DEVELOPING FEMINIST SOCIOLOGICAL

KNOWLEDGE: PROCESSES OF DISCOVERY
 

Linda Christiansen-Ruffrnan

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
 

Carla Accardi

Introduction (1)

In the last thirty years, women's studies/recherche féministe(2) has developed assumptions different tram contemporary disciplines. Our challenge as feminist sociologists has been to rid society, sociology and social knowledge of its patriarchal and colonial heritage, including racism, heterosexism, class discrimination and other forms of domination. The patriarchal heritage - or the historical and socially reproduced assumptions of male authoritative control of knowledge, power and resources - has biased sociological knowledge and disciplinary practice as has the social, economic and geo-political location of most sociological work. It has shaped ideological, cultural and structural patterns in both blatant and subtle ways, blinding men and women to its power. Eventually, feminist sociologists learned that we must take seriously one of sociology's central assumptions: that one's grounded position in social structure influences perceptions, including those of intellectuals and scientists, often in ways in which we cannot see. Recognition of multi-centred realities has profound implications far changing fundamental, taken-for-granted ways in which sociology is practised today.

In feminist work I have been startled when sociological colleagues, both men and women who are "experts" on social patterns, do- not grasp patriarchy's deep negative impact on our thinking, on sociology, on our lives and on societies. But then I remember the power of patriarchy in my own life: it has silenced me along with others, obliterated women's diverse realities and steered our societies in unjust ways, often without disclosing itself. Sometimes I find hard to imagine how I could have become a sociologist, conducted theory and research with biased tools and earned a PhD at an elite school while so blind to patriarchal distortions. Yet, even as we uncover new facets of patriarchy's complex social relations of ruling, patriarchal knowledge is still heard as truly authoritative, and appealing, even by those women - and men - made invisible, depersonalized, or ridiculed - and harmed - by its power.

In this reflective essay I invite you to share my journey of discovery, tram education through teaching and research struggles. First I set the theoretical and methodological framework far this article and far my approach to feminist analysis. Then I theorize important processes of my becoming a feminist sociologist in Canada, introducing methodological, political and theoretical challenges and potential contributions of feminist sociologists along the way. Interwoven throughout this essay on developing feminist sociological knowledge are my own personal reflections and my perceptions of the emerging field of feminist sociology. The essay also addresses readers who are both new to the field and practitioners, in hopes that engagement with this article will also contribute to processes of discovery and to developing feminist sociological knowledge.

An Epistemological Introduction to Feminist Scholarship and the Methodological Goal of Authenticity

Many feminist scholars still gain theoretical insights from the women's movement's discovery that "the personal is political." If we elaborate that idea and apply it to the realm of knowledge, we understand that the intellectual is both personal and political. Moreover, the intellectual, like the social, is rooted in contemporary knowledge paradigms that are fundamentally patriarchal and colonial. Feminists challenge all sociologists to uproot their biased knowledge base and to envision another sociology.

These theoretical reflections have grown out of years of experience where we explored and lived feminism, patriarchy, knowledge, and power and tried to understand them and their interconnections. These rich lived experiences, what could be considered many inter-related participant observations, form an empirical basis for my theorizing. This "retrospective reflection" aims to display the "not atypical" patterns of feminist knowledge development, based on long- term, intensive and diverse field experiences and intellectual collaboration.

Explicit reliance on connecting experience and knowledge is unusual in contemporary social sciences. As feminist scientists such as Ursula Franklin (1990) and Margaret Benston (1982) have pointed out, the scientific method ... is designed to break the connection between knowledge and experience by objectifying knowledge so that it is disembodied, neutral, abstract and, ideally, applicable and available to all. The dichotomy between the objective and subjective is.. designed to accomplish the same goal of denying experiences the authority to participate in, or even to affect , scientific knowledge creation. Feminist scholars recognize the impossibility of this dichotomous separation and the negative consequences of not recognizing the patriarchal and colonial heritage of our knowledge system. The fact that knowledge is socially constructed undermines claims to full objectivity. Instead, I claim the authenticity goal of scholarship. This paper is my best effort to speak ethically and truthfully, to think vigorously through complexities, to avoid the known traps of bias, to make my perspective and assumptions as explicit as possible and to be cognizant of the effects of socio-political contexts.

Designing Appropriate Methodologies: Alternative Knowledge Claims of Retrospective Reflections

This article, by design, is an authentic, feminist retrospective reflection. It is not a literature review, although I did a new search far "feminist sociological work" and struggle with how to identify it.(3) I rejected the conventional literature review because its focus on the creation, celebration and reproduction of individualized, abstracted, "objective" knowledge seemed to embody patriarchy and ethnocentrism. I knew I could not accomplish the lofty claims of the scholarly literature review - to account far all knowledge and then to order it abstractly, in the name of. objectivity. The literature review has a western, English language bias and social location. The available publications and abstracts provide an inadequate and incomplete sampling basis and deny access to feminist knowledge used in praxis, written in other languages and published in obscure sources such as the so-called "grey literature" of repor1s and non-books. Even if one ignores this sampling bias, often the literature review reifies patriarchal knowledge because it cannot question the layers of patriarchal assumptions, even within published feminist ar1icles, and then it utilizes abstracted patriarchal concepts to inter-relate ar1icles.

