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Dorothy E. Smith, Groundbreaker in Feminist Sociology, Dies at 95

Starting in the 1960s, she sought to re-center her discipline on the experiences of women, people of color and other marginalized groups.

By Clay Risen

Dorothy E. Smith, a feminist scholar and sociologist whose extensive criticism of her own field led her to establish groundbreaking theories and sub-disciplines that pushed sociology away from its foundations as a male-dominated, male-centered endeavor, died on June 3 at her home in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was 95.

Her son David said the cause was complications from a fall.

Dr. Smith, who spent most of her career at Canadian universities, was best known for her contributions to what is called standpoint theory. She argued that while conventional sociology claims to be the disinterested pursuit of objective truth, it is in fact encoded with ideologies that see the male experience as universal.

“As women, we have been living in an intellectual, cultural and political world, from whose making we had been almost entirely excluded and in which we had been recognized as no more than marginal voices,” she wrote in her first and best-known book, “The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology” (1987).

Sociology, she said, was not just a lens for viewing society but also a tool for ordering it, turning the events and facts of everyday life into administrative jargon (“single mother,” “special-needs child”), organized according to the needs of the male-centered world. Worse yet, all this was invisible, she maintained; what she called “relations of ruling” were taken as natural, because the only point of view on offer was the one defined by men.

She posited that a better, liberating alternative would be to reverse the focus of sociology. Rather than making people — in particular women, but also people of color, gay men and lesbians, anyone on the margins — the object of study, they should be the subject, with the sociologist focusing on the world around them as seen and experienced from their standpoint.

“She was critical of forms of investigation that study people, particularly people in marginalized circumstances, and make them the object of study, whereas if you kind of take the standpoint of people, you’re not looking at them, you’re looking around them,” Liza McCoy, a sociologist at the University of Calgary and a former student of Dr. Smith’s, said in a phone interview. “You’re looking at what are the conditions and the practices that create the conditions that they find themselves.”

Dr. Smith offered herself, a single working mother, as a case study. She explained what her home life was like, in all its messy complexities, then showed how certain seemingly neutral terms — “single parent,” for example — fed those lived experiences into a series of social assumptions and bureaucratic processes: how her children were taught in school, how policymakers treated people like her, and even how her colleagues viewed her.

“Starting with experience was what we knew how to do in the women’s movement,” she wrote in a biographical essay in 2004 . “Indeed we needed it because we came to see more and more clearly how the intellectual and cultural world we’d participated in had been put together from men’s standpoint.”

Dr. Smith called this approach “institutional ethnography,” and it has become a dominant mode of inquiry in feminist social science as well as outside academia, where community-based researchers use it to understand the relationship between a person’s everyday world and the organizing forces surrounding it, including schools, places of worship, the workplace and the police.

While she first applied her approach as a middle-class, educated, heterosexual mother and wrote about it in feminist terms, Dr. Smith saw it as a tool available to anyone marginalized by conventional sociology’s dominant forms of inquiry. And, indeed, subsequent scholars have used her methodology to study things as disparate as the lives of gay men and the way the police treat Black teenagers . It was, she said, “a sociology for people.”

Dorothy Edith Place was born on July 6, 1926, in Northallerton, a small town in northern England. Her father, Tom Place, was a timber merchant. Her mother, Dorothy Foster (Abraham) Place, was a university-trained chemist who as a young woman had been active in the women’s suffrage movement. She spent time in jail for breaking windows at Harrods department store in London, alongside Sylvia Pankhurst . When Ms. Place left the movement in the 1920s, her parents bought her a small farm, where she met her future husband.

Young Dorothy grew up amid a brilliant brood: Her brother Ullin became a renowned philosopher, while another brother, Milner , became a widely published poet. All three, as well as another brother, David, went to boarding school, though Dorothy’s education was primarily to prepare her for motherhood.

She resisted that path as much as she could. She took a two-year course in social work at the University of Birmingham, then moved to London, where she became active in Labour Party politics. She worked as a secretary for a publishing company. To widen her career opportunities, she applied to study at the London School of Economics. She was 25 when she was accepted.

She received a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955. Along the way she discovered Marxism and the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty , both of which would greatly affect her work; that same year she married an American, William Smith, who was studying in London on the G.I. Bill.

