Breaking out again In the early 1980s feminist social science remained highly positivist in its ideas about the research process. Consequently, the original Breaking Out had a signal impact on ideas about feminist research. Its authors, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, were concerned to emphasize that most aspects of positivism were antithetical to feminist principles and practice, and also that most qualitative styles of research tended to be as positivist as more scientistic and quantitative ones. In the first edition Liz Stanley and Sue Wise argued that academic feminists, should be less concerned with the choice of method and techniques and much more concerned with the epistemological bases and claims of different styles of feminist research. In making these arguments they challenged large areas of existing feminist social theory, including ideas about socialization and the hegemony of structural approaches which denied the theoretical and political importance of everyday practice and experience. This new edition provides an introductory discussion of the sociological, political and academic context in which Breaking Out was first written, and reviews its reception among feminist scholars. A new concluding section considers recent development in feminist social thought, including essentialism, deconstructionism and the epistemologies of the oppressed. In this section the authors offer a new thesis for the feminist agenda, based on their notion of fractured foundationalism. Breaking Out Again thus provides a context to current debates concerning the feminist research process as well as its own new perspective. As a refreshing contribution to feminist social theory, it will be widely read by students in women’s studies and sociology. Liz Stanley is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, and Sue Wise is Lecturer in Applied Social Science at the University of Lancaster. Also available from Routledge Feminist praxis Research, theory and epistemology in feminist sociology Edited by Liz Stanley Doing Feminist Research Helen Roberts Partial visions Feminism and utopianism in the 1970s Angelika Bammer Getting smart Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern Patti Lather Feminism and the contradictions of oppression Caroline Ramazanoglu Breaking out again Feminist ontology and epistemology Liz Stanley and Sue Wise London and New York First published as Breaking Out in 1983 by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. This second edition first published in 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1983, 1993 Liz Stanley and Sue Wise All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stanley, Liz, 1947– Breaking out again: feminist ontology and epistemology/Liz Stanley and Sue Wise. —2nd rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Feminism. 2. Women—Psychology. 3. Women in politics. 4. Women’s studies. I. Wise, Sue, 1953– . II. Title. HQ1154.S642 1993 305.42—dc20 92–28809 CIP ISBN 0-415-07270-0 (hbk) 0-415-07271-9 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-20161-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20164-7 (Glassbook Format) This book is dedicated to Dale Spender and Pippa Brewster, midwives of the original Breaking Out, and to Gill Davies, a central figure in establishing British feminist publishing. Contents Acknowledgements: second edition ix Introduction to the second edition 1 Introduction to the first edition 16 One Sunday afternoon…16 … And its consequences 21 1 Feminism and the social sciences 26 Key themes in the feminist critique 27 Ripping-off the women’s movement? 36 Feminist criticisms: a brief critique 40 2 Feminist theory 45 Some current feminist writing (or ‘how to prove a point’) 48 Theory, experience and research 58 Feminism, ‘our way’ 61 3 Beyond the personal? 66 The personal is the political—or is it? 67 Experience versus ‘the family’ 74 Theory and experience 88 4 Socialization and gender role: a sort of critique 92 ‘The family’, socialization and gender role 93 Reflexivity and ‘role’ 103 Feminist theory of ‘the family’ as a structural theory 110 viii Breaking out again 5 Feminist consciousness 119 Feminist consciousness and consciousness- raising 120 Sexism and changing consciousness 124 Feminism and ‘the other’ 134 6 The research process 150 Positivism and naturalism 151 Involvement and emotion 159 Feminist social science research 163 7 ‘And so, dear reader…’ 173 Research and us 175 Sitting inside the circle… 180 … And breaking out 182 8 Breaking out again: afterword 186 Introduction 186 ‘Feminist method’ and feminist epistemology 188 A feminist ontology: theorizing body, mind and emotion 194 A feminist ethic 200 ‘Women’ and deconstructionism 204 Essentialism and constructionism 208 Representation and the question of history 216 Difference and ‘différance’ 219 Epistemologies of the oppressed 222 Some concluding thoughts 228 References and further reading 234 Name index 247 Subject index 250 Acknowledgements Second edition Judith Aldridge, Bogusia Temple and Lisa Adkins read an earlier draft of the introduction and afterword to this second edition. We are grateful to them for their comments and criticisms. Celia Lury’s review of Feminist Praxis nudged us in the direction of writing about postmodernism—many thanks to her. We would also like to thank the participants in the Feminist Thought seminar in the Sociology Department at the University of Manchester—Jo Bird, Tom Cockburn, Heather Elliott, Darlene Emerson, Miriam Fitzsimons, Ruth Jamieson, Liz Jones, Merja Kapanen, Rebecca Key, Rosemary Kidd, Debbie Lowe, Laila Luumi, Brigid Moss, Karen Page, Maarit Ritvanen, Mika Saikkonen, Bogusia Temple and Verena Wilde—for their useful responses to the draft of the afterword and also to the recommended reading which surrounds it. Furry thank yous all round to St Thomas Aquinas, Precious Mackenzie, Jessye Norman, Mrs Whisky Rochester, Alfred Schutz and Tiny Stray. Introduction to the second edition When this book was first published, in 1983, it joined two other Routledge women’s studies1 texts dealing with what were then called the ‘methodological’ aspects of feminist social science. These were the collections edited by Helen Roberts (1981), Doing Feminist Research, and by Gloria Bowles and Renate D.Klein (1983), Theories of Women’s Studies. All three books were important in Britain for a number of years, providing the basic feminist references on methodological topics and issues. Breaking Out, then sub-titled ‘Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research’, continues to be widely cited and used, in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, India, New Zealand, the USA and other parts of the world, in books, journal articles and in theses, and in spite of having gone out of print in 1989. Breaking Out was written for reasons that related closely to the organization and preoccupations of feminist social science of the time. Its origins lay in a journal article, ‘Feminist consciousness, feminist research and experiences of sexism’ (Stanley and Wise, 1979). This analytically used our experience of receiving hundreds of obscene telephone calls from men while our home phone was the contact number for a lesbian group through the 1970s; it did so in order to discuss the theory, counterposed and challenged by the actuality, of feminist research. It emphasized that, for academic feminists, ‘research’ and ‘life’ should be neither compartmentalized nor analytically unpacked using separate intellectual means. It also argued that the precise content of ‘women’s oppression’ varies for different women, for it is decidedly not the same for lesbian women like us as compared with heterosexual women, and also that ‘oppression’ encompasses a variety of means by which women fight back, for in some times, places and circumstances women 2 Breaking out again have relative power as well as in others having relatively less. In it we argued that: (1) ‘feminist research’ should become more sophisticated and less naively positivist than it mostly was at the time; (2) models of research are precisely that, and feminist social science needed empirically grounded investigations of the means by which research knowledge is produced, rather than its own version of ‘methodological cookbooks’ which prescribe rules for how to do research ‘correctly’; (3) styles of sociology concerned with ‘experience’, with everyday life and the means by which people go about analysing and understanding it, were worth closer, more sympathetic consideration by feminist social scientists; and (4) ‘women’s oppressions’ are complexly varied and need equally complex means of analysing and understanding them. We were then commissioned to write a book exploring similar themes. The result was submitted in 1982 to its intended publisher, Pergamon. Organizational changes and the transfer of our manuscript to New York meant that it was read in relation to very different ideas about what ‘academic feminism’ should look like, for our original editor had liked the manuscript—but