The form of literature review is also problematic. The association of authors' names with ideas in a literature review suggests ownership and individual invention, while many feminists recognize that true innovation is likely to occur collectively both with other scholars and in the field. Too often individual authors are cited far knowledge that they appropriated and had no role in creating. A 1994 discussion with an Indian feminist scholar raised another problem: her editor insisted she cite "authorities" far her asser1ions about the feminist movement of which she is par1. We realized that as feminists, we have not yet figured out how to credit ideas, new to academia, that had become the taken-for-granted knowledge of community groups, the women's movement or groups of colleagues. An unresolved feminist challenge in the academy and outside is how to enhance and name this type of collective discovery.

This essay uses retrospective reflections because they do not pretend to make universalistic generalizations. Their less grandiose claims make them more appropriate to current needs of knowledge creation. They are designed to enlighten, to increase understanding of the social world and to generate reflection and research. Their approach follows the tradition of qualitative, inductive research, but the grounded theory to be developed is neither causal nor abstract. Rather, theoretical reflections on feminist praxis remain grounded in setting and context to illuminate women's realities, the persistent power of patriarchy and ways to create knowledge and change. Social processes are revealed in the context of specific historical and structural circumstances. The scholarly goal is engagement in an on-going, collective intellectual enquiry rather than proving intellectual superiority or claiming credit far discovery.

Theoretical and Methodological Bases far Engaged Feminist Analysis

The methodological stance of this article, and my scholarly work, is authentic, engaged, personal and political. As a feminist, I am interested in:

·          women - enhancing women's place in the world, learning tram women and women's experiences in all their diversity and understanding women's ways of seeing, knowing, acting and organizing in different times.

·          patriarchy - undermining patriarchal and related relations of power, learning about the many devices to discriminate and oppress in different settings, and understanding ways in which men and women reproduce patriarchal power while women's knowledge and resources are appropriated far inhumane purposes.

·          social change and transformation - envisioning, understanding and making social changes to end the oppression, not only of women but of all peoples; and

·          global feminist movements - learning and working with others far equity, social justice and new ways of envisioning and creating our world.

These theoretical and personal feminist commitments (i) to women, (ii) to ending patriarchal oppression, (iii) to transforming the world and (iv) to working within the feminist movement enhance rather than hinder authentic scholarship and praxis. They provide an explicit location with a set of theoretical assumptions, rich empirical observations and action opportunities to test out ideas. I learn tram experiences, observations, interactions, texts, other participants, praxis and tram theorizing each of these, and my own situated understanding, in conjunction with others who bring different ideas, perspectives and structural/situational conditions to our conversations.

My theoretical reflections have become grounded methodologically in feminist movement, the site of my field-based learning and my praxis. But my scholarship did not begin here. Earlier I was convinced that intellectuals could and should be disengaged tram society. The following sections describe these earlier periods, and my process of becoming a feminist sociologist. They-., demonstrate how sociology's traditional claim of intellectual disengagement tram society is contradicted; it is disproven by sociology's patriarchal heritage and practices.

The Promise of Sociology: Learning the Discipline's Heritage

As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I was inspired by sociological imagination. Ely Chinoy was the first of many male professors who helped me to experience the joys and anguish of learning sociology - its broad-ranging subject matter, the intricacies and power of its diverse methods and the brilliant social analysis of its theorists. I loved to engage with the developing theories and paradigms and to figure out social patterns of structure and change.(4) In this respect, I was unlike some feminist contemporaries such as Marilyn Porter, far whom sociology was a "flag of convenience," hosting work en her prior interests in Marxism and feminism (see Marilyn Porter, 1993). Sociology was my developing identity.

As a graduate student at Columbia University, I recall experiencing occasional incidents of institutional sexism. Far example, I was initially rejected as a "Columbia Fellow" because females were not considered as serious scholars.(5) I was so colonized by patriarchy, however, that I was not conscious of sociology's patricentrism and misogyny. I adopted what I now recognize as patriarchal standards: favouring abstracted theory, belittling practical work and scorning the only sociological topic remotely related to women, the family. In retrospect, there were signs of intellectual alienation: theoretical fascination with the concept of the stranger, with alternative methodologies, qualitative research, emerging paradigms, and knowledge at the boundaries of the sociological discipline. At the time, I remember being more distressed by social relationships among sociologists: the climate of disrespect, the games of arrogance that I learned to play and the dysfunctional, individualistic publish or perish academic norms that undermined ideals of good scholarship and a collaborative scholarly community. I longed far an alternative.

American and Patriarchal Sociology: Betrayal and Silencing with the Shattering of the Paradigm

When I moved to Nova Scotia, Canada and began sociological teaching and research, I began a different type of educational experience. One after another the foundational assumptions of sociology were challenged as I tried to use sociology's knowledge. The discipline's keys to understanding society simply did not fit the realities I saw in Atlantic Canada. Research in small, isolated Labrador communities in the 1970s challenged sociology's assumptions about traditional women, unilinear progress and modernity (Christiansen-Ruffman, 1980). Earlier, sociological hypotheses, tested by highly sophisticated field- based experiments with multiple experimental and control groups in urban United States, failed the social applicability test - both in the field and in the classroom - and raised profound questions about experimental generalization and universal knowledge claims. As my questioning of basic paradigmatic knowledge progressed, and as "pieces" of "knowledge" fell victim to social applicability and predictability tests, I began a whole second stage of unlearning and learning.