They both entered graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her doctorate, also in sociology, in 1963. She defended her dissertation nine months after giving birth to her second son. Around that time her husband abandoned the family.

With two children to raise alone, Dr. Smith took a temporary job lecturing in sociology at Berkeley. The only woman on a faculty of about 40, she was often ignored by her colleagues. That imbalance led her to wonder what effect the male dominance of a field, especially a social science, might have on the questions it asks and the methods it uses to answer them. It was the starting point of a nearly 60-year career.

She continued her inquiries during two years at the University of Essex, in Britain, and then at the University of British Columbia, where she arrived in 1968.

By then the women’s movement was in full swing, and she joined several colleagues in creating a women’s studies program at the university, only the second in Canada.

She moved in 1977 to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto, where she remained until her retirement, in 1996. Along with her son, she is survived by three grandchildren. Another son, Steven C. Smith, died in 2019.

Though she wrote extensively in academic journals, Dr. Smith did not publish her first full-length book until she was 60 years old. She wrote six more, including, with her friend and fellow sociologist Alison I. Griffith, “Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People,” which appeared last month.

She also kept up a lively presence on Twitter.

“Without using Google, what do you think the ‘E’ in my middle name stands for?” Dr. Smith asked on May 22 . “I have been told many times that I do not look like this name so I am testing a hypothesis.”

She revealed the answer four days later , adding, “Who knew you could find out so much personal information about me on Google? Pro tip, do not Google yourself! (Also do not Google me, it is mostly false information).”

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey." More about Clay Risen

Woman is a Rational Animal

Dorothy e. smith.

Feb 2, 2022 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Imagine you are riding a train in a rural stretch of countryside and look out the window. You see a Native American family: a woman, man, and their children standing by the river watching you pass them in the train. But how do you know that they are a family? Perhaps they are strangers who happened upon each other. How do you know they were looking at the train? They are too far away to really tell. If we simply consider our perspective to be a sole reality or objective reality, we will not only lose information from other perspectives, but lose information on the perspectives themselves. We lose the perspective the “family” themselves have to offer on the situation. We also lose the information of our position relative to the family, with us in the train and them by the river. To not consider their perspective nor acknowledge our perspective when drawing our conclusions is to eliminate and neglect their understanding of the situation, as well as the context of the situation, necessarily restricting our understanding of the situation and losing valuable insights as a result.

Fifty years ago, a sociologist named Dorothy E. Smith took such a train ride, which began to sow the creative seeds of a new field. But she would need one more inspiration before those seeds would ultimately sprout into the field of feminist standpoint theory, and that inspiration would come through her personal experience in academia.

Smith was born into a rural middle-class family in England. Her middle-class status and excellence in academics afforded her the privilege of completing her undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics, where she studied sociology and anthropology, and began her illustrious academic career. She would go on to complete her doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley by completing a PhD in sociology before continuing her career as a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where her experiences provided the inspiration for her theory that would ultimately become a new branch of sociological investigation: feminist standpoint theory.

Dorothy Smith at the Congress. Source: Flickr.com 2011

Smith’s time at UBC coincided with the Canadian Women’s Movement from the late 1960s through the 1970s. However, it was not the broader Women’s Movement that inspired her work on feminist standpoint theory, but rather a personal experience with one of her colleagues. Sociology was still a field dominated by male academics during Smith’s time at UBC. As a result, “mainstream” sociological research was conducted from the male perspective, which forced female academics such as Smith to think, write, and exist as a male while they were within the academic sphere. Such an uprooting and devaluation of one’s identity was extremely painful for many female academics, as it effectively required them to detach from their personal experience and perspective while in the professional sphere. Smith describes the pain that this oppression of female identity had on one of her friends and colleagues: “she would look in the mirror and she couldn’t see herself. . . she had lost her sense of who she was”. [1]

Smith’s experience of the marginalization of the female identity with academia, combined with her understanding of perspective, inspired in her the realization that all sociological investigation is conducted from the perspective of the sociologist: “sociology’s conceptual procedures, methods, and relevances, organize its subject matter from a determinate place in society. This critical disclosure is the basis of an alternative way of thinking sociology”. [2]

