized and appreciated only if it can be located successfully,
somewhere, in relation to existing work.
My account of Arlene's mentorship would not be complete without
some mention of the personal texture of our relationshipthe
complex and lively breadth of our interaction. One of my vivid
memories: each time I put a chapter in Arlene's mailbox, I would
soon afterward hear her extravagant voice booming down the hall
as she skipped toward my office. "Marj, my dear Marj!" she would
shout. "You finished another chapter! You deserve a reward; what
would you like? A box of chocolates? Or shall I take you for sushi
lunch tomorrow?" Sushi lunch was my favorite, so we would stroll
down the street together, and I would have my reward. It felt
wonderful. To emphasize this kind of help is not to trivialize
Arlene's intellectual contribution to my work; rather, I mean to
emphasize her recognition that intellectual work is best sustained
through attention to emotional, as well as intellectual, needs. While
I was her student, I ate and shopped with Arlene, as well as joining
her at feminist lectures and meetings. She introduced me to her
colleagues and "talked up" my work. I watched and learned as she
helped to build a feminist world within the discipline and pulled
me into that world.
 Page 266

Collective Work
My scholarship has always depended on the support of women
colleagues and could not have developed as it has, I believe,
without my relationships with other women. Twice, I've enjoyed
long periods of intensive "partnered" reading and thinking. In
graduate school, I worked with Sandra Schroeder and for several
years after graduation with the late Marianne (Tracy) Paget. In
neither case did we work collaboratively on joint projects or even
on the same topics. But in both cases we shared feminist
commitments, interests in experimentation and resistance, and
some affinity in our styles of thought. In both cases, we paid loving
attention to each other's work, read and talked about everything we
wrote, and tried to hear and coax out for each other what we meant
to do in our work.
Sandy and I scheduled weekly meetings throughout our dissertation
work (a practice that amused us since we were housemates most of
that time and shared an office as well); we considered each other
essential, though unofficial, members of our dissertation
committees. Tracy and I began our work together by reading all the
work of Dorothy Smith that we could find, and we agreed that it
made a difference to study her writing as a coherent, extended body
of thought (the way students are routinely taught to understand
canonical male theorists). We talked about reading other women
sociologists in this way (inspired in part by the work that Shulamit
Reinharz was doing to reclaim women sociologists of the past), but
that project was precluded by Tracy's untimely death in 1989. 14
These intense working relationships seem a bit like falling in love,
at least in the sense that they don't come along very often and
cannot be produced at will. But I have shared feminist ideas,
reading, projects, and debates with many other groups and
individual colleagues over the years. These relationships have been
important because they have felt quite different from more
conventional academic spaces. Within them, some understandings
can be taken for granted, and one doesn't need to defend and
legitimate feminist principles and assumptions. We can and do
question our core ideas, as critics might, but this activity feels quite
different when undertaken with sympathetic colleagues. Within
such groups, we give lots of encouragement, we deal with
emotional issues alongside intellectual ones, and we find nothing
strange or suspect in that agenda. Finally, we have energy, fun, and,
usually, a lot of laughter. Sometimes I feel that male colleagues are
a bit jealous of these relationships (those who know about them, at
least), and I can see why they might feel that way.
 Page 267

Getting In
I chose to study sociology during a period of contracting
opportunities for academic work; we were warned, on that hopeful
first day of graduate school, that many of us would have difficulty
finding jobs. Thus, for nine yearsfrom 1978, when I entered
graduate school, until 1987, when I was hired as an assistant
professor at Syracuse UniversityI had a keen sense of the
possibility that I would never find stable employment as a
sociologist. After completing my degree in 1984, I searched for a
permanent job for three years, scrambling to find work and moving
every year. During one difficult year in Boston, I supported myself
with part-time teaching: a more than full-time schedule for less
than half-time pay. I was quietly enraged for much of that year; the
most difficult job was managing those emotions and considering
how long I could persist in such a life. It was then that I met Tracy
Paget, who never held a permanent teaching post. During much of
our time together, she supported her scholarly work as many artists
support their creative projects: by enduring periods of temporary
clerical work so that she could also have periods of uninterrupted
writing. She didn't often tell about this strategy while she was
alive; it didn't sound very "professional." But I think she wouldn't
mind that I divulge the secret here. I think she would agree that it is
important to speak about such women and their work. Challenging
disciplinary tradition leaves many innovative scholars outside the
institutions of scholarship and personally vulnerable. I believe that
the discipline is impoverished by their absence.
One of the things that feminism has provided for me is an analysis
of the evaluative and gatekeeping processes that structure these
experiences. It has given me a way to think about some of the
difficult moments in my professional life. I have learned to think
long and hard about audiences for my writing, and I have learned
to evaluate the gatekeepers: when my work is judged, I ask who is
judging it and on what terms. When I hear, "But that's not
sociology," I have learned to say (or at least think), "Maybe not
yet."
The character of the theory I deployed during my training can be
seen in an episode of graduate student activism. During 1982-1983,
I began to work, with Patty Passuth, Lisa Jones, and other graduate
students at Northwestern, on something we called "the gender
project": a survey of graduate student experiences in our
department, which we hoped would help us to understand the
frustrations so many of us were feeling. We gathered data on
attrition from the graduate program, interviewed all of the students
in residence, and wrote an article-sized report for distribution to
 Page 268
the department. 15 Although the attrition data were incomplete, it
seemed that during the decade we had studied, women had been
more likely than men to drop out of the program, especially at the
dissertation stage. Introducing the document, we wrote:
In a survey of all students, we found subtle differences in the ways
that male and female students described their interactions with faculty
members. Relative to men, women tended to feel more marginal to
the department, and believed they were taken less seriously. They
reported receiving less help and encouragement than men, were more
pessimistic about their chances for employment, and their
expectations were more likely than men's to have dropped since
entering the program. A substantial number of women blamed
themselves for the situations they described, reporting that their own
work was marginal to the field, or that their experience in the
program was "unusual" in some respect.16
In fine multimethod fashion, we presented tables and quotations
from respondents to illustrate a pattern of "benign neglect" of
women students. Although unwilling to "point with certainty" to
causes, we suggested several factors that might explain these
problems: the structural reality of a predominantly male faculty,
documented differences in the interactional styles of men and
women and the differential responses these styles elicit from
others, and the incomplete acceptance of women's concerns within
the discipline. Echoing "The Missing Feminist Revolution"17which
must have been circulating at the time, though I don't think we had
read itwe concluded:
Another possible cause for the differential experience of men and
women students is that by following their own concernsan approach
to research encouraged by this departmentfemale students are more
likely than men to be working on non-traditional topics or
approaching traditional topics in original ways. Thus, they may have
more difficulty formulating their ideas, and faculty may have a harder
time understanding them or seeing the significance of their work.
