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Feminist Sociology i The British Sociological Association is publishing a series of books to review the state of the discipline at the beginning of the millenium. New Horizons in Sociology also seeks to locate the contribution of British scholarship to the wider development of sociology. Sociology is taught in all the major institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom as well as throughout North America and the Europe of the former western bloc. Sociology is now establishing itself in the former eastern bloc. But it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that sociology moved from the fringes of UK academic life into the mainstream. British sociolo- gy has also provided a home for movements that have renewed and chal- lenged the discipline; the revival of academic Marxism, the renaissance in feminist theory, the rise of cultural studies, for example. Some of these developments have become sub-disciplines whilst yet others have chal- lenged the very basis of the sociological enterprise. Each has left their mark. Now therefore is a good time both to take stock and to scan the horizon, looking back and looking forward. Recent volumes include: Nationalism and Social Theory Gerard Delanty and Patrick O’Mahoney Interactionism Paul Atkinson and William Housley ii Feminist Sociology Sara Delamont iii © 2003 Sara Delamont First published 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, pho- tocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash - I New Delhi 110 - 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN:ISBN 0 07619725447619 5450 3 ISBN 0 7619 5451 1 Library of Congress Control Number Available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall iv contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Of silverbacks and tree houses vii Chapter 1 When the patriarchy gets worried 1 Chapter 2 Neither young, nor luscious, nor sycophantic: developments in feminist sociology, 1968–2002 13 Chapter 3 The new forms possible to women? The achievements of feminist sociology 35 Chapter 4 Organising the necessary work: the question(s) of method(s) 60 Chapter 5 Unconventional but seething: were there any founding mothers? 78 Chapter 6 The brotherhood of professors, males all: the founding fathers of sociology 96 Chapter 7 Simply invisible: feminist sociology and the malestream 115 Chapter 8 Making fictions of female destiny: postmodernism and postfeminism 136 Chapter 9 Prerogatives usurped? Conclusions 153 Appendix 1 A critique of the orthodox histories of sociology 155 Appendix 2 The autobiographical narratives 160 Bibliography 162 Index 188 v acknowledgements I am grateful to Robert Moore for encouraging me to write this book. Paul Atkinson has allowed me to rehearse all the ideas in here many times and as he has actually read Breaking Out he also understands them. Rosemary Bartle Jones and Karen Chivers word-processed this book for me, and I am very grateful. The ideas in this book have been clarified over thirty years of argument with women and men, from Margo Harding (then Galloway) in Edinburgh, and Lorna Duffin and Irene Jones in Leicester, to Teresa Rees and Amanda Coffey in Cardiff. I dedicate it to Ginnie Olesen who is always an inspiration. vi introduction of silverbacks and tree houses When struggling to write this book I wondered why I had asked to do so. On hearing about the series I wrote to the editor Robert Moore and asked who was writing the gender/feminism volume. In part this was to ensure that feminist, and gender issues were included in the series: the price of feminist inclusion is often eternal vigilance. Had I been told that volumes had already been commissioned on women and/or on feminism and/or on gender, I would have rejoiced and got on with other projects. When Robert Moore told me that he had yet to organise any book on gender or ‘women and men’ or feminism or queer theory or men’s studies I stepped forward and said I was available as an author if that would suit him, even though writing a book like this is a poisoned chalice. However, I did also want to write it, because I had finished an introductory textbook on gender in modern Britain (Delamont, 2001) and that had led me to revisit and rethink where I stood on a whole range of topics in feminist sociology which I had not been addressing since I had finished Knowledgeable Women (Delamont, 1989b). Robert Moore and I discussed how gender, feminism, queer theory, and the new men’s studies might or might not figure in the series, and settled on the structure and perspective of this book. I got the contract, cleared the desk (metaphorically) and started to write, to read and reread, and to think and rethink. Writing a book on feminist sociology is not a recipe for a quiet or an apolaustic life: only for serious struggle. There have been six problems. These dilemmas are not unique to me, of course: most are old favourites. I have confessed to each, and to my solution, below. They are: (1) demarcating feminist sociology from feminist perspectives in other disciplines; (2) distinguishing feminist sociology from the sociology of women and/or of gender; (3) dealing with the malestream of sociology; (4) the temptation of messy texts and fictions; (5) the fear of rejection by my sisters; (6) and the lure of detective stories. The biggest problem is the large, and rapidly expanding literature feminist sociology on feminism, on gender studies and on lesbian and gay studies. Not only is it hard to keep up with that literature (there were three collec- tions of feminist science studies published by one firm in 2001 and many many more in fields like cultural studies or literary criticism), there is also a definitional problem. How far is this work sociology? Take, for example, Ahmed et al.’s (2000) collection Transformations: Thinking through Feminism, which frames a book series of the same title. Is the book a contribution to sociology? Is the series? There are sociologists in the volume, but there are also scholars in other fields such as English and Philosophy. Oxford University Press have a series: Oxford Readings in Feminism Studies with 12 titles. There is no book on Feminism and Sociology, but many of the titles that do exist address themes central to sociology (the public and the private, science, race, cultural studies). A Glossary of Feminist Theory by Andermahr et al. (2000) is, similarly, a collaboration between two sociologists and a lit- erary theorist: is it sociology or not? Deciding to exclude feminist work because it is not primarily sociological seems petty, yet the book is for a British Sociological Association (BSA) series, and is meant to be about sociology. The distinction is not trivial. Much of the dispute in Allen and Howard’s (2000) collection is between political scientists (Hekman, 2000) and sociologists (Smith, 2000), and focuses on feminist ideas viii becoming troubled at disciplinary boundaries. Smith robustly attacks Hekman: ‘Susan Hekman’s interpretation of my work is so systemati- cally out to lunch it is difficult to write a response ... Apart from a lack of care and thought, what is she doing that leads to her systematic misreading?’ (2000: 59). Smith’s answer to her own robust and rhetorical question lies partly in disciplinary differences. ‘Speak for your own discipline, Susan’, she cautions. Sticking strictly to Sociology could involve leaving out many important and exciting ideas; even if we do not entirely follow the late Carl Couch’s (1997: 102) statement that ‘most sociologists are as dull as turnips’. Also, I have a weakness for straying into anthropology, my original discipline, while steering away from political science, philoso- phy, economics or psycho-analytic theory, where I feel alien. Some of the topics I have treated as sociological overlap with other disciplines. Domestic violence is perhaps the best example. This is a social problem that has been extensively researched by criminologists, and I have drawn on that discipline in my thinking about domestic violence. Distinguishing feminist sociology from the sociologies of women and/or of gender is a second problem. There are certainly anti-feminist writings on women and on gender, and there are publications on women and gender whose authors may not self-identify as feminists, or who may self-identify but are unrecognisable as feminists to anyone else. In the 1970s any sociological research on women or on gender was introduction potentially feminist because all the empirical areas were only just open- ing up, and so all the research done was mutually cited and integrated. In 2002 it is possible for a sociologist to do research on, for example, women and divorce, and not be feminist at all, not to cite feminist work, and not to be integrated with any feminist sociology. For this book I have charitably assumed that anyone who wrote about women or gender from a feminist perspective, loosely defined, in the period 1960–80 ‘counts’ as a feminist sociologist for this book. After 1980, I have narrowed the focus to include only those authors who have self- defined as feminist. A third dilemma turns on men: should I focus on sociological work by, on, and for women, or scrutinise the impact of feminist perspectives on malestream sociology and men’s responses to feminist sociology? There is no easy answer to this: the dilemma is central to Chapter 5.