Sociology is organized from a perspective. Because it is necessarily organized from a

perspective, that perspective should be considered as a foundation of sociology. Smith formalized the idea of differing sociological perspectives or lenses in a concept called standpoint, which encapsulates the experiences of an individual and acknowledges their effect on the framing and conclusion of a sociological investigation. She contrasts her synthesis of feminist standpoint theory with sociology at the

time, emphasizing the idea that traditional sociological research does not consider differential perspectives mediated by differential experience: “traditional sociological research uncovers only the object of research as it stands by itself. Such a sociology hides the way those objects are constituted, constructed, and in actual concrete social relations in which the sociologist participates”. [3]

In the train metaphor, you represent a sociological group observing another, represented by the family. Your position in the train and the family’s position by the river are the sociological perspectives of two different groups, mediated by their unique experiences. Assuming that your perspective is correct and objective, and the family you perceive is indeed a family, is equivalent to a sociologist viewing investigation from their standpoint as objective and allowing their experience of the world to subsume the standpoints of all other parties; such a sociological investigation would lose all information about the investigator’s standpoint relative to the subject of study. Instead, by acknowledging one’s standpoint, the investigator avoids completely imposing their experience as an objective reality over other standpoints and can analyze how standpoints interact or behave relative to each other, weighing the experience and perspectives of each and allowing for a more complete investigation of the world. Though it is impossible to completely detach one’s experience to some extent in their interpretation of a phenomena, inclusion of the standpoint of all involved parties will allow later consumers of the analysis to form their own analysis on how perspective has influenced any conclusions reached. Smith’s ideas of standpoint are an acknowledgement that there are different perspectives, none of which is a true objective reality, and that considering perspectives of observation is an important component of studying sociological phenomena.

However, Smith argued that the lack of a truly objective standpoint doesn’t imply that standpoints are all equally informative in all situations. Such a stance is explored by Smith in her synthesis of feminist standpoint theory, grounded in the observation that “traditionally and as a matter of occupational practices

in our society, the governing conceptual mode is appropriated by men”. [4] Smith did not claim that the female standpoint is universally greater than that of the male standpoint, as she desired the acknowledgement of perspective and different standpoints during sociological research. However, she did recognize one set of sociological investigations where the utility of the female standpoint greatly exceeds that of the male: in the illumination and identification of the systems of oppression that work against women. Smith specifically drew attention to the idea of experience: “By taking a standpoint in our original and immediate knowledge of the world, sociologists can make their discipline’s socially organized properties first observable then problematic”. [5] Because marginalization of women is specifically experienced by women and not by men, women are better equipped to identify the presence, effects, and magnitude of impact that structures of oppression have on their lives and society: “the only way of knowing a socially constructed world is from within”. [6]

In a continuation of our train ride, suppose that you are observing the world from the train. You see that outside it is sunny, bright, and the view of the rural countryside is beautiful. But you are watching from the perspective of an air-conditioned train, so all you see is good weather, but from the perspective of the family, the outside may be exceptionally hot or humid and full of mosquitos, and you have no way of knowing. From an outside perspective, it can be nearly impossible to identify difficulties experienced by a group, but if an individual possesses the standpoint of that group, they can identify how they are marginalized because it is made obvious through their experience where certain systems of oppressions inhibit their ability, well-being, and humanity.

Despite all the insight that feminist standpoint theory has delivered, it is not without its criticisms. Contemporary standpoint theorists push back against the idea of a universal female experience, claiming

that “different cultural contexts and political agendas may cast a very different light on both the ‘idols’ and the ‘enemies’ of knowledge as they have been characteristically typed in western feminist epistemology” [7] . This highlights an interesting parallel in the strengths and weaknesses of feminist standpoint theory: differences between female and male experience allow for the female standpoint to identify things that the male standpoint can’t, but differences in other factors such as race and class can further segment female experience into finer and finer subsets of experience.

