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Feminism & Darwinian Revival
Betty Friedan
Through decades of social activism, strategic
thinking and powerful writing, Friedan is one
of contemporary society's most effective
leaders.
Betty Friedan
Born on February 14, 1921 and died on
February 14,2006 (on her 85th birthday, at
her home in Washington)
Born and grew up in Illinois
Felt marginalized because she was Jewish
in the Mid West
Background
Her father worked as a button seller, and later
owned a jewelry shop. Her mother quit a job as
a women's page editor for a newspaper when
she became pregnant with Betty in order to
become a housewife. Betty realized how
frustrated her mother had been as a housewife
when her mother took over the family shop after
Betty's father fell ill. Her mother's new life
outside the home seemed to be much more
satisfying.
Her Life
 Went to Smith College, where she felt
completely liberated. She was a brilliant student
who graduated summa cum laude in 1942.
 She trained as a psychologist but never
pursued a career in the field. When she wrote
"The Feminine Mystique," she was a suburban
housewife and mother who enhanced her
husband's income by writing freelance articles
for women's magazines.
Her Experiences
 She became a journalist during World War II
when there were more positions available
because the male journalists were off at war. As
a reporter for the Workers' Press in New York,
she saw that women were paid a small part of
what men were paid and were then fired when
the men returned from war. And, when Betty
Friedan asked for maternity leave she too was
fired. No wonder she felt so strongly bout these
issues…
The Feminine Mystique
 In 1963, Feminine Mystique became an
immediate best-seller (over one million
sold)
 3 years later, she founded NOW
(National Organization for Women)
 She was a member of the National
Women's Political Caucus,a founder of
the National Association for the Repeal
of Abortion Laws, and a key leader in
the struggle for passage of the Equal
Rights Amendment
The Feminine Mystique
“With its impassioned yet clear-eyed
analysis of the issues that affected
women's lives in the decades after World
War II — including enforced domesticity,
limited career prospects and, as
chronicled in later editions, the campaign
for legalized abortion-"The Feminine
Mystique" is widely regarded as one of the
most influential nonfiction books of the
20th century”
“The Problem That Has No Name”
 “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many
years in the minds of American women, It was a
strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a
yearning that women suffered in the middle of
the twentieth century in the United States. Each
suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she
made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched
slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches
with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and
Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she
was afraid to ask even of herself the silent
question - "Is this all?”.”
The problem that has no name…
 The “problem that has no name”-the feeling that raising a
husband, children, and home is not enough, women
want more!
 There occupation back then was HOUSEWIFE, so many
women wanted careers
 During the 1950’s and 1960’s if women felt upset or
depressed they blamed it on themselves or their
marriage, they went to the doctors saying I am so
ashamed but I am not happy with my life.
 The Doctors did not even have a name for this. So
many women, felt like this but most were too ashamed to
talk about it too each other. “For over 15 years women
found this problem harder to talk about than sex!”
 Women’s goals were to get married, have children (lots
of them), and have a nice home.
"The problem that has no name — which
is simply the fact that American women
are kept from growing to their full human
capacities — is taking a far greater toll on
the physical and mental health of our
country than any known disease."
Betty Friedan broke down
barriers and influenced many
women just by talking about
these issues in her book. She
was very influential!!! What
are some of the ways we can
tell these barriers have been
broken?
Nancy Chodorow
Nancy Chodorow
Born January 20, 1944 in New York, NY
Nancy Chodorow is an interdisciplinary
scholar that describes herself as “a self
defined interpretive or even humanistic
psychoanalytic sociologist and
psychoanalytic feminist.”
She made important contributions to the
study of gender relations and family.
Family
Her father, Marvin, was a professor of
applied physics. She married Michael
Reich, a professor of economics had two
children with him, Rachel and Gabriel, and
was separated from him in 1977
Education
She received her BA from Radcliffe
College. She was trained by Beatrice and
John W.M. Whiting in a culture and
personality anthropology that, in
retrospect, could be considered
prefeminist, but was, at the time, gender
and generation sensitive. Chodorow
received her PhD from Brandeis University
in 1975
She is widely considered the leading
psychoanalytic feminist theorist and is a
member of the International
Psychoanalytical Association, often
speaking at its Congresses.
Career
She spent many years as a professor in
the departments of sociology and clinical
psychology at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Influential
"It is difficult to imagine the shape that
feminist literary criticism might have taken
in the last twenty years without the
enabling influence of The Reproduction of
Mothering. The importance of Chodorow's
work cannot be overestimated."--Marianne
Hirsch, author of The Mother/Daughter
Plot
Chodorow has extensively pursued
the question of why women desire
motherhood?
What are the traits of a dad?
What are the traits of a Mom?