I felt betrayed, and I was silenced. The social analysis I had acquired, at its highest Ph.D. level, failed to provide me even with words to describe my qualitative research. The several competing paradigms I had learned in graduate school did not help directly. They did, however, hold out hope for an alternative. But I could not translate my research on citizen participation of I grass roots groups in Halifax into interesting sociological questions. I eventually did a literature review and wrote a paper on "who participates," from the questions raised by other articles in the sociological literature. It was boring. I could not figure out how to ask the right questions to create the sociology I longed to do.(6)

In retrospect, I learned the value of silence in academia. My conscious choice of location "at the margins," and break with American sociology, provided an organizational space where I had the luxury of recognizing that silence was appropriate. Irresistible publication pressure deprived colleagues of exploring the possibilities of feminist knowledge as it forced them to fit women into patriarchal knowledge paradigms.

As antidotes to the American standpoint implicit in the assumptions of sociology, I embraced Canadian sociology, with its more historical base, and international sociology, with its greater diversity. I also engaged locally with the Atlantic Canadian sociology community. The Atlantic Canadian context revealed sociology's ethnocentric urban American bias more easily than its patriarchal bias.(7) My gradual discovery of sociology's patriarchal heritage came along with the women's Liberation movement.

Becoming A Feminist Sociologist in Canada

When I started teaching in Halifax in the late 1960s, there were no books, no articles, no journals, no courses and hardly a mention of women anywhere. Even the idea of a feminist sociologist had not yet been conceived. This section theorizes my experiences as a series of overlapping stages that led to the development of Canadian women's studies, with leadership from a number of feminist women sociologists, and later to the sub-field of feminist sociology.

Silences and Putting Women Into the Subject Matter: From Sex Roles to the Experiences of Women

Before women's studies/recherche féministe, women were seldom mentioned, and then only as functional to men. No body of social knowledge named'; embraced or reflected women's realities. Both questions about women and women's experiences and interpretations of these experiences were considered irrelevant, illegitimate, without a heritage or a place. Information related t9. women was not knowledge or worthy of study, and any conceptual possibility of socially active women was erased, ridiculed and met other forms of resistance. The lack of a scholarly literature on the subject meant that we could not conform to the formula far writing an article. Nothing was available to cite in the standard "theory" section, and the few rich original feminist writings raised too many questions and did not fit the formula far abstraction. New ideas were discussed and not written, or circulated as drafts.

In 1970 I was assigned to teach the sociology of family (8) and found that old ways of conceiving of the family did not work. In retrospect, the influence of the emerging women's movement is clear. I adopted an existing sociological and psychological disciplinary frame of age and sex roles, combined with anthropology, to focus on male and female family roles for different generations in different societies. We developed new concepts and understandings of family dynamics.(9) Soon, the conceptual framework of sex roles also became problematic for many feminists, because depictions of male and female roles reproduced and legitimized sexism. "Women," especially autonomous women, had more analytic and political power, as the women's movement taught us at the same lime as it helped create the words "woman" and "women" as powerful.(10)

Identifying As A Woman !

In 1970 institutions treated women in a clearly discriminatory way. For .' example, I was hired as a sociologist at a lower rank and at $2000 less or only 83% of the salary of my male counterpart. When I discovered these differences, I sought equality. Even though university administrators could not name any criterion on which he excelled, discrimination was legitimate The rank was changed, but not the salary, which presumably was corrected when we unionized.(11)

As these individual instances of discrimination, these lived material realities, were shared with others in similar positions, and as they became social and political, I began far the first lime to see myself clearly as a woman and as a member of a discriminated group. Past experiences, which I did not understand, clicked into focus. As I saw the world through women's eyes, I sought out other women to organize and to press far collective change.(12) We realized that playing the patriarchal games of "being good" was not going anywhere. We needed the power of working together to change structures of discrimination.

Creating Women's Space Amidst the Silences

As women who envisioned change, we talked, organized and formed caucuses within professional organizations and campuses as we were doing in the community. Although we were still bound by existing paradigms, we considered ways of building a new field of knowledge, with a focus on creating useful social knowledge for the advancement of women. Excitement greeted every newsletter, article and book on women, e.g., Marilee Stephenson's (1973) collection, Women in Canada and the Canadian Newsletter for Research on Women (later Resources far Feminist Research). These early and diverse information sources were filling in the silences, and thousands of new ideas were being picked up, combined, and creating new idea explosions. Meanwhile in 1970 within the International Sociological Association, the Research Committee 32 on Sex Roles (Iater Women in Society), was being established and RC32 held its first meeting at the Toronto World Congress of Sociology in 1974. A feminist colleague and I presented a paper there. Scholarly conventions constricted our theoretical options at the time, and we adapted C. W. Mills' (1959) dichotomy of private troubles and public issues to focus on women.

Canada celebrated 1975, International Women's Year, with a public "Why Not?" campaign, which provided new, legitimate social space and resources for women's organizing. We carne together to conduct research and present briefs to groups such as the Nova Scotia Task Force on the Status of Women, founding groups and doing research along the way. Three sociologists planned a major Canadian research/book project to make women visible. The research funding agency in Canada turned down our project because they saw no research' on which to base these books. To harness our momentum, we planned a small Canada-wide conference in 1976 which grew exponentially to capture the burgeoning energy of this new field. It coupled with the initiation of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) in Ottawa to begin years of annual conferences on feminist research.(13)

Discovering and Uncovering Sex Bias in Research

When I first broke society's misogynist  mind control over me and began to identify as a woman, I could begin to see sex bias in research. First, the blatant sexist language practices drew attention, and we worked out the arguments for why the generic "he" was unacceptable. Feminists also worked to eliminate sexist language and to change the portrayal of women in social knowledge and policy.

Gradually, with the intellectual power and energy of women's meetings and conferences we figured out new levels of what we called sexist biases in (research, which infected the very foundations of academic knowledge.