The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology by Dorothy E. Smith. Source: Amazon.com

An example of finer bifurcation of experience is the difference in treatment of female African American sociologists and female European American sociologists at the start of the 20th century. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were female European American sociologists who founded Hull-House, a social aid settlement house that established them as the “leaders of a national social movement”. [8] Hull-House’s prestige was such that even the academic powerhouse the University of Chicago “was strongly motivated to establish a tie with Hull House”. [9] Clearly, the work of Addams and Starr received respect and recognition, as they were considered the undisputed leaders of their field and motivated the primarily male-run University of Chicago to desire a collaboration. However, the same could not be said to the same extent for their African American counterparts. At the Atlanta University conference, the men and women were separated at the conference, resulting in the minimization and trivialization of the work of female African American sociologists: “separating the women from the men at the second conference led to separating women’s concerns from the main conference and did not always give the women’s interests the same amount of critical attention”. [10] While the male-run University of Chicago recognized the merit of work done by Addams and Starr, the male-run Atlanta University Conference did not recognize female African American sociologists’ contributions to the same extent and marginalized them in a segregated conference. In this example, though they are all female, there is a clear difference in experience between European American and African American female sociologists, bifurcated by race. In such a scenario, it can be argued that feminist standpoint theory loses validity, as two groups have very different experiences despite them both being female.

This criticism leads to an extension of the notion of standpoint beyond that of simply male and female, allowing it to consider other separations in experience mediated by race, class or gender. This extension is a powerful tool, as it generalizes a core idea in feminist standpoint theory: marginalized standpoints with experiences of oppression are best equipped to identify systems of oppression that act on them. Standpoint theory informs a philosophy of improvement for society: a philosophy that encourages people to listen to marginalized individuals to gain knowledge about systems of oppression that are not immediately apparent to those who do not possess personal experiences of the marginalization. It promotes a philosophy that grants credibility to the oppressed and gives them a voice so that we may begin to improve our society.

The lasting impact of feminist standpoint theory, and its generation to standpoint in general, has made Smith one of the most influential sociologists. She is recognized for her contributions to sociology with many awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology, the Outstanding Contribution Award from the Canadian Sociological Association and Canadian Anthropological Association, as well as the John Porter Award, cementing her legacy as one of the most groundbreaking sociological theorists in history. However, it’s worth noting that Smith did not develop her ideas of feminist standpoint theory in a vacuum, as her works often interacted with ideas from fellow researcher Sandra Harding, who worked before and during the same time to develop similar ideas of standpoint.

Standpoint theory maintains its relevance today as a lens through which we may first observe then begin to resolve modern examples of marginalization and inequality. For example, as more women in recent years have spoken out against underrepresentation in fields such as engineering, law, and finance, they’ve drawn attention to this problem and led to the creation of initiatives in both education and industry to help resolve this injustice. As more women speak out against unfair wage practices and the so-called “glass ceiling”, compensation practices across all industries are forced to become more transparent and equitable, marking the start of improvement in this area. Injustice remains across the world, and standpoint theory remains a powerful philosophy to encourage us to hear the voices of oppressed peoples, so that we may destroy the systems of oppression and institutions of inequality that remain in our society as we strive to continue progressing towards greater equality.

About the Author:

Patrick is a third year undergraduate studying quantitative biology at the University of Chicago. In this free time Patrick enjoys playing tennis, poker, and reading.

References:

Featured Image : Dorothy E. Smith. Source: University of Toronto 2019

Carroll, William K. 2010. “‘You Are Here’: an interview with Dorothy E. Smith.” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 6(2):9-37

Lemert, C. C. (2010).  Social theory: The multicultural and classic readings  (4th ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Smith, Dorothy. 1974. “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” Sociological Inquiry. 44(1): 7-13.

Harding, S. G. (1987). Feminism and Methodology : Social Science Issues. Indiana University Press.

Jaggar, Alison M. & Bordo, Susan (eds.) (1989).  Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing . Rutgers University Press.

Deegan, M. J. (2005). Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 . Transaction Publishers.

Wilson, F. R. (2006). The segregated scholars: Black social scientists and the creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890-1950 . University of Virginia Press.

[1] Carroll, 18

[2] Lemert, 21

[3] Harding, 84

[4] Smith, 5

[5] Lemert, 24

[6] Lemert, 21

[7] Jaggar & Bordo, 258

[8] Deegan, 40

[9] Deegan, 37-38

[10] Wilson, 96

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Dorothy Smith: History & Feminist theory

• Dorothy Smith: History & Feminist…
• Born on July 6, 1926 in Northallerton Yorkshire England to Tom and Dorothy Place and her three brothers.