Gender Personality and the Reproduction
of Mothering
Girls and boys are “taught” appropriate
behaviors and learn appropriate feelings,
but how do women become mothers?
She says biologics and instinct do not
justify why women become mothers.
Women’s mothering includes the
capacities for its own reproduction.
Accounts of socialization and repetition
help to explain the ideologies about
gender roles.
Gender and Reproduction
 “Psychoanalysts argue that personality both results from
and consists in the ways a child appropriates,
internalizes, and organizes early experiences in their
family-…”
 This explains why how you are raised has something to
do with the way you will act, usually depending on
gender.
 There is an assumption that women’s destiny includes
primary parenting, but in reality most psychoanalysts say
this job is laid out for both genders.
 But to explain why women mothers are more likely to
identify with the role of primary care giver is they identify
at an early age by seeing their mother as the primary
care giver and see that as their role in the future.
 “As a result of being parented by a woman,
women are more likely than men to seek to
be mothers…”
 The early experience and pre-Oedipal
relationship differ for boys and girls.
 Girls feel very close to their mothers during
childhood and are more concerned with
childhood issues in relation to their mother
and a sense of self involved in these issues.
But boys do not feel this way, they feel
“opposite of their mother”.
 “So the relational basis is extended in
women, and inhibited in men.”
Oedipal Triangle
“Women’s heterosexuality is triangular and
requires a third person—a child– for
structural and emotional completion”
Men do not define themselves by
relationships.
The Oedipus Complex pushes boys and
girls in the direction of extra-familial
heterosexual relationships, making a step
towards the “reproduction of parenting”.
Through the relationship between man and
women, contradiction is necessary so the
women will not be satisfied with just her
husband alone, and will seek relations to
children.
Men have a lack of emotional ability and
women have a less-exclusive heterosexual
commitment and this is used to ensure
women’s mothering.
Cycle of Motherhood
 This creates the definition of women’s mothering
that just spreads the message to their daughters
and the opposite message to their sons, and the
cycle is repeated.
 The fact that women are in the domestic sphere,
gives males dominance.
 Women as wives and mothers, reproduce the
family as a male dominated society. This allows
the men to work in non-familial jobs and not
parent.
 And women turn their energies to nurturing and
caring for children.
To sum it all up…
 “Women in their domestic role reproduce men
and children physically, psychologically and
emotionally. Women in their domestic role as
house workers reconstitute themselves
physically on a daily basis and reproduce
themselves as mothers, emotionally and
psychologically, in the next generation. They
thus contribute to the perpetuation of their own
social roles and position in the hierarchy of
gender.”
Discussion Questions
As you read the last quote, “They thus
contribute to the perpetuation of their own
social roles and position in the hierarchy of
gender”, can you think of ways women
could still be said to do this in today’s
society?
Dorothy E. Smith
The Conceptual Practices of Power
A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge
Dorothy E. Smith
Biographical Information
 Canadian Sociologist
 Born 1926 in Great Britain.
 She earned her Bachelor’s degree from the London School
of Economics in 1955 and her doctorate from University of
California, Berkeley, in 1963, she also returned to lecture
there.
 Eventually moved to North America in the late 1960s. She
chose Canada over the United States because she was
opposed to the Vietnam War.
 She has had immense impacts on sociology and many other
disciplines including women's studies, psychology, and
educational studies. Within sociology, she has influenced
feminist theory, family studies, and methodology.
For Smith’s brief autobiography, visit http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault/dorothy_smith.htm
Dorothy E. Smith
Major Works
 Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005)
 Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations
(1999)
 The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist
Sociology of Knowledge (1990)
 Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of
Ruling (1990)
 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist
Sociology (1987)
 Feminism and Marxism: A Place to Begin,
A Way to Go (1977)
Dorothy E. Smith
Feminist Standpoint Theory: a definition
Standpoint feminism emphasizes that feminist
social science should be practiced from the standpoint of
women.
 Therefore, women's experiences exist as the point of
departure, instead of men’s experiences
 Standpoint theory retains elements of Marxist historical
materialism for its central premise: knowledge develops
in a complicated and contradictory way from lived
experiences and social historical context.
Dorothy E. Smith
The Conceptual Practices of Power
A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge
From Marx she had learned not to be satisfied with treating
the conceptual as a given--rather to view “concepts and
categories as expressions of social relations and hence as
opening up a universe for exploration that is `present' in them
but not explicated.”
(Marie Campbell)
Dorothy E. Smith
Problems with Sociology
 Sociological thought has been established within
the “male social universe”
 The standpoint of women is not considered
equal to the standpoint of men
 Thus women are forced to think of
the world in concepts and terms of
men
Dorothy E. Smith
Relations of Ruling and Objectified Knowledge
“There are institutions through which we
[women] are ruled and through which
we…participate in ruling.” (page 319)
 Sociology as objective?