The research literature which incorporates women's perspectives into
sociologydeveloped over the past 20 yearshas been integrated into
"mainstream" courses only to a limited extent. Researchers have
found that after taking women's studies courses, female students
report feeling more included in academic disciplines, more serious
about themselves as scholars and more assertive about their studies.
Thus,
 Page 269
more active efforts to incorporate new knowledge especially relevant
to women may help to combat female students' feelings of
marginality. 18
I have quoted at some length from this document because I think it
illustrates how I used feminist analysis at that time to construct and
sustain a sense of opposition to business as usual in graduate
training. It also displays the construction of our activism within the
boundaries of the institution and shows how the goal of "getting in"
to the profession shaped the substance and form of our resistance.
As I look back at this document, I am struck by its heartfelt but
measured concern and by our earnestly "professional" tone. Our
confidence in the effectiveness of "the facts," presented well,
suggests a considerable measure of political naïveté, as well as the
kind of comfort we felt within the program in spite of our
complaints. And the carefully suppressed anger in the document
points to the extent to which we had already accepted a powerful
professional discipline.
I learned several lessons from my involvement in this project. I
learned, in the end, that researching injustice carries the seeds of
cooptation: though it provoked much discussion, our report
resulted mostly in calls for further research. I also learned,
however, that speaking out about these problems could bring
women together. We were surprised when women faculty in the
department expressed gratitude that we had raised these issues.
And the intense work of writing the report together was a powerful
and energizing experience of collective analysis. For a while at
least, our report constructed a lively solidarity among women in the
department. Finally, I learned that my personal skills could be used
to stir up some trouble within an institution and that stirring up
trouble felt like a very good thing to do.
I have suggested that feminism was for me a theory that made
immediate and personal sense. I do not mean to suggest that the
kind of analysis just described exhausts the meanings of feminism
or provides a full account; any adequate feminism must also fit for
other women, most of whom are in situations quite different from
those of sociology graduate students. In addition, my location as a
woman intersects with other privileges and oppressions shaping my
experience. It is for this reason that I have tried to display my
middle-class, academic background in my telling of this story. I
have wanted to give a sense for the particular kind of gendered life
I have led and how it has shaped both my feminism and my career.
(I learned several kinds of lessons, for example, from observation
of my father's work life, including the following: that academic
work could be profoundly satisfying; that an academic can chart
her own course in many ways; that institutional politics requires
particular kinds of entrepreneurship; and,
 Page 270
perhaps most important, that the academy is no paradise. 19 I also
learned a style of demeanor and discourse so that the kinds of talk
required in institutional settings feel relatively familiar. I wanted to
resist adopting wholesale my father's consuming absorption in
work, which sometimes felt distancing to me as a childI remember
the often closed and inviolable door to his studybut that has been
more difficult than I expected.)
My feminism has provided a perspective that sustains a useful,
restrained resistance to some aspects of business as usual, while
continuing other aspects of this ''business" with a vengeance. It
seems important to acknowledge these limits, but I want to resist
the view that this version of feminism can serve only to support the
advancement of privileged middle-class academics. As I analyzed
my own marginality, I could readily see that there were similar
obstacles for other underrepresented groups and that I would need
to use my theory reflexively to analyze my own blindnesses and
exclusions. My personal sense of oppression has, I think, helped
me not only to hear but also to feel, with some urgency, the
complaints of those excluded on bases other than gender. When
students complain about my courses, I do not want to reply that I
hadn't thought about lesbians (for example), that I couldn't find any
material on women of color (for example), or that surely one class
on women with disabilities (for example) is enough. These lame
excuses sound far too familiar. And I am convincedbecause I have
worked so hard to convince those who resisted my feminist
complaintsthat really working to change the way I think will
enliven my work and move us all forward.

And Now . . .
Through the early years of my career, I've been motivated and
sustained by a sense of resistance to disciplinary traditions that has
bordered on hostility Feminism has provided pathways (or
lifelines) out of the discipline. I have read feminist works outside
of sociology, and I often find that they are more productive of the
insights I need than the writings of other sociologists. I do not
mean that I ignore or dismiss feminist work in sociology but that I
have been interested in the challenge of getting out of the
discipline, and then back in, exiting and reentering with
transformative ideas.
Now that I feel reasonably well established in the discipline, I find,
tellingly, that I am more interested in sociology. I want to know
more about the history of the discipline, and I feel more interested
(in both senses) in its future. One can certainly read this shift as a
simple economic response to a change in my situation; I would not
discount this reading entirely. But
 Page 271
I think this reaction to acceptance also signals the implicit
messages about "ownership" of the discipline that are sent when
some groups are virtually excluded from participation and hints at
the costs to the profession of these kinds of exclusions.