Patriarchal assumptions and major concepts of academic disciplines - "universal suffrage" without women in political science and the "islanders and their wives" in anthropology - excluded half the population. In sociology, the association of "work" with employment rendered invisible many types of women's unpaid work, and GNP/GDP eliminated women's subsistence, agricultural work, women's community work, women's work in fishing enterprises and housework from the economy. "Class" and "production" reflected the patriarchal reality of their origins and failed to include women's experiences.

Typically we found that sexist biases distorted knowledge creation at all stages of the research process (see Canadian Psychological Association, 1977; Spender, 1981; Eichler, 1983; 1988; Vickers, 1984; Eichler and LaPointe, 1985; Christiansen-Ruffman, 1982; 1985; 1989). The "important questions" assumed male realities. Patricentric concepts and indicators as well as population and sampling decisions excluded women by design. Men's words were considered authoritative, and even women's sex roles were doubly interpreted through male eyes of interviewee and researcher. Analytic biases made more than small differences in sociological findings: hypotheses became their opposites (see critique in Christiansen-Ruffman, 1982). Patriarchal forgetfulness and blindness led to inappropriate inferences which passed through editors as legitimate scholarship, as they still do today. For example, most of the literature on migration gave job rather than family reasons far the move. Only a "deviant case" of a male moving for "family" reasons - far his wife's job - revealed that we were taking the moves of members of nuclear families - most often the wives and children - far granted; they did not count empirically. If everyone was counted, the "finding" of the migration literature would be reversed. Even still, the migration literature is silent on the work women do in the process of migration which is neither housework nor paid employment but part of what I have called women's community work.

Recognition of biases, assumptions and alternative methodologies led to the blossoming of women's studies/recherche féministe in Canada, and to another burst of feminist energy in the academy. Numbers of courses, programs and the legitimacy of this new field grew dramatically, especially in the early 1980s in Canada (Brodribb, 1987; Eichler, 1990). Women succeeded in getting the Social Science Federation of Canada to mount its Task Force on the Elimination of Sexist Bias in Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to designate "women and work" as one of its strategic themes. In addition, five Chairs of Women's Studies were established . across Canada, and new personnel and courses multiplied. Eichler and Tite (1990: 14) found the largest number of new faculty entering the field of women's studies in Canada during 1980-84, many coming tram established disciplines, especially sociology.

Avoiding Patriarchal Reproduction: Feminist Methodologies as Appropriate Methodologies for Different Feminist Objectives

As the pattern of sex biases in research became clearer, we turned to methodological accounts to discover why sociology was producing such biased knowledge. Typically, for example, women were seen as different enough to be excluded from samples in research studies, but not different enough to be excluded from generalizations and inferences in results, which were seen as applicable to all human beings. When women were included by name, they were usually blamed (e.g., maternal deprivation). We found how both the patriarchal heritage of contemporary society and the deep-rooted patricentric and colonialist biases in sociological concepts and assumptions shape conceptual and methodological decisions. As well, we saw how the positivist, hypothesis-testing research process reproduces flawed, patriarchal knowledge because of its starting point in existing patricentric concepts and theories. The deductive research process, with its focus on replication and testing the applicability of existing knowledge, does not easily admit new concepts. The feminist objectives of creating concepts, ideas and new understandings that are useful in the world contrasts with the positivist objective of testing existing knowledge, and both goals sometimes contrast with another feminist goal of empirically-based theorizing. The methodological task of developing "appropriate methodologies" specifically designed to accomplish these different analytic objectives now seems self-evident, yet it still eludes successful achievement. For example, a study describing the changing extent of a particular form of discrimination in society requires a positivist, quantitative design while a study on discriminatory processes benefits tram qualitative methodologies such as reflections on experiences, collaborative comparative research and action research.(14) Feminist methodologists focused mainly on new exploratory and creative approaches needed at this dawn of feminist discovery.(15)

Exploring Feminist Differences

The discovery of sexist biases in research led, de facto, to theorizing differences of women tram men (e.g., Spender, 1981; O'Brien, 1981; Gilligan, 1982; Miles, 1982; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule, 1986.) Some of these books developed theories of women directly out of a critique of research I centred on men that distorted women's realities by omission. Other feminist I scholars began to conceive of the world and its social relationships from women's perspectives and noticed how differently the world was configured when examined through the eyes of a housewife (e.g., Claudia von Werlhof, 1988) or of a young mother with a twenty-four hour working day. As did Mary O'Brien (1981), we explored how new feminist theory might evolve, grounded philosophically in the social relationships of birthing, and/or caring, as Marx's theory was in work and Freud's in sex.

And feminist exploration of differences went considerably further, to focus on the diversity of women and on women's perspectives on the world and from around the world. For example, the Combahee River Collective (1979) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) theorized black feminism and were among many who contributed both to an appreciation of gender, race and class interrelations and to multicentred feminisms (Miles, 1996). Reconceiving the world and its institutions through women's eyes, for instance led Kathy Ferguson (1984) to make The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, Christiansen-Ruffman (1982; 1995) to conceive a different politics in women's organizing, and participants at a conference in Dakar to envision Another Development With Women (1982). But so much more theorizing is needed. I have found particularly useful the work of feminist researchers from the economic south, especially the group called DAWN, Development Alternatives With Women far a New Era. Relatively early, they characterized global crises and suggested that poor women and children be the touchstone against which to judge policies and theories in a committed, transformative feminist scholarship (DAWN, 1985 or Sen and Grown, 1987).