 Hegemony of methodology
Dorothy E. Smith
Women’s Exclusion from the Governing
Conceptual Mode
“Men have functioned as subjects in the mode of
governing; women have been anchored in the
local and particular phase of the bifurcated
world.”
 Gendered division of labor has perpetuated women’s
oppression
 Men have enjoyed the privilege of work that requires
“liberation from attending to needs in the concrete.”
 Women have historically been assigned to these
particular needs (sound familiar?)
 Marx’s concept of alienation is relevant here
Dorothy E. Smith
Knowing Society from Within
“Women’s standpoint…discredits sociology’s
claim to constitute an objective knowledge
independent of the sociologist’s situation.”
 SOLUTION: a reorganization of the relationship of
sociologists to the object of our knowledge and of our
problem. Involves first placing sociologists where we are
actually situated, and second, making our direct
embodied experience of the everyday world the
primary ground of our knowledge.
Dorothy E. Smith
Sociology as Structuring Relations Between
Subject and Object
“The constitution of an objective sociology as
an authoritative version of how things are is
done from a position in and as part of the
practices of ruling in our kind of society.”
 The persistence of the privilege relies upon a
substructure that has already been discredited and
deprived of authority to speak the voices of those
who know society differently.
 Example of the Indians outside of the train
Dorothy E. Smith
A Bifurcation of Consciousness
“Women’s situation in sociology discloses to
us a typical bifurcate structure with the
abstracted, conceptual practices on the one
hand and the concrete realizations…in the
other.”
 Failure of objectivity
 Inability of sociology to acknowledge
women’s world
Questions for discussion
Does objectivity exist?
Do you think sociology excludes women?
Lawrence H. Summers
Remarks at NBER Conference on
Diversifying the Science & Engineering
Workforce
Cambridge, Mass.
January 14, 2005
Just a little background…
 Born to a Jewish family in Connecticut on
November 30, 1954
 Secretary of the Treasury for the end of Clinton’s
term
 Served as the 27th President of Harvard
University from 2001-2006
 Created a lot of controversy and stir among
environmentalists, affirmative action advocates,
and feminists with his opinionated speeches
which ended his term as President and
shattered his once-esteemed reputation
Why are women under-represented
in the Science & Engineering
Workforce?
“high-powered job hypothesis”
“different availability of aptitude at the high
end”
“different socialization and patterns of
discrimination in a search”
“high-powered job hypothesis”
 High expectations set for them:
-single and without children
-around 80 hours a week in the office
-flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, basically
putting the job as top priority
-expected to remain in the job for the long run
-mind always focused on the tasks only concerned with the job,
even if not physically on the job
 It takes such a high level of commitment that a much higher
percentage of married men are more prepared for the job then
married women. Could this be due to Chodorow’s emphasis on
women’s duty to motherhood?
The Catch-22
• Is the society at fault for expecting such high
standards and commitment for top jobs?
• Summer’s inquires about the unfairness in
making women have to sacrifice more than men.
This goes back to Chodorow’s belief that women
feel compelled to mother.
• Does the elite job itself create those high
standards or are the standards and pressure
from the people what make the job so
prominent?
• Whichever the case, the women who make that
choice to take the job must be willing to make
sacrifices and commitments.
“different availability of aptitude at the high
end”
 There is a stereotypical pattern
of different human attributes
working in the field of science
and engineering with a lower
representation of women.
 In other words, small
differences in math or science
aptitude translate into a large
discrepancy at the intellectual
level needed to do world-class
science.
“different socialization and patterns of
discrimination in a search”
These are two theories that
Summer claims are prevalent,
yet invalid:
1. Socialization
2. Discrimination
1. Socialization
Summers believes there may be
some socialization that is a cause:
Kibbutz study
Then contradicts himself; nature
trumps nurture:
 “people naturally attribute things to
socialization that are in fact not
attributable to socialization […] and were
in fact due to more intrinsic human nature.”
“taste differences” between men and
women cannot be attributed to
socialization
 Separated twins studies
2. Discrimination
 Overt discrimination:
open and observable prejudice that is not
hidden, concealed, or secret (ex. in the Jim
Crow era where racism was more socially
acceptable in the south)
 Passive discrimination:
stereotyping not involving visible reaction or
active participation, may even be unconscious
(ex. employees who tend to hire employers who
think like them and are like them)
On Affirmative Action:
 “Fallacy of composition”: not half as many qualifies
scientists that are at the top ten schools like there should
be
 Theory of discrimination
“If it was really the case that everybody was
discriminating, there would be very substantial
opportunities for a limited number of people who
were not prepared to discriminate to assemble
remarkable departments of high quality people at
relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not
discriminating, because of what it would mean for
the pool that was available.”
