Ground-breaking and original, this book debunks the myth that empirical social science has been dominated by its male founders and methodologists. The author re-analyses the critical role British, French and American women played in creating the field from the 16th through the early 20th centuries. Included are Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Beatrice Webb, Catharine Macauley, Florence Nightingale, Madame de Staël and Jane Addams.
An essential volume for anyone interested in the history of sociology, the development of sociological theory, or the history of women in the profession, this well-researched, compellingly argued book makes the case for the active and significant presence of women in the creation of sociology and social theory in its founding and classic periods. Further, Lengermann and Niebrugge explain how the women came to be erased from the history of sociology and identify the political and intellectual currents that now make their recovery both possible and important. The volume focuses on 15 women in eight chapters. Each chapter begins with a biographical sketch situating each thinkers ideas in a historical, social, and cultural context. Next, the authors analyze the womans theory, summarizing its underlying assumptions, explicating its major themes, and introducing key vocabulary. The chapter concludes with excerpts from the original texts of the women founders. All the theories discussed in this text share a moral commitment to the idea that sociology should and could work for the alleviation of socially produced human pain. The ethical duty of the sociologist is to seek sound scientific knowledge, to refuse to make the knowledge an end in itself, to speak for the disempowered, to advocate social reform, and to never forget that the appropriate relationship between researcher and subject is one of mutuality.
In contrast, this volume draws long overdue attention to the ways in which changing gender relations shaped the development and organization of the new social knowledge. And it challenges the privileged position that academic - and mostly male - social science has been granted in traditional histories by showing how women produced and popularized new forms of social knowledge in such places as settlement houses and the Russell Sage Foundation.
The first book of its kind to provide a full and comprehensive historical grounding of the contemporary issues of gender and women in science. Women in Science includes a detailed survey of the history behind the popular subject and engages the reader with a theoretical and informed understanding with significant issues like science and race, gender and technology and masculinity. It moves beyond the historical work on women and science by avoiding focusing on individual women scientists.
Against these contentions she shows, for example, that women social thinkers have been active in every age since the sixteenth century. McDonald presents these women's work as evidence of the way in which the empirical social sciences have been employed by social reformers, including advocates for the equality of women, to challenge the state and those in authority. She argues as well that Weber's "interpretative sociology" has been misinterpreted, citing his extensive, but usually ignored, quantitative work. Despite the supposed opposition of interpretative and mainstream sociology, McDonald maintains that many of the founders of the discipline explored both. Covering the important eras in the development of the social sciences, she deals with the early Greeks, the seventeenth-century emergence of the scientific method (especially Bacon, Descartes, and Locke), the French Enlightenment, (especially Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and Germaine de Staël), and British moral philosophy (especially Hume, Smith, and Catharine Macauley). From the nineteenth century she includes figures such as Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Quetelet, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, J.S. Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Beatrice Webb.
From Maria Winkelman's discovery of the comet of 1702 to the Nobel Prize-winning work of twentieth-century scientist Barbara McClintock, women have played a central role in modern science. Their successes have not come easily, nor have they been consistently recognized. This book examines the challenges and barriers women scientists have faced and chronicles their achievements as they struggled to attain recognition for their work in the male-dominated world of modern science.
Originally published in 1985, Women, Social Science and Public Policy looks at what difference the debate over the position of women had made to the way social scientists worked and thought, or to law and social policies at the time. Debate had been widespread during the 1960s and 1970s and this book takes stock. It avoids the standard statistics on the position of women and concentrates instead on the challenges contained in this long debate to the way research topics and method are selected – challenges in effect to the assumption of ‘business as usual’ with the addition of a few details on women. Sponsored by the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, this book is deliberately multi-disciplinary. Chapters are written by leading scholars in anthropology, economics, history, law, politics, psychology, sociology and government. These authors share both a theoretical and practical knowledge of ideas and policies. They share also a concern with analysing basic assumptions and to set Australian research and debate in an international context. This thoughtful book will be of interest to all who wish to understand the theoretical and the policy issues underpinning much of the feminist debate, and the way in which it affects their own thinking about issues of social science, social policy and social structure.
Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.
Educational and inspirational, this gift-worthy New York Times bestseller from the authors of Rad American Women A-Z, is a bold, illustrated collection of 40 biographical profiles showcasing extraordinary women from across the globe. Rad Women Worldwide tells fresh, engaging, and amazing tales of perseverance and radical success by pairing well-researched and riveting biographies with powerful and expressive cut-paper portraits. The book features an array of diverse figures from 430 BCE to 2016, spanning 31 countries around the world, from Hatshepsut (the great female king who ruled Egypt peacefully for two decades) and Malala Yousafzi (the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize) to Poly Styrene (legendary teenage punk and lead singer of X-Ray Spex) and Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft (polar explorers and the first women to cross Antarctica). An additional 250 names of international rad women are also included as a reference for readers to continue their own research. This progressive and visually arresting book is a compelling addition to women's history and belongs on the shelf of every school, library, and home. Together, these stories show the immense range of what women have done and can do. May we all have the courage to be rad! For teachers, this book is appropriate for grades 6-8 and could be used in either Social Studies or English classes, or as part of a text for a multidisciplinary unit. It can also be used as a Common Core text for grades 6-8 Social Studies/History - CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.1-10.