Feminists developed collaborative, comparative methodologies to reduce individualism and increase representation of diverse women and their experiences. Such approaches allow us to understand different manifestations of oppression from sexism, racism, class discrimination, coloniality, heterosexism, ableism, ageism… Learning from differences and similarities in concrete experiences also allows us to understand local and global processes such as fundamentalism, nationalism and globalisation. For example, work on the negative implications of structural adjustment on women in the economic south foreshadowed similar work on structural victimization of women in Canada and eastern Europe with "restructuring."

Challenging Basic Paradigmatic Assumptions of Knowledge

Through wider, clearer feminist eyes, I discovered inappropriate assumptions at the base of knowledge and understood their deep-rooted limitations on thought, research and intellectual engagement. I have continued to search out patriarchal remnants that remain as taken-for-granted features of feminist knowledge. For example, I criticized both the either/or and the patricentric syndrome as inherited biases within feminism (Christiansen-Ruffman, presented in 1982, published in 1989). Subsequently, I identified the Abstraction Syndrome, or what might also be called imperialist universalism within sociology, in both the empirical tradition and the ideal theoretical tradition of patriarchal knowledge.

The Abstraction Syndrome refers to the ideal of abstracted, decontextualized and universalistic knowledge. The ideal of one single abstracted theory at the heart of the knowledge system is under challenge from post-modernism, which is another variation of the abstraction syndrome. Sometimes associated with the abstraction syndrome is positivist methodology which aims to test abstracted hypotheses developed from what are considered "universalistic" (but are often patriarchal, racist, sexist, urban, American and class based) theories. Feminism has demonstrated conclusively that a major assumption of the abstraction syndrome - that social lime, social space and social structure make no fundamental differences - is unwarranted. At great intellectual expense, existing paradigms and outdated concepts of science alienate us from our intellectual roots in the field and orient sociology and feminism away from the important questions of living around the globe.

Sometimes I consider the patriarchal knowledge system and its assumptions as similar to an onion. The tough, penetrating and straight greens declare their individual and strong linear presence, and simplistic form, to the world. Below the surface the hidden centre of the onion itself has a tough protective skin. Its many layers of patriarchal assumptions send out tears to blind your eyes and distort your vision. One layer after another is peeled back to reveal nothing at its care. Its roots within the material world are not deep. In contrast, images of feminist knowledge, and eventually global knowledge, have more complex structures like a tomato or a tree, with deep roots, many seeds and grounded links to living earth. Feminist knowledge is centred on life values of equality, diversity and justice.(16)

Re-Visiting Our Links With the Field

The "field," like difference, has been part of Canadian feminist heritage, but with new generations, and the power of the abstraction syndrome, its taken- for-granted character cannot be assumed. When we theorize the field more explicitly, we realize that most assumptions of feminist analysis have come from the women's movement, or the field of praxis (Christiansen-Ruffman, 1997). Theoretically, Dorothy Smith (1987) treats the field, or the everyday world, as problematic and emphasises women's location, or standpoint, in it. Methodologists Kirby and McKenna (1989) suggest "researching from the margins" [of the field]. Feminist social theorists and historians of sociology such as Mary Jo Deegan's Women in Sociology (1991) are rediscovering how early women sociologists developed and tested their ideas while working in the field. The challenge for feminist sociologists today, under new conditions, is how to redevelop sociology so that the field is a site for knowledge creation and praxis toward more just societies.

Sociology and Women's Studies: Creating and Avoiding the Split

Sociology and women's studies have taken similar, overlapping, interacting but different paths over the last thirty years. In Canada, sociologists have been women's studies pioneers; Eichler (1992) finds that the discipline was the earliest and most frequent contributor to women's studies courses, despite the initial lack of material. Feminist sociologists have blazed new trails that meander, divide and lead in different directions as new discoveries are made, Feminist researchers remain in the clearings to build new knowledge while feminist explorers take forays into new wilderness, blazing new ground, and getting lost, and sometimes rediscovering deeply buried traces of past trails.

Along the way, the patriarchal and colonialist nature of the surroundings has been (re)discovered as well as the difficulties of leaving the well-established trail. Feminists creating the path have resisted attempts to cover it up, mislead its followers, divert its course and pave it aver. Now women's studies is established, sociology has increasingly become a place for feminist sociologists. But how feminist-friendly is the discipline?

Assessing Feminist-Friendly Sociology

Most social scientists, albeit reluctantly, would agree that feminist analysis has changed what social science considers knowledge. Francine Descarries, for example, begins an assessment with this passage tram Claude Lévi-Strauss' (1936) study of the Bororo: "The entire village departed the next day in thirty dugout canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in abandoned houses." (17) She concludes:

The time has undoubtedly passed in which a renowned man of science could record such an observation without even tarnishing his reputation as a so-called "objective" scholar… Feminists succeeded, then, in demonstrating that it was no longer possible to conceive of the world or produce science "as before", that is, in a way that effaces women as subjects of history and totally voids their experiences (Descarries, 1996: 116).

University campuses, the curriculum, course outlines, journals, knowledge and publishing practices (18) attest to changes and improvements since the late sixties, despite slow progress, remaining vestiges of patriarchy and new patriarchal forms. As Laslett and Thorne (1997:14) write, "A decade after [the] lament aver 'the missing feminist revolution in sociology' [see Stacey and Thorne, 1985], there has been significant progress in challenging and reworking sociological frameworks."