The History

• Dorothy Edith Smith is a Canadian sociologist with a research interest in sociology and many other disciplines, including women’s studies, psychology, educational studies, and sub-fields of sociology, including feminist theory, family studies, and methodology. She also founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist Standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
• Dorothy was born in England; it was hard to find a job where she lived at the current time. So she had a variety of positions, she ended up doing secretarial work in the book publishing industry until she was fed up and tried to get into publishing, but it was a no for girls at the time. She eventually went to university and earned a degree in sociology.
• When she came to the united states to go to graduate school, she met her husband, and gotten married with and had two children while getting her doctorate. She eventually started teaching Sociology and was the only woman teaching in a faculty of forty-four. In her intellectual life, there were three central moments: One was going to The London School Of Economics and becoming fascinated with sociology.2nd was the second was a course given by Tamotsu Shibutani at Berkeley on George Herbert Mead which laid the groundwork for later deep involvement with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty lastly was the women’s movement.
• With Dorothy’s most significant life change, she had decided that the women’s movement was for her. It led her to strange paths, and sociology was what she learned through practice. She taught at the University of British Columbia and taught in one of the first women’s studies courses. She started with four other women, and there was no way of books or materials to teach, so she had to make it up.
• He was influenced by Karl Marx. His work became very important to her in many ways, partly because of the politics, but much more so as a method of thinking that helped her develop sociology for women and what now thought of as sociology for people.
• She came to Toronto to teach sociology at an Ontario institute for studies. Where she had met another feminist, Margrit Eichler, and Mary O’Brien OISE was progressive in its view of women, the sociologists were all feminist students, and this is when she wrote sociology for women. She then published a paper about developing sociology for women/people with the idea of ‘beginning in the standpoint of a housewife and mother in the actualities of her everyday world and investigation of the social gain the convert actualities of every day and every day doing things.’
• Her first formulation was “Women’s perspective as a radical critique of sociology”. She had difficulty writing this before because she had trouble recognizing her authority to speak because of our male-dominated society. Eventually, she wrote for the women.
• She wrote and published many papers after them, one most recognized as Feminism and marxism: a place to begin, a way to go. Marxist Feminism is a sub-type of  Feminist theory  that focuses on the dismantling of capitalism to liberate women. Marxist Feminism states that private property, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion, and ultimately unhealthy social relations between men and women, is the root of women’s oppression in the current social context.

Best Known For

• Transformation of sociology and feminist standpoint theory, to include race, class, and gender. Standpoint theory: One of the questions that Smith addresses is “How would sociology look from a woman’s standpoint?” One of her main concerns is to critique mainstream sociology that she views as implicitly or explicitly adopting a male-centred approach that supports the governing conceptual mode. For Smith, “All knowledge is knowledge from a particular standpoint, and what which has been claimed as objective knowledge of society conceals a male bias.”

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Bibliographic information

Module 1: Foundations of Sociology

Reading: feminist theory.

Figure 1. Over the years, feminist demands have changed. First-wave feminists fought for basic citizenship rights, such as the right to vote, while third wave feminists are concerned with more complex social movements, like post-structuralism.

From the early work of women sociologists like Harriet Martineau, feminist sociology has focused on the power relationships and inequalities between women and men. How can the conditions of inequality faced by women be addressed? As Harriet Martineau put it in  Society in America (1837):

All women should inform themselves of the condition of their sex, and of their own position. It must necessarily follow that the noblest of them will, sooner or later, put forth a moral power which shall prostrate cant [hypocracy], and burst asunder the bonds (silken to some but cold iron to others) of feudal prejudice and usages. In the meantime is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race? If so, what is the ground of this limitation?

Feminist sociology focuses on analyzing the grounds of the limitations faced by women when they claim the right to equality with men.