Feminism has led me to questions about the disciplinary context
within which I struggle to construct meaningful work. In the
process of "becoming a sociologist," I have come to feel that I need
to understand how sociology works, as a discipline, to include and
exclude topics and perspectives, to advance and coopt projects of
inquiry, to resist and tame transformative agendas. I want to
understand what it means to adopt a "discipline": how a discipline
produces a discourse that enables some projects and rules others
out of bounds. One aspect of a recent project (on the work of
dietitians and nutritionists) involves an exploration of the force of
"disciplinarity.'' 20 In pursuing this research, I have been
interviewing professional women who are in positions similar to
mine and whose career stories and concerns with work often mirror
mine. We work inside the structures of institutional power but not
at their centers, and this kind of position, as "marginal insider,"
gives rise to characteristic troubles and ambivalences. My aim is to
make visible the sticky web of disciplinarity and professionalism
within which they (and I) work. These interests arise, in part, from
my own puzzles. They are also a product of new intellectual
currents, including postmodern meditations on knowledge
production and questions about the place of feminism within,
among, and across disciplines. Thus, I still struggle with questions
about locating myself as a feminist scholar.
In 1992, poised on the brink of tenure, I met the fifteen women and
one man who had enrolled in my graduate seminar in feminist
research. For the first class, I had chosen as our texts two poems:
Kate Rushin's "Bridge Poem" and Marge Piercy's "Unlearning to
Not Speak."21 I had planned to read the poems aloud, and I had
resolved to read with feeling. I was nervous, a bit hesitant, but the
words carried me along, and my voice broke with feeling as I read.
We all noticed, and that moment of emotion became a topic for
discussion: why do we feel this way, and what does it mean? By
the end of class, one student was ready to admit that she'd been
dismayed at first to find poetry in a sociology classroomso "soft"
and womanish! Starting outside of the discipline, I think, had the
effect I'd intended: we began to construct space for
experimentation. About halfway through the semester, I noticed
with surprise and some embarrassment that I was listening to
students' presentations and worrying, "But is it sociology?" My
feminism kept me quiet for the moment and gave them license to
proceed.
 Page 272
Near the end of the course, however, I began to feel an urgent need
to lecture and warn them, to point out the necessity of living
within, as well as between, disciplines. "I want you to be bold, take
risks, and make trouble," I told them. "But I also want you to be
here, to survive in this institutional space. For that, you have to
accept a discipline."
In spite of the comforts of the second generation, survival hasn't
felt easy. Some days, it seems that the feminist revolution is still
missing: my feminist courses attract mostly women students, and I
often feel that I live my professional life in a parallel female world
apart from the "main business" of my institution and profession.
Some days, I notice how many of us are now at work, and I think
the revolution may be sneaking up on us, arriving while we're busy
with office hours, so that we hardly have time to notice. As I write
this last sentence, I am conscious of my easy use of the word "us,"
and I worry: about my sense that I might be turning into one of
"them'' and my desire to construct a "we" that continues to press at
the boundaries of disciplinary traditions. Almost all the time, I'm
interested to see what will come next.

Notes
Some of this material first appeared in my remarks at a panel
discussion I organized jointly with Ruth Linden
("Works/Disciplines/Lives: Locating Ourselves as Feminists in
Sociology," Annual Stone Symposium of the Society for the Study
of Symbolic Interaction, University of California, San Francisco,
February, 1991); our discussions then shaped some of these
reflections. I am also grateful for the support provided through a
1993-1994 research leave granted by Syracuse University and an
appointment that year as visiting scholar in the Women's Studies
Program at Brandeis University
1. I have borrowed this sections heading from Mirra Komarovsky,
whose article "Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles," American
Journal of Sociology 52 (1946): 184-189, describes aspects of the
situation I mean to evoke in this section, even though her analysis
is based on data from an earlier generation.
2. What I remember, actually, is an extended argument about the
logistics of a dual-career marriage; as I recall it, I was the only one
willing to argue that a woman shouldn't necessarily follow her
husband wherever he might go. Now as my partner and I struggle
through our tenth year of a 300-mile separation, this memory has
an uncomfortably ironic edge.
3. Her first article on the topic was Elizabeth Fennema,
"Mathematics Learning and the Sexes: A Review," Journal for
Research in Mathematics Education 5 (1974): 126-139. She went
on to collaborate with Julia Sherman on a series of NSF-sponsored
studies that examined differential participation and attitudes, and
were widely quoted as interest in gender and mathematics grew.
Her most recent thinking on the topic
 Page 273
is summarized in Elizabeth Fennema, "Mathematics, Gender, and
Research," in Gila Hanna, ed., Towards Gender Equity in
Mathematics Education (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 9-26. Other
Wisconsin faculty who were important for my developing outlook
were Jack Kean, in whose language arts class I read Women on
Words and Images, Dick and Jane as Victims (Princeton, NJ.:
Women on Words and Images, 1972); and my adviser Thomas
Popkewitz, who introduced me to sociology via Peter L. Berger
and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).
4. This course, which provided the foundation for my
understanding of women's studies as an academic field, was taught
by literary scholars Susan Stanford Friedman and Susan Snaider
Lanser.
5. See Ileen DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and
Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
6. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959).
7. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, "Engendering Knowledge: Women and
the University" (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Program
on Women, 1981). Abu-Lughod was probably chosen to deliver
this prestigious annual lecture because she had just published a
book on North African cities. She surprised the faculty selection
committee, she believes, when she used the occasion to address
issues of women's status in the academy, which were being
discussed by the newly formed Organization of Women Faculty at
Northwestern. The group still exists there, and Arlene Daniels's
decision to use the 1993-1994 lectureship to provide an update to
Abu-Lughod's lecture illustrates the kind of collaborative activism
I learned from them.
8. I relied heavily on the following: Ann Oakley, The Sociology of
Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Catherine White
Berheide, Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, and Richard A. Berk,
"Household Work in the Suburbs: The Job and Its Participants,"
Pacific Sociological Review 19 (1976): 491-517; Richard A. Berk
and Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, Labor and Leisure at Home:
Content and Organization of the Household Day (Beverly Hills,
Calif.: Sage, 1979). There was also an earlier study by Helena Z.
Lopata, Occupation: Housewife (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971), which took "housewives," rather than "housework,"
as the topic but also took their activity seriously as work. And there
was an emerging Marxist literature on domestic labor.