Sociology's relative progress is reported by political scientist Jill Vickers, after she examined one major professional journal in English Canada for each of the disciplines of sociology, political science, psychology and geography:

Only in ... Sociology were there enough feminist articles, research notes and reviews in the three years I surveyed (1989-91) to represent a critical mass. The subjects tackled included female lone parenting, risk factors in wife abuse, women sports coaches, gender differences in earning and women's double work shifts. Central elements in the field were also under scrutiny, as for example in articles challenging schemas of occupational prestige, because of their inability to incorporate gender. That is, the presence goes beyond a women and society sub-field and involves intrusions into the discipline's conceptual frameworks. Even in articles, notes and reviews not written from a feminist perspective, awareness of feminist findings was common (Vickers, 1996, p. 229).

Nevertheless Eichler (1992) reminds us of the "Unfinished Transformation." Sociology still requires richer and fuller conceptualizations of sociology's key concepts such as class, and new inclusive foundational concepts. Feminist scholarship such as Bella's 1992 analysis of women and Christmas are useful in showing how patricentric dichotomies such as "work" versus "leisure" discount women's realities. At the end of the century, we still have not achieved feminist friendly sociology: an equal and legitimate focus on women and women's experiences; an absence of patriarchal concepts and assumptions, even in feminist work; and encouragement for a variety of appropriate methodologies, including those designed to change structures of knowledge and society. Sociology's subject matter, methods, concepts, models, theories, assumptions and institutional practices are in need of a major overhaul. We are challenged to create knowledge which includes the multiple perspectives of women and men around the world.

Challenges: Persistent Power of Patriarchy

Contemporary knowledge is not exempt from the persistent power of patriarchy which appears in old and new forms, as Lerner (1986) and Walby (1990) describe. The patriarchal heritage of sociology continues to leave its mark on all knowledge, and all academics are marked, mired and marred by its power. Patriarchal relationships dis-able our sociological analysis, as they cripple our societies and distort our institutions. In reaction to changes from the women's, peace and environmental movements, knowledge, resources and power in every institutional sphere of society are undergoing neo-patriarchal pressures.(19) The academy is no exception, and the ivory tower has been working to contain and constrain women's studies. Some of its major insights have been appropriated and transformed so that at best they are no longer relevant and at worst they become a hindrance to continued global feminist enlightenment. Any discussion of feminist achievements in knowledge must therefore be tempered. Time will tell whether neo-patriarchal forces in society will succeed in creating new patriarchal mechanisms to stifle the pro-feminist trend toward a wiser, fuller and more inclusive understanding of society, or whether we are witnessing the last gasps of patriarchy.

Patriarchal Methodological Designs and Theories

Biased work and research practices are still prevalent in sociology as is evident in sociology texts. For example, even in one of the best books on research, Neuman's (1997) third edition, one of two illustrative studies in Chapter 1 implicitly endorses sexist, imperialist, racist and classist inferences. When Neuman describes design decisions the study used to make samples tram 1948, 1967, 1974, 1979 and 1984 comparable, he ignores biases created in excluding female students from the 1974, 1979 and 1984 data. He does not mention the initial design problem of using an elite, formerly male, mainly white American college to draw conclusions about "the" student population overtime. An opportunity is missed to discuss overgeneralization and biased inferential practices.

Another annoying example in Jackson (1995) uses the language of equality to obscure an inappropriately gendered sampling protocol. After random digit dialling, the protocol favours interviewing adult males if one is present at home,(20) "to create a greater equality in the participation rates of male and female respondents" (Jackson, 1995:399). This description comes after the paragraph where Jackson explains that in random sampling:

All choices are to be made by probability procedures… It is critical that interviewers not simply replace the unavailable respondent with the nearest, most convenient, replacement. This would bias the sample toward those who are at home or are more cooperative (p. 399).

Jackson fails to mention how the illustrative protocol violates these methodological principles: It does not follow probability procedures, does replace respondents and consequently biases the female sample, as well, toward those women who are likely to be at home. Jackson ignores other possible reasons for this inappropriate protocol, such as cost, efficiency and ideology. As I have shown elsewhere, (Christiansen-Ruffman, 1982; 1985; 1989) patricentric assumptions - whether that women don't really count - or that all women count the same - lead to biased methodological decisions and distorted knowledge - and to apparently irrational and direct violations of methodological principles.(21)

Feminist sociologists have developed four analytic strategies to create new knowledge and to address the layers of patriarchal assumptions in sociological theory which exclude and/or exploit women. The early feminist sociologists simply borrowed existing theoretical ideas and tried to fit women into them. The resulting "theory" retained layers of patriarchal concepts and assumptions. Even when we adopted the second feminist strategy of challenging the key concepts and debates of existing theoretical traditions from women's perspectives, we often have not thought deeply enough, or, when we did, our most significant and transformative ideas were ignored.

A third strategy has added the perspective of women to classical theory. Previously unknown women theorists such as Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) (see Hoecker-Drysdale, 1992) have been (re)discovered and promoted through scholarship and organizations such as the Harriet Martineau Society. (See also Deegan, 1991; McDonald, 1994 and Lengermann and Niebrugge- Brantley, 1998 on the broad range of other women sociological theorists and Deegan, 1988 on Jane Addams.) Sydie (1994), instead, has focused on insights about women by well-established classical (male) theorists.