Is the conscious effort to maintain
diversity justified?
“how many are there who have turned out to be
much better than the institutional norm who
wouldn’t have been found without a greater search.
And how many of them are plausible compromises
that aren’t unreasonable, and how many of them
are what the right-wing critics of all this suppose
represent clear abandonments of quality
standards.”
 Shaq metaphor in opposition
Five things to consider concerning
what the quality of marginal hires
are when major diversity efforts are
increased:
1. Citation analysis
2. Objective versus Subjective factors in
hiring
3. Search procedures dilemma
4. Financial incentives and support
for child care
5. Detriments of career interruptions
1. Citation analysis
2. Objective versus Subjective factors
in hiring:
 If objective, then the subjectivity that is
consistent with discrimination and a
disadvantage for minority groups will not be an
issue.
 If subjective, objectivity may “bias the
comparisons away from many attributes that
those who contribute to the diversity have: a
greater sense of collegiality, a greater sense of
institutional responsibility.”
 Ties in with Smith’s Feminist Standpoint Theory
concerning objectivity
3. Search procedures dilemma
 Extensive searches could possibly end up
finding minority group members who may have
been overlooked before.
 On the negative side, it could also make it hard
to hunt down certain people coming from
particular family situations that work to the
disadvantage of minority group members.
4. Financial incentives and support for
child care
5. Detriments of career interruptions
“I think the case is overwhelming for employers
trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who
respond’s to everybody else’s discrimination by
competing effectively to locate people who others
are discriminating against, or to provide different
compensation packages that will attract the people
who would otherwise have enormous difficulty
with child care.”
Discussion Question
What is an example of an institution or
workplace that we can relate to that uses
affirmative action? Do you think it is
reasonable for an institution to take into
account people’s backgrounds in order to
bring in diversity or only look at the
résumé objectively?
More Questions…
Have you ever personally
experienced academic discrimination
or tracking based on gender?
Statement of the American
Sociological Association Council
on the
Causes of Gender Differences in
Science and Math Career
Achievement:
Harvard’s Lawrence Summers and the
Ensuing Public Debate
February 28, 2005
ASA Strikes Back
 In opposition to Summer’s speech, ASA Council
believes that women do have the capability of
working in the field of science and engineering if
they are given the chance and an
accommodating environment.
 Bitter Professors at Harvard claimed that his
remarks inhibited their attempts to enlist top
women scholars.
 Compliant with Friedan’s belief that women are
inhibited from working to their maximum
potential
Nature versus Nurture
 Studies have shown that because our culture pigeonholes the roles
that each gender is supposed to fulfill, this causes “noticeable
differences in their interests and performances.”
 ASA against nature and biology having a part in gender differences
Come-back to Summers at the Conference:
“had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different
opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact
that it would have had different outcomes.”
 In the UK, girls’ have shown a higher level of academic versus boys
due to:
-better access to courses
-support from counselors
-better career prospects
-change in role models
So could this be due to something in the water over in Europe, or are
they just brought up and trained differently than in the US?
“Relatively fast social change and a consistent
pattern of female disadvantage in converting
individual ability into occupational success
imply the presence of important institutional
factors at work…policy changes can foster
behavioral changes that would remedy this
problem.”
Breaking the Barrier example
Continual Subordination
“Scientific correctness” explains:
-inequitable opportunities
-restrictions in their ability to have formal and
informal training
-lack of social and domestic supports
-still unsure about women’s competence so
there is less expectations for their ability to
perform
-pressures to conform to stereotypical behavior
and the media also is a negative influence
Discussion Questions
Do you believe that it is this “scientific
correctness” which inhibits females from
being able to work at their full potential or
do you agree with Summer’s concept that
women are inherently incapable of doing
that type of work?
Fighting Back
February 9th of just this year a new
President took the place of Harvard
University following Summer’s dismissal.
How ironic that a woman stepped up to the
plate?
A Lesson Learned
 “My January remarks substantially understated the impact of
socialization and discrimination, including implicit attitudes patterns of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject.
The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes
through in my comments, and my remarks about variability
went beyond what the research has established. These are
dynamic areas of inquiry, which will no doubt continue to
engage scholars in the years ahead. For now, if any good can
come out of the recent controversy, I hope the intense attention
on issues of gender can provide us with an opportunity to make
concrete progress in the time ahead. It is vital that we
aggressively implement policies that will encourage girls and
women to pursue science at the highest levels, and that we
welcome and support them in our faculty ranks.”
-Lawrence Summers