9. Eventually the dissertation became a book: Marjorie L. DeVault,
Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as
Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
10. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Invisible Careers: Women Civic
Leaders from the Volunteer World (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
11. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, "Invisible Work," Social Problems 34
(1987): 403-415.
12. I use the term "acceptable" with Ruddick's analysis of
"maternal thinking" in mind. See Sara Ruddick, "Maternal
Thinking," Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 342-367; and Sara Ruddick,
Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989). Ruddick points out that one of the demands of
mothering is to produce a child "acceptable" to the societya
demand that sometimes conflicts with a mother's own values.
13. Arlene Kaplan Daniels, "When We Were All Boys Together:
Graduate School in the
 Page 274
Fifties and Beyond," in Kathryn P Meadow Orlans and Ruth A.
Wallace, Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women
Sociologists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 27-
43.
14. Shulamit Reinharz, "Teaching the History of Women in
Sociology: Or Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Wasn't She the Woman
Married to William I.?" American Sociologist 20 (1989): 87-94.
See also the historical material in Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist
Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992). For an account of Tracy's cancer experience in light of her
writing on medical error, see Marianne A. Paget, A Complex
Sorrow: Reflections on Cancer and an Abbreviated Life,ed.
Marjorie L. DeVault (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993).
15. Marjorie DeVault, Lisa Jones, and Patty Passuth, "Gender
Differences in Graduate Students' Experiences" (Paper prepared as
a project of the Graduate Student Association, Department of
Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, May 1983).
16. Ibid., p. 1.
17. Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne, "The Missing Feminist
Revolution in Sociology," Social Problems 32 (1985): 301-316.
18. DeVault et al., "Gender Differences," p. 33.
19. Cf. the accounts of academics from working-class backgrounds
in Jake Ryan and Charles Shackrey, Strangers in Paradise:
Academics from the Working Class (Boston: South End Press,
1984).
20. Marjorie L. DeVault, "Between Science and Food: Nutrition
Professionals in the Health-Care Hierarchy," inJennieJ. Kronenfeld,
ed., Research on the Sociology of Health Care (Greenwich, Conn.:
JAI Press, 1995), pp. 287-312; Marjorie L. DeVault, "Ethnicity and
Expertise: Racial-ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research,"
Gender and Society 9 (1995): 612-631.
21. "The Bridge Poem" appears in Cherrié Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981), pp.
xxi-xxii; "Unlearning to Not Speak" comes from Marge Piercy, To
Be of Use (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), p. 38.
 Page 275

About the Authors

JOAN ACKER, professor emerita of sociology, University of
Oregon, is the author of Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class,
and Pay Equity (1989), Developing a Feminist Sociology
(forthcoming), and many articles on women and social class,
stratification, organizations, and work. In 1989 she received the
Jessie Bernard Award, and in 1993 she received the American
Sociological Association Career of Distinguished Scholarship
Award.
R. W CONNELL is professor of education at the University of
Sydney, Australia. He has been professor of sociology at
University of California, Santa Cruz, and has held visiting
positions in other North American universities. He is author or
coauthor of Masculinities (1995), Gender and Power (1987),
Schools and Social Justice (1993), and Making the Difference
(1982), and he has been involved in labor, peace, and progressive
politics for about thirty years without ever convincingly learning to
sing.
DESLEY DEACON is associate professor of American studies and
sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of
Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (1997) and "Bringing
Social Science Back Home: Theory and Practice in the Life and
Work of Elsie Clews Parsons," in Helene Silverberg, ed., Social
Science Engendered (1997). She is now working on a book about
trauma and feminist science, based on the life of Katharine Dexter
McCormick, the woman who financed the development of the
contraceptive pill.
MARJORIE L. DEVAULT is associate professor of sociology and
a member of the Women's Studies Program at Syracuse University
She is the author of Feeding the Family: The Social Organization
of Caring as Gendered Work (1991) and the editor of Marianne A.
Paget, A Complex Sorrow: Reflections on Cancer and an
Abbreviated Life (1993). Her current projects focus on feminist
 Page 276
methodology, gender dynamics of professional work, and
constructionist approaches to family.
BONNIE THORNTON DILL is professor of women's studies and
affiliate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland,
College Park. She researches African-American women, work, and
family and is currently studying the coping and survival strategies
of low-income single mothers in several rural southern
communities. She was the founding director of the Center for
Research on Women at the University of Memphis from 1982 until
1988. Her books include Women of Color in U.S. Society (coedited
with Maxine Baca Zinn, 1994) and Across the Boundaries of Race
and Class: Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic
Servants (1994).
SARAH FENSTERMAKER is professor of sociology and
women's studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She
has published widely in the areas of gender, work, and domestic
violence and is perhaps best known for her book The Gender
Factory: The Allocation of Work in American Households (1985).
She has recently coedited (with Ann Goetting) Individual Voices,
Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in Sociology (1995). Her
current work focuses on the theoretical articulation of race, gender,
and class in women's work.
EVELYN NAKANO GLENN is professor of women's studies and
ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley Her
interests center on women's work, the political economy of
households, and the intersection of race and gender. She has written
extensively on a variety of topics within these broad areas,
including racial/ethnic women's labor, paid domestic work, impacts
of changing technology on clerical labor processes, gender and
immigration, and the social constructions of mothering. She is the
author of Issei, Nisei, Warbride (1986) and coeditor (with Grace
Chang and Linda Forcey) of Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and
Agency (1994). Her current research focuses on raced and gendered
constructions of labor and citizenship in three regions of the United
States.
ELIZABETH HIGGINBOTHAM is professor of sociology in the
Center for Research on Women and the Department of Sociology
and Social Work at the University of Memphis. Her work has
appeared in Gender & Society, Women's Studies Quarterly, other
journals, and many edited collections. Her research projects have
focused on how race, class, and gender impact the lives of women,
particularly mobility issues for black women and for black and
 Page 277
white professional and managerial women in the Memphis area.
She is completing a book entitled Too Much to Ask: The Cost of
Black Female Success.