The addition of women to sociological theory is necessary but not sufficient to overcome deeply embedded problems of patriarchy and colonialism. Another strategy I advocated in the 1980s is "autonomous feminist theorizing," aimed at developing new theoretical ideas while working with and engaged in feminist praxis in the field. The importance of theorizing as process and theoretical engagement in specific geo-political locations is even more clear in 1997. In fact, this field-based approach has implications far the broader discipline of sociology. Sociology and the contemporary system of knowledge, both inside and outside the academy, will benefit from a fresh, inclusive, relevant, worldly and feminist-friendly sociology that develops new concepts and conventions as it seeks to understand and transform the world.

Collaborative Comparative Field Based Theorizing: A Feminist Contribution to Re-lnventing Sociology

Sociologists who recognize colonial and patriarchal heritage embedded in our discipline are looking for new concepts, perspectives, methodologies and approaches to social analysis. I think that feminist theorizing has a lot to offer. Its perspective provides an antidote to current ahistorical, abstracted, dichotomous conceptualization. Its committed and multi-faceted focus encourages creative understanding of a wide variety of situations. Specific relationships, social processes and diverse, grounded realities provide the empirical basis far innovative, field-based theorizing as does reflection on feminist praxis.

In fact, the "field" has been essential to most theorists whose work has become canonized as social theory. Many "fathers" of sociology were, in large part, writing and theorizing about what they saw as problems of their day and suggesting improvements. They were engaged in a form of field-based learning and theorizing. What feminists are suggesting, however, is not more of the same - an individual scholar inventing new concepts alone with (his) reason and free of values and influences from the world.(22) Feminist scholars know the impossibility of disengagement and have made a methodological strength out of engagement. Methodological principles have taken on a new shape in the process. Praxis has become a theoretical and empirical resource. The individual scholar has given way to creative, collaborative, comparative theorizing. It is not surprising that feminists combined reason and passion to reinvent this winning combination of collaborative, comparative field-based theorizing as a key to the feminist enlightenment

My experience suggests that sociology, like feminism, should ground itself in the relevant questions of the day, from the perspectives of the powerless, in order to develop its socially relevant scholarly agenda. But this process must build on distinctive experiences and mitigate the silencing harms of inequality. In order to counter the power of biased, contemporary knowledge, previously marginalised groups need their own intellectual space for creative work, and these separate spaces must be respected and fostered. As marginalised groups (re)gain their individual and collective distinctiveness, knowledge creation will flourish, especially if sociologists are mindful of homogenizing tendencies. As more complex, multi-centred and multi-faceted ideas replace dichotomies, insightful concepts will emerge. Organizations such as the International Sociological Association are fruitful sites for this active intellectual engagement and for developing a collaborative, comparative approach to research across boundaries. As long as this approach is truly attentive to and respectful of differences, collaborative and comparative field-based learning will enlighten, enliven and nourish knowledge to further enlightenment.

Notes

(1) Helpful comments on this paper and book are welcome. Please send them to the author at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 3C3; fax: 902-420-5121; or email: Ruffman@husky1.stmarys.ca. I thank colleagues and my students for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts, especially Barbara Cottrell, Ruramisai Charumbira, Angela Miles, Marilyn Porter and Evangelia Tastsoglou.

(2) This name, women's studieslrecherche féministe was developed at a Canada-wide symposium in 1991, organized in association with a review of strategic research on women. Its explicit recognition of women, feminism, and bilingualism distinguishes it from Gender Studies, more characteristic of the United States. The more collective, diverse and less individualistic assumptions of Canadian feminist scholarship and practice are illustrated by the difference between the group-based National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) in Canada and the individual-based National Organization of Women (NOW) in the United States.

(3) For example, to locate new feminist sociology, I examined collections of feminist. articles for the one written by the sociologist." But I found other authors with even more profound sociological insights. This pattern shows the benefits of multi-disciplinarity and is perhaps a sign of sociology's readiness for the global feminist enlightenment.

(4) Ethnomethodology and world systems theories were being developed, and were seen as more new and exciting than structural-functionalism by graduate students. Nevertheless, I remember experiencing great pleasure when I developed the concept of attribution set, to accompany Merton's status-set, role-set and person-set mode!. It could account for differences among societies in their treatment of statuses and their importance. I still do not understand why others were not more excited about it, although I now see a possible explanation in American ethnocentric universalism.

(5) With support from Terence Hopkins, my appeal was successful, although I eventually turned it down in lieu of a larger fellowship. This fellowship denial is one of a few blatant sexist incidents I remember within this institutional environment of an all- male faculty. The female mistresses around as research and teaching assistants, however, were negative role models for me in terms of a career path and made me cautious of faculty sponsorship. I count myself fortunate in not having to deal with blatant acts of what we now call sexual harassment, although I turned down a research assistant job for fear that it might place me in a compromising position. On the one hand, therefore, I was structurally being influenced by being female, but at the same time, with no independent women as professorial role models, my female identity was not well developed. It seemed less complicated to consider oneself as a competent, generic man. Being an autonomous woman was not yet rediscovered as a real option in daily life, although I felt I had a right to be considered as equal to men.

(6) Dorothy Smith (1992:133) describes a similar difficulty writing papers, but earlier than I, "around 1972," she "discovered as a feminist a very different way of writing," and of using existing academic conferences for communication among women.

(7) Perhaps the more recent American bias is closer to the surface of knowledge structures and easier to see.

(8) It is one of the contradictions of the developings of feminist knowledge that, on the one hand, this teaching assignment was insulting because it did not recognize my professional expertise. At the time as well, studying family was low on sociology's hierarchy of sub-fields. On the other hand, it did recognize women's knowledge of the family, however sexist that social construction, and it legitimized my having to invent a course which made sense from a women's, global perspective. Part of the course led  me to use the field as a basis for learning and creating new ways of knowing.