Inequality between the genders is a phenomenon that goes back at least 4,000 years (Lerner 1986). Although the forms and ways in which it has been practiced differ between cultures and change significantly through history, its persistence has led to the formulation of the concept of patriarchy. Patriarchy refers to a set of institutional structures (like property rights, access to positions of power, relationship to sources of income) that are based on the belief that men and women are dichotomous and unequal categories. Key to patriarchy is what might be called the dominant gender ideology toward sexual differences: the assumption that physiological sex differences between males and females are related to differences in their character, behavior, and ability (i.e., their gender). These differences are used to justify a gendered division of social roles and inequality in access to rewards, positions of power, and privilege. The question that feminists ask therefore is: How does this distinction between male and female, and the attribution of different qualities to each, serve to organize our institutions (e.g., the family, law, the occupational structure, religious institutions, the division between public and private) and to perpetuate inequality between the sexes?

Feminism is a distinct type of critical sociology. There are considerable differences between types of feminism, however; for example, the differences often attributed to the first wave of feminism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second wave of feminism from the 1950s to the 1970s, and the third wave of feminism from the 1980s onward.

At the turn of the century, the first wave of feminism focused on official, political inequalities and fought for women’s suffrage. In the 1960s, the second wave feminism, also known as the women’s liberation movement, turned its attention to a broader range of inequalities, including those in the workplace, the family, and reproductive rights. Currently, a third wave of feminism is criticizing the fact that the first two waves of feminism were dominated by white women from advanced capitalist societies. This movement emphasizes diversity and change, and focuses on concepts such as globalization, post-colonialism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Contemporary feminist thought tends to dismiss generalizations about sex and gender (e.g., women are naturally more nurturing) and to emphasize the importance of intersections within identity (e.g., race and gender). The feminist perspective also recognizes that women who suffer from oppression due to race, in addition to the oppression they suffer for being women, may find themselves in a double bind. The relationship between feminism and race was largely overlooked until the second wave of feminists produced literature on the topic of black feminism. This topic has received much more attention from third wave scholars and activists.

Despite the variations between different types of feminist approaches, there are four characteristics that are common to the feminist perspective:

• Gender is a central focus or subject matter of the perspective.
• Gender relations are viewed as a problem: the site of social inequities, strains, and contradictions.
• Gender relations are not immutable: they are sociological and historical in nature, subject to change and progress.
• Feminism is about an emancipatory commitment to change: the conditions of life that are oppressive for women need to be transformed.

One of the keen sociological insights that emerged with the feminist perspective in sociology is that “the personal is political.” Many of the most immediate and fundamental experiences of social life—from childbirth to who washes the dishes to the experience of sexual violence—had simply been invisible or regarded as unimportant politically or socially. Dorothy Smith’s development of standpoint theory was a key innovation in sociology that enabled these issues to be seen and addressed in a systematic way (Smith 1977). She recognized from the consciousness-raising exercises and encounter groups initiated by feminists in the 1960s and 1970s that many of the immediate concerns expressed by women about their personal lives had a commonality of themes. These themes were nevertheless difficult to articulate in sociological terms let alone in the language of politics or law.

Part of the issue was sociology itself. Smith argued that instead of beginning sociological analysis from the abstract point of view of institutions or systems, women’s lives could be more effectively examined if one began from the “actualities” of their lived experience in the immediate local settings of “everyday/everynight” life. She asked, What are the common features of women’s everyday lives? From this standpoint, Smith observed that women’s position in modern society is acutely divided by the experience of dual consciousness. Every day women crossed a tangible dividing line when they went from the “particularizing work in relation to children, spouse, and household” to the institutional world of text-mediated, abstract concerns at work, or in their dealings with schools, medical systems, or government bureaucracies. In the abstract world of institutional life, the actualities of local consciousness and lived life are “obliterated” (Smith 1977). While the standpoint of women is grounded in bodily, localized, “here and now” relationships between people, due to their obligations in the domestic sphere, society is organized through “relations of ruling,” which translate the substance of actual lived experiences into abstract bureaucratic categories. Power and rule in society, especially the power and rule that constrain and coordinate the lives of women, operate through a problematic “move into transcendence” that provides accounts of social life as if it were possible to stand outside of it. Smith argued that the abstract concepts of sociology, at least in the way that it was taught at the time, only contributed to the problem.