SUSAN KRIEGER teaches in the Program in Feminist Studies at
Stanford University and is the author of Hip Capitalism (1979),
The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community (1983),
Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form
(1991), and The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among
Women (1996).
BARBARA LASLETT is professor of sociology at the University
of Minnesota and was editor of Signs (with Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres)
between 1990 and 1995. She has coedited several collections of
Signs readings, including Rethinking the Political: Gender,
Resistance, and the State (1995), Gender and Scientific Authority
(1996), and The Second Signs Reader (1996). Her research and
writing have focused primarily on the historical sociology of the
family and of American sociology. She edited Contemporary
Sociology between 1983 and 1986 and is past president of the
Social Science History Association. She is currently working on a
collaborative project (with Mary Jo Maynes and Jennifer Pierce) on
the uses of personal narratives in the social sciences.
JUDITH STACEY is Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender
Studies and professor of sociology at the University of Southern
California. She has written extensively on the politics of family
change and feminist knowledge. Her publications include In the
Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern
Age (1996) and Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic
Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (1990).
BARRIE THORNE is professor of sociology and women's studies
at the University of California, Berkeley She is the author of
Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (1993) and coeditor (with
Marilyn Yalom) of Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist
Questions (1990) and Language, Gender; and Society (1983). She
is currently working on a comparative ethnographic study of
childhoods in California communities that vary in social class,
race, and ethnic composition and in histories of immigration.
LYNN WEBER is director of women's studies and professor of
sociology at the University of South Carolina. She served as
director of the Center for Research on Women at the University of
Memphis from 1988 to 1994 and associate director from 1982 to
1988. At the University of Memphis, she
 Page 278
worked with Elizabeth Higginbotham on a project exploring the
background and current status of black and white professional and
managerial women. They have produced several publications from
this work. She is also coauthor (with Reeve Vanneman) of The
American Perception of Class (1987). She is currently writing a
book on the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
 Page 279

Index
A
Abbott, Edith, 30
Abu-Lughod, Janet, 216, 261, 273n7
academia, 118
discrimination within, 17, 35, 95-99, 107, 122n6
demographics of, 35, 99, 100n3, 127, 146n5
feminist movement in relation to, 10-11, 12, 15
power, gender, and, 20, 154, 228n22, 228n23
values at odds with, 231, 251, 257
activism and self, 29, 30, 32, 53, 68, 112, 145, 168, 213, 231, 235,
240, 258
See also feminist movement; social movements
Adoro, Theodor, 108
agency, human, 2, 6-7, 9, 19, 64-65
See also structure and agency
Alinsky, Saul, 30
Allon, Natalie, 112, 147n11
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 38
American Association of University Professors, 83
American Labor Party, 29
American Sociological Association, 5, 11, 13, 16, 56, 58, 60, 80,
81, 121n1, 124n25, 138, 146n5, 152-154, 161-162, 241, 253
aspirations
career, 7, 28, 29, 49-50, 75, 143, 211, 239, 241, 258
family, 7, 29, 100n1, 258
gender conflict in, 28, 29
political, 7, 14, 29, 239, 241
race, ethnicity, and, 76
Australian National University, 156-157, 169
Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of
Science, 154-155
autobiographies, see life histories
B
Barnard College, 172
Barry, Kate, 38, 41, 124n26
Beauvoir, Simone de, 30-31
Becker, Howard S., 110, 216, 217, 227n9, 262-263
Berheide, Catherine White, 218, 220, 227n10
Berk, Richard, 214, 218, 220, 221, 227n10
Bernard, Jessie, 39
biographies, see life histories
Bisno, Herb, 32
Bittner, Egon, 107, 118
Blackburn, Jean, 157
Blau, Peter, 54, 55, 56
Bly, Robert, 158, 160
Boime, Jerry, 114, 115
Bonacich, Edna, 70n18
Bordo, Susan, 61
Borough of Manhattan Community College, 235
Bose, Chris, 100n10
Boston Area Women Social Scientists, 80
Boston Draft Resistance Group, 112
Boston University, 78-79, 83-84, 88
Brandeis University, 103, 106-118, 122n5, 122n7, 123n13, 124n26,
129-130, 147n11, 240
Bread and Roses, 12, 113, 114
Breckenridge, Sophenisba P., 30
Breines, Wini, 147n11
 Page 280
Brenner, Johanna, 70n18, 71
Brenner, Robert, 59
Brown, Carol, 100n10
Brown, Elsa Barkley, 92
Brown, N. O., 108
Buraway, Michael, 81
Burgess, Ernest, 54

C
California State University, Northridge, 57-58
Carter, Barbara, 112
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
University, 59-60
Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 61
Chicago, Judy, 259
Chicago School of Sociology, 54, 109, 227n9
Chicago Voice of Women, 112
Chicago Women's Liberation Union, 12, 214-215
childhood, sociology of, 117, 120
