Feminism in Sociology, Feminism as Sociology

Abstract

In 1974 the British Sociological Association (BSA) Annual Conference chose as its theme the issue of Sexual Divisions in Society. That conference produced two volumes of essays and began what became an extended discussion about the relationship of Sociology to feminism and of feminism to Sociology (Barker and Allen, 1976a, 1976b). The consensus of the essays published in the two volumes of papers from that 1974 conference was that Sociology was deficient in its attention to women and saturated with the assumption of the human as the male human, an assumption that, it was argued, also dominated other academic disciplines. From that BSA conference, the collected papers did much to challenge this taken-for-granted-view and set the scene for the emergence of a considerable volume of work about and by women. At that conference too, it was not just Sociology as an academic discipline that was challenged but also Sociology as a profession: a profession in which, it was argued, those all important networks of appointment, promotion and publication were dominated by men and male interests. Certainly, the empirical evidence for this assertion was considerable: there were women in the profession but their numbers were small. Even the most fervent denier of sexual discrimination would have difficulty in refusing to recognise at least a degree of exclusion. It is also worth pointing out here that those long gone days were days before the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), a book which proved to be one of the most important challenges to conventional, literal, understandings of gender since the eating of the forbidden fruit led Adam to realise that the categories of biological male and female existed.