(9) In retrospect, a student referred to the course I taught then as women's studies, and we reflected on the power of "first" naming women's diverse realities.

(10) We needed to reclaim the colonialization of women, and our negative self-image was so strong at the time that a member of "The Voice of Women," a feminist peace group did not see herself as a member of a women's group.

(11) Blatant discrimination was widespread. The Nova Scotia government still had lower minimum wage scales for women, and women were forbidden in taverns, private clubs and unwelcome at ceremonial occasions such as New Year's levees. We were quicker to challenge some of these institutional barriers than to recognize the depth of discrimination in our language, concepts and structures of know1edge (Goueffic, 1996).

(12) The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) in the early 1970s established corresponding members to a Status of Women Committee, and my faculty association asked me to represent our university. We also organized women's caucuses and other groups within the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, our regions, our universities and our communities.

(13) The founding and annual meetings of the Canadian Research Institute far the Advancement of Women (see Clippingdale, 1996) played an important synergistic role in the developings of women's studies/recherche féministe in Canada. Sociologists, as 30% of CRIAW's Presidents, have contributed to CRIAW's goals, including the promotion of research by, for and about women and the fostering of relationships between CRIAW's diverse constituencies: inside and outside the academy in both anglophone and francophone Canada.

(14) From the beginning, we have recognized the difficulties of these alternative strategies. Many feminists have known that deep-rooted patriarchal assumptions are almost impossible to escape totally, and that qualitative work also runs the risk of reproducing patriarchal social knowledge unknowingly and of creating new patriarchal forms. In fact, it is an on-going challenge to rid even the best feminist work of patriarchal remnants, and a great deal of attention to this problem still is required within sociology.

(15) In countering methodologically rigid, positivist thinking, I have found the analogy of describing and analysing a tomato useful. One may smell, touch, taste or look. Each approach gives a different and equally valid sense of the tomato, but each is also incomplete. Slicing the tomato in different ways discloses additional information. Each slice reveals a distinct pattern of seeds and flesh, some with more seeds and some with less. Each sample is different, but no less accurate for that particular slice. Different perspectives and approaches rather than different slices will reveal the most complete picture of the tomato, especially in the initial discovery stages. And it goes almost without saying that a tomato also looks different on the vine, in the store, in the salad or in the spaghetti sauce, and thus its description must be contextualized (see Christiansen-Ruffman, Descarries and Stewart 1993:4-5).

(16) I have also conceived of knowledge more abstractly. In the early 1980s Berit Aas, founder of the Women's University in Norway, and I portrayed a new feminist knowledge structure. We pictured emerging, expanding and overlapping knowledge circles focused on women's struggles, which intersected with each other. Thus, women's movements were pictured in the centre, where all circles overlapped, with movements related to ecology, peace, development, health, alternative economy, each with overlapping circles, relating to each other. These intersecting circles portrayed overlaps in knowledge areas, implied interdisciplinarity, and focused knowledge creation on specific problems which the women's movement had identified in the "field." The overlapping circles were later refined and developed by Margaret Fulton and the Norwegian board. In retrospect, the intersecting circles seem too fixed and closed; spirals may provide .a better starting imagery, as they are more open and dynamic.

(17) This passage from Lévi-Strauss's 1936 study was, according to Descarries (1996), first noted by Claire Michard-Marshal and Claudine Ribery (1982:7). This book and article is also available in French. This English version was translated by Jody Freeman.

(18) Most Canadian sociology texts now acknowledge women's presence and include feminist scholarship, or a focus on women, at least in a chapter. In some texts feminism is treated as a major paradigm (e.g., Sylvia Hale, 1995). Nevertheless, this shift is by no means complete, and numerous students still learn only of the "universal actor," with his inevitable male perspective and characteristics.

(19) As a feminist sociologist, I see a new stage of capitalist exploitation globally. Partly as a reaction to the women's and environmental movements, patriarchal capitalism is appropriating and colonializing newly gained spaces. Among these are progressive and feminist language which are undergoing Orwellian distortions as reform comes to mean reduction, participation is taken as user pay and "discrimination" is applied to multinational companies rather than marginalised groups. Internationally women have increasingly become not only a source of expendable labour, but a disembodied commodity, through trade in body parts, sex tourism, and cybersex. Previously common property, such as the ocean and portable water, seeds and forests, are becoming privatised and commodified as Shiva (1988) and Mies and Shiva (1993) describe.  And as capital seemed to have reached the exploitation limit of our natural resources, genetic engineering has become a source of what Shiva (1997) calls biopiracy. Private capital has also begun to exploit the previously social and public services of women and the welfare state in what we might call socio-piracy.

(20) This protocol is from Alberta Survey. Jackson cites Cliff Kinzel (1992), "The Alberta Survey 1992: Sampling Report," University of Alberta: Population Research Laboratory.

(21) For example, sociologists usually argue that we can aggregate data because random errors will cancel each other out. Unfortunately, patriarchal assumptions are likely to build on each other in ways that invalidate this argument and thus doubly undermine the feminist project.

(22) I see feminist analysis as an approach to solving the gap within sociology between relevant theoretical questions and banal empirical findings. One "solution" by Merton (1957), theories of the middle range, has dominated a major sociological paradigm for years, feeding the abstraction syndrome without solving important questions, generating new theories or making enough empirical breakthroughs. One symptom of the problem with this hypothesis-testing, measurement-oriented paradigm is that the only way new ideas could be created empirically is through serendipity, or learning from a mistake.  

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