See also family, sociology of
Chinchilla, Norma, 70n18
Chodorow, Nancy, 60, 107, 116, 117, 147n11
Chow, Esther, 255n15
City University of New York, 147n9, 235, 240, 241
Coghlan, Timothy, 170, 171
Collins, Patricia Hill, 147n11
Columbia University, 61
Comte, Auguste, 177
Connell, Robert W., 169, 187n8
consciousness or identity bifurcated, 7, 17, 38, 112
gender or feminist, 11, 34, 59, 144, 214, 218
political, 53, 59, 111, 120, 143, 212
racial or ethnic, 53
See also feminist movement: and consciousness-raising
Coser, Lewis, 106, 107, 108, 110, 118
Coser, Rose Laub, 115, 118, 124n25
Crozier, Michael, 36
Crutchfield, Richard, 76
D
Daniels, Arlene Kaplan, 41, 57-58, 100n8, 146n4, 216, 261, 264-
265, 273n7
Davies, Marjorie, 147n11
Davis, James A., 54
Dawson, Madge, 155, 157, 160
Deutsch, Steven, 36
Dill, Bonnie Thornton, 87, 92, 121n1
Dixon, Marlene, 57
Dubin, Robert, 32, 33
Duncan, Otis Dudley, 51, 54, 216
Durkheim, Emile, 15, 106, 108
E
Ellis, Robert, 32
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 145
emotions, 9, 21, 64-65, 142, 151
and creativity, 55, 56, 66, 172, 186
and knowledge, 64, 66
and life histories, 2, 3, 52, 142
and research, 51-52, 53, 185, 195-196, 259, 265
sociology of, 61, 64-65, 66-67
and work, 17, 48, 55, 62, 66, 111, 194, 205, 261-262, 265, 266
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 106
F
family, sociology of, 116-117, 173
family and self, 54, 60-61, 142-143
 children, 50, 68
parents, 28, 49, 52, 62, 75, 76, 103-105, 115-117, 168, 172, 210,
211, 233-234, 236, 238, 258-260, 269-270
siblings, 260
spouses and lovers, 30, 50, 77, 88, 154, 172, 174-175, 264,
272n2
See also consciousness or identity; mothers and mothering
Fanon, Frantz, 108
Feldberg, Roslyn, 79, 80, 83, 84, 100n10
Feldman, Arnold, 216, 217, 262
Fellman, Gordon, 107, 108, 110
Felton, Nadine, 100n10
feminist movement, 5, 10, 16, 22n5, 33, 45-46, 50, 112-113, 168,
176, 213, 258, 260
and academia, 10-11, 12, 15
and consciousness-raising, 7, 8, 12, 17, 113, 117, 214, 240
and feminist sociology (see feminist sociology: and feminist
movement)
ideas and ideologies of, 8, 11, 179-181
 Page 281
responses to, 160
and social movements, 21, 30, 112-113, 215, 240
See also activism; Bread and Roses; Chicago Women's
Liberation Movement; consciousness or identity: gender or
feminist
feminist sociology, 8, 17
co-optation of, 14-15, 116, 120, 269
challenges to profession from, 39, 81, 267-269
exclusionary practices of, 18, 201 and feminist movement, 2, 11,
16-18, 21, 40, 45-46, 113-114, 116-117, 119, 129-220, 224
history of, 2, 5, 10-18, 19, 20, 22n5, 35, 37, 38, 119-120
(see also specific universities)
influence on sociology of, 6, 7, 12, 15, 19, 126, 154-155
institutionalization of, 5, 6, 11, 13-18, 20, 127-128, 146n4, 154-
155, 162-163, 268, 272
men's relationship to, 36, 157-158, 159-160, 163, 272, 273
and other disciplines, 7, 9, 81
and political action, 18, 46, 53, 57-58, 128-129, 132, 140-141,
145, 160-161, 224
and professional organizations, 11, 13, 57, 80, 264
(see also American Sociological Association; Pacific
Sociological Association) responses to, 13, 19-21, 36, 39, 93,
 114-115, 139-140, 159, 162-163, 219, 261, 269, 272
theory and research (see feminist theory and research)
See also academia; sociology; women's research centers;
women's studies
feminist theory and research, 14-15, 65, 126-128, 138-139
critiques of, 12-13, 18, 24n28, 42, 45, 60, 132, 138, 240
on economy, 45
on education, 260
on emotions (see emotions)
on epistemology, 6, 109
(see also knowledge)
on the family, 116-117, 128, 130-135, 218-220, 222-224, 248-
249, 263-264
future of, 9, 13, 18, 45, 79, 141-142
on gender relations, 6, 9, 15, 62-64, 180-181
on gendered identity, 9, 111, 114-115, 116-117
intellectual influences on, 22n5, 109, 117, 130, 179, 217-218,
220, 271
on language and speech, 120
on men and masculinity, 15, 62-65, 111, 114-115, 136-138, 157,
161
on methodology, 6, 66-67, 117, 131, 133, 203, 223, 264
(see also life histories)
 on organizations, 43, 46
on politics and the state, 44, 115, 120, 170
on power, 44, 180-181, 271
on professions, 115
on race and ethnicity, 42, 63, 82, 86-87, 90-93, 94, 248-249
(see also intersections of race, class, and gender)
radical sociology, critiques of, 37, 42
on sexuality, 9, 12, 43, 44
sociological theory and research, critiques of, 7, 14-15, 34, 36,
43-45, 63-66, 81, 113-114, 116, 136-138
on work or class, 41-43, 79-82, 86-87, 90-93, 130-133, 134-135,
169-170, 218-220, 222-224, 248-249, 263-264, 265
(see also intersections of race, class, and gender)
See also feminist sociology; sociological theory and research;
sociology; women's research centers; women's studies
Fenichel, Otto, 109
Fennema, Elizabeth, 260
Ferree, Myra Marx, 100n10
Flacks, Richard, 221
Florida State University, 88-89
Foucault, Michel, 43
Freiberg, Terry, 83-84
Freud, Sigmund, 30, 32, 44, 105, 106, 109, 111
Friedan, Betty, 145
G
gender
and discrimination, 28, 56, 167, 168, 211, 258, 259
(see also academia: discrimination within; sociology:
discrimination within) on
theory and research (see feminist theory and research;
sociological theory and research: on gender and women)
See also consciousness or identity: gender or feminist;
intersections of race, class, and gender
 Page 282