Feminism and Heterosexism

The feminist perspective also criticizes exclusive understandings of sexuality, such as heterosexism. Heterosexism is a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination that favor male-female sexuality and relationships. At one point, heterosexual marriage was the only lawful union between two people that was recognized and given full benefits in the United States. This situated homosexual couples at a disadvantage, and made them ineligible for many of the government or employer-provided benefits afforded heterosexual married couples. However, heterosexism can extend far beyond government validation, as it describes a set of paradigms and institutionalized beliefs that systematically disadvantage anyone who does not fit into a normative mold. Like racism, heterosexism can operate on an institutional level (e.g., through government) and at an individual level (i.e., in face-to-face interactions). Feminist critiques of heterosexism thus align with queer theory and the ideas of Michel Foucault, who studied the relationship between power and sexuality.

Feminism and Multiculturalism

Though the feminist perspective focuses on diversity and liberation, it has been accused of being incompatible with multiculturalist policy. Multiculturalism aims to allow distinct cultures to reside together, either as distinct enclaves within ostensively Western societies, or as separate societies with national borders. One possible consequence of multiculturalism is that certain religious or traditional practices, that might disadvantage or oppress women, might be tolerated on the grounds of cultural sensitivity. From the Feminist perspective, such practices are objectionable to human rights and ought to be criminalized on those grounds. However, from a multiculturalist perspective, such traditions must be respected even if they seem to directly violate ideas about freedom or liberty. Controversies about this have arisen with both arranged marriages and female genital mutilation.

standpoint theory:

theory that feminist social science should be practiced from the standpoint of women

• Feminist Theory. Provided by : Khan Academy. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHPOLSywdi0 . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
• Feminist Theory. Authored by : William Little. Provided by : BC Campus. Located at : https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology/chapter/chapter1-an-introduction-to-sociology/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• The Feminist Perspective. Provided by : Boundless. Located at : https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/412/sociology-1/theoretical-perspectives-in-sociology-24/the-feminist-perspective-158-7930/ . Project : Boundless Sociology. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Standpoint theory definition. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_feminism . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
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Dorothy Edith Smith: History & Feminist theory

Going through the pages of history explains and gives a brief story of how kings won over other. more stories explain kings as a conqueror, more than those in which tells queen as winners; the queen was not there in even the stories as winners. Then comes the trend changer: the queen who fought bravely and even died on a battlefield: Rani Laxmibai is among one of the greatest queens who fought bravely on a battlefield against the colonial rulers. Also, the American Revolution highlights the women as the substitute of men: when men were busy on the field while fighting against Britishers. They also took participate in the fight for freedom, changing the thoughts of misogynists.

Above theory comprising the true facts, throws light on the struggle done by women, in order to achieve their reputation as a respected civilian in society. Yet by analyzing today’s census, a very clear picture of the failure of that struggle can be seen. Women as legends got to succeed in their goal on that day, the day which had separated their breath from them but they ultimately remained as the failure in removing the misogynist beliefs.

Dorothy Edith Smith: Biography

Dorothy Edith Smith  was born on July 6, 1926. She was a great sociologist in Canada. She was interested in the research work and like to work as researchers with research interests in a variety of disciplines. Their subjects include women’s studies, psychology, and educational studies. She also remained working as the sociologist on some great subjects, such as feminist theory, family studies and also on methodologies. Dorothy Smith explained the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.

She highlights the rude behavior of society towards a woman. She asked the society to realize her responsibilities, which are somehow invisible but are present and are as important as those of man. According to her, a woman has to continuously do the housework which is not credited similar to men.  She (woman) also work without salary at home and still is not paid with sufficient respect. They are ill-treated with disrespect in most of the uneducated society.

A society believe in not educating a girl as, the believed, that an educated girl can question on the dominance of male: according to a society; besides the low standard and no respect as paid to women, they are not even entitled to those rights which allows her to raise questions on the exploitation, which is experienced by her. Being a fundamental right, the right to education imposes a restriction on every family to educate their daughter but as the condition of society is clearly in front of us, thus it could be claimed that feminist is just a theory which had been  put forward in front of society, thereafter remained buried under the pages of books and had never affected the society, in such a way that may bring a change.

Still, there were such women which proved themselves as a hero of the society and had never bowed in front of the social-misogynist views.

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