Geschwender, James, 81
Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, 87, 247, 254n9
Glazer, Nona, 37, 41, 80
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 146n4, 247, 248, 254n9
Gojkovic, Jasminka, 111
Gordon, Avery, 141
Goucher College, 213
Gramsci, Antonio, 262
Greer, Germaine, 144, 145, 168

H
Habermas, Jürgen, 108
Hacker, Sally, 37, 41, 44
Halbwachs, Maurice, 108
Hamilton, Nora, 70n18
Harris, William, 35
Harvard University, 73-75, 77-78
Hertz, Rosanna, 146n4
Higginbotham, Elizabeth, 87, 92, 121n1, 147n11
Hill, Richard, 35
Hochschild, Arlie, 146n4
Hodge, Robert W., 51, 56, 69n10, 70n19
Holmstrom, Lynda, 112, 147n11
Holter, Harriet, 41
Horowitz, David, 139-140
Howe, Florence, 213, 226n6
Huber, Joan, 80
Hughes, Everett C., 54, 80, 107, 108-112, 115, 118, 119, 120,
227n9
Hughes, Helen MacGill, 80, 115, 124n25
Hume, David, 105
Hunter College, 29-30
Huse, Donna, 111, 114

I
intersections of race, class, and gender, 13, 15, 42, 63-64, 230-231
experience of, 230, 233, 269-270
theory and research on, 90-94, 138, 229-256
See also Inter-University Group Studying the Intersection of
Race and Gender; women's research centers: Center for
Research on Women, University of Memphis
Inter-University Group Studying the Intersection of Race and
Gender, 87, 91-92
J
Janowitz, Morris, 55, 56
Jay, Nancy, 111, 116
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B., 66
Joffe, Carole, 146n4
Johnson, Miriam, 32, 36, 39
Jones, Lisa, 267
K
Kahn-Hut, Rachel, 121n1
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 115, 169, 170
Kecskemeti, Paul, 107, 108
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 61
Keller, Suzanne, 115
Kennedy, Robert, 226n4
Kitsuse, John, 216
knowledge, 16, 18
creation of, 8, 19, 21, 68
diffusion of, 68
and emotions, 64, 66
and gender, 2, 8-9, 65-66
politics of, 12, 63, 185
sociology of, 2, 21, 65-66, 109, 177-179
 transformations of, 13, 14-15
See also feminist theory and research; social theory
Komarovsky, Mirra, 219, 272n1
Kraft, Phil, 81
Krech, David, 76
Kurz, Demie, 218

L
Laing, R. D., 108
Lamphere, Louise, 81
Lehrer, Susan, 100n10
lesbianism, see sexuality
Lessing, Doris, 259
Lever, Janet, 216, 261
Liebow, Elliot, 80, 219
life histories, 2-10, 38
and emotions, 2, 3, 52, 142
as genre, 2, 4, 5, 7, 61
and historical contexts, 2
and memory, 4
reading of, 3, 4
and social theory, 19, 46
and sociology, 2-9, 18, 19, 52, 62-63, 72n32, 72n37, 171, 185,
186
and structure and agency, 2, 5, 6-7, 10, 19, 209
work and, 2
writing of, 3-5
 Page 283
life stories, see life histories
Long, Elizabeth, 147n11
Lopata, Helena Znaniecka, 219
Lorber, Judith, 41
Luker, Kristin, 146n4
Lyon, Eleanor, 218
M
McCarthy, Eugene, 226n4
McCarthy, John, 32
McCormick, Katharine Dexter, 176, 189n14
Mach, Ernst, 177-179, 183
McLuhan, Marshall, 108, 111
McNall, Scott, 32
Malcolm X, 143, 144, 213
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 106, 178
Mannheim, Karl, 105, 106, 108, 109
Marcuse, Herbert, 44, 105, 107, 108, 122n7
Martin, Jean, 155-156, 157
Marx, Karl, 15, 32, 108, 109, 110-111, 159, 216, 222, 262
Massachusetts Sociological Association, 80
Maynes, MaryJo, 2, 61, 72n37
Mead, George Herbert, 54, 106, 227n9
Melber, Barbara, 78
Memphis State University, see University of Memphis
men, feminism and, 13, 18, 114-115, 157-158, 159-160, 163
Mendelsohn, Janet, 116, 117
men's movement, 158
Mernissi, Fatima, 147n11
Merton, Robert K., 32, 56-57
Michels, Robert, 108
Michigan State University, 119
Milkman, Ruth, 146n4
Miller, Alice Duer, 176
Miller, S. M., 83
Millman, Marcia, 116, 146n4, 147n11
Mills, C. Wright, 2, 106, 107-108, 241, 261
mothers and mothering, 116-117
See also family
Mukerjee, Chandra, 78
Mullings, Leith, 255n15
N
narrative, see life histories
National Council for Research on Women, 246
National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs,
81
National Women's Studies Association, 126
Newton, Judith, 136, 137
New University Conference (NUC), 213
New York University, 241
Northwestern University, 214, 215-217, 220, 227n9, 261-266, 267-
269, 273n7
O
Oakley, Ann, 219-220
Ogburn, William Fielding, 8, 50-52, 55, 59, 61-66, 68
Omi, Michael, 94
Orwell, George, 158, 160
P
Pacific Sociological Association, 57, 58
Paget, Marianne, 266, 267
Park, Robert, 29, 54
Parsons, Elsie Clews, 171-177
Parsons, Talcott, 10, 32, 73
Passerini, Luisa, 4
Passuth, Patty, 267
Pierce, Jennifer, 72n37
Piercy, Marge, 259, 271
politics and the state, sociology of, 63
Popkin, Ann, 116, 117
professions, sociology of, 63-67
Progressive Minnesota New Party, 68

R
race or ethnicity
and career advancement, 80, 163n5
and discrimination, 75-76, 77, 236-237
(see also academia: discrimination within)
See also consciousness: racial or ethnic; feminist theory and
research: on race and ethnicity; intersections of race, class, and
gender
racism, see race or ethnicity
Red Wednesday, 8, 70n18
 Page 284
Reinharz, Shulamit, 147n11, 266
religious right, 160
Reskin, Barbara, 146n4
Richards, Pamela, 218
Roby, Pamela, 80
Rollins, Judith, 146n4, 147n11
Rosenberg, Larry, 107, 118
Rossi, Alice, 50, 56, 57, 69n7, 213
Rossi, Peter, 54, 55, 69n7, 214
Rothman, Barbara Katz, 146n4
Rothstein, Fran, 100n10
Rubin, Lillian, 146n4
Rushin, Kate, 271
Russell, Diana, 146n4

S
Sacks, Karen, 81
Scheler, Max, 106, 108
Schnaiberg, Allan, 216, 217
Schroeder, Sandra, 266
Schutz, Alfred, 108, 109
Seeley, Jack, 107, 112
Seiznick, Gertrude, 57
self-esteem, 31, 37, 50, 77, 176
See also emotions
Sex and Gender Section, American Sociological Association, 5, 11,
13, 16, 121n1, 146n5
Sex Roles, Section on, American Sociological Association, see Sex
and Gender Section, American Sociological Association
sexuality, 21, 29, 65, 113, 173, 194-206
and discrimination, 18, 190n15, 194, 198-200, 201-202, 203,
205
(see also academia: discrimination within)
feminist theory and research on, 9, 12, 43, 44
and homophobia, 204, 160
sociology of, 173-175
Sherman, Julia, 272n3
Silber, John, 83
Simmel, Georg, 108-109, 111
Skinner, B. E, 105
Slater, Philip, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114-115, 116, 118
Smith, Dorothy, 7, 12, 15, 17, 32, 37-38, 40, 41, 42, 62, 112, 221-
222, 223, 228n16, 263, 266
Smith, Joan, 81
social class and career advancement, 163n5
and discrimination, 242-243
(see also academia: discrimination within)
See also intersections of race, class, and gender
socialist feminism, see feminist movement; feminist theory and
research
social movements, 16, 32, 53, 112, 143, 158, 213, 258
See also feminist movement; men's movement
social theory, 6-7, 110-111
of action, 8, 64, 67
critical, 116
European, 106, 108-109, 110
feminist (see feminist theory and research)
and life histories, 19, 46
Marxist, 11, 22n5, 32, 37, 53, 54, 59, 116
phenomenological, 109, 110
postmodernist, 133-138, 271
psychoanalytic, 22n5, 32, 109, 110, 116
rational choice, 45, 64
structural-functionalist, 10, 22n5, 32, 108, 116, 241
structuralist, 54
symbolic interactionist, 54
 See also feminist theory and research; sociological theory and
research
Society for the Study of Social Problems, 80, 138, 146n4, 264
sociological theory and research on childhood, 117, 120
on emotions, 61, 64-65, 66-67
on family, 116-117, 173
on gender and women (pre-feminist sociology), 10, 115, 155,
157, 213, 272n1
on knowledge, 2, 65-66, 109, 177-179
on methodology, 2, 4, 109-110
on professions, 63, 67
on politics and the state, 63
on race and ethnicity, 240
on sexuality, 173-175
on sociology as science, 50-52, 55, 61, 63, 65, 111, 119
See also feminist theory and research; social theory
Sociologists for Women in Society, 5, 57, 60, 70n18, 80, 146n4
sociology
demographics of, 10-11, 13, 24n25, 122n5, 146n5
(see also specific universities)
as a discipline, 15-16, 19-20, 111, 118, 133-138, 169, 271
 Page 285
sociology(continued)
discrimination within, 57-58, 98-99, 153-154, 267-269
(see also specific universities)
future of, 84
hierarchy and power within, 14, 16, 18, 114, 152-153, 162, 201
history of, 3, 9, 10-11, 56, 62, 84, 138-139, 232, 241
(see also specific universities)
and political action, 11, 16, 53, 63, 68, 70, 112, 118, 119, 213
radical, 16, 56, 57, 59
responses to feminist sociology (see feminist sociology:
responses to)
and sexuality at work, 39, 40
theory and research (see sociological theory and research)
and writing, 3
See also academia; feminist sociology; feminist theory and
research; sociological theory and research
Sokoloff, Natalie, 100n10
Spelman College, 233
Spencer, Herbert, 177
Spock, Benjamin, 31
Stacey, Judith, 14, 260
Stanford University, 31, 59-60, 104-106
State University of New York, Binghamton, 89
Stein, Gertrude, 171, 172, 180, 183
Stein, Maurice, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111
Stoller, Nancy, 112, 114
Strauss, Anselm, 54
structure and agency, 8, 19-20, 21, 64-65, 67
See also agency, human
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 235, 240
Syracuse University, 267
T
Thorne, Barrie, 14, 132, 147n11
Timberlake, Michael, 248, 255n21
Towle, Charlotte, 30
Trilling, Diana, 165-167, 186
Tuchman, Gaye, 147n11
Turbin, Carole, 100n10
U
University of California at Berkeley, 76-77, 93, 94, 122n5
University of California at Los Angeles, 56-57, 59, 81
University of California at Santa Barbara, 221-222, 224-225
University of Chicago, 30, 48-50, 53-55
University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, 242, 243
University of Massachusetts at Boston, 240-241
University of Memphis, 8, 14, 92, 121n1, 229-233, 242, 243, 244-
256
University of Minnesota, 61
University of Oregon, 31-41
University of Southern California, 57-58
University of Wisconsin at Madison, 260

V
Van Houten, Don, 36, 41, 46
Veblen, Thorsten, 29
Vogel, Lise. 147n11
W
Wallace, Henry, 30
Weber, Lynn, 92, 121n1
Weber, Max, 15, 105, 108, 159, 262
Weiss, Robert, 106, 108
Weitzman, Lenore, 146n4
Wellman, David, 36
West, Candace, 146n4, 223
White, Deborah Gray, 255n12
Wilkinson, Doris, 80
Williams, Bruce, 248, 255n21
Wilson, Thomas, 221
Wittner, Judy, 218
Wolff, Kurt, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118, 122n7
women's liberation movement, see feminist movement
women's movement, see feminist movement
women's research centers, 233
Center for Research on Women, University of Memphis, 8, 14,
92, 121n1, 229-233, 244-256
Center for the Sociological Study of Women, University of
Oregon, 35, 40-41
Women's Research and Resource Center, Spelman College, 233
women's studies, 10, 16, 26n47, 78-79, 93, 118, 232
critiques of, 247-248
departments and programs of, 81, 93,