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A FEW LACED GENES: SOCIOLOGY, THE WOMENr S MOVEXENT AND THE WORK OF DOR- E, SMLTH

Deirdre Mary Saryth

A thesis submitted i n conformity w i t h the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Sociology and Equity Studies Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the

Unf versity of Toronto

@ Copyright by Deirdre Wary Smyfh 1999

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ABSTRACT

A Pew Laced Genes: Sociology, the Woxuen's Movement, and the Work of Dorothy R. Smith, PhD, 1999 .

Deirdre M, wth, Department of Sociology aad Eqlufty Studies in Education,

Ontario Institute for Studies in Bducatioa of the University of Toronto.

This dissertation examines the productive forces which

gave rise to a sociological method called the Social Organization

of Knowledge (SOK) , formulated by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy

E. Smith. The method is used to study the organizing power of

ob j ectif ied knowledge found in textually-mediated f oms of

discourse. It was created as a subversive response to the

traditional canon of the sociology of knowledge. Smith has a

feminist ancestry, in that her direct foremother is Margaret Fell.

The thesis begins with Fellr s life from her conversion to Quakerism

in 1652, and continues with the militant Suffragette experience of

Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy Foster Abraham, Smithf s mother and

grandmother. It then proceeds with Smith's early life in England

and the development of the SOK is traced through her doctoral

studies at the University of California at Berkeley, the Vancouver

Womenr s Movement, 1968 - 1977, and the Toronto Womenf s Movement from 1977 to the present.

A central argument in this dissertation is that the

women's movement, in its ongoing historical manifestations acts as

a productive force for change. Women's movements are represented

in a way as to reflect the empirical reality of Smith's feminist

lineage, lived life, and her lifework. Historical materialism is

used to reproduce women' s lives, employing the term, appropriated

from Marx's The German Ideology, of 'productive forcesr , defined as

the innovative ways which women, over time, have used household

labour to advance their work for women's equality. I argue that

through the qualities that were offered to Smith in an

intergenerational experience of f e m i n i s m , and the imaginative use

of the historical moment in the Vancouver Womenr s Movement, she

created an identity for herself as a feminist sociologist, shaping,

over her sociological career, a new contribution to the sociology

of knowledge, the SOK method. The dissertation is categorized as

interpretive historical sociology. Data were collected by: 1) in-

depth interviews ; 2 ) participant obsemation; and 3 ) library,

archival, and database research.

Lacing the Genes: Historical Sociology and Historical Materiali~,.,e.o.~e-.,,.,,m,,m..-tm

2 . TIE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE t THEORIZING TEE CRUST AND T'HE C R U M B o a o o o a - - m a - - *

Inventing a Sociology of Knowledge: A Theory for Differing Womenr e Movements, . , - . . . Problematizing the Sociology of Knowledge,

Classical Forms of the Sociology of Kn~wledge..~

Text-Reader Conversation.a~,~a..maw~~,w..,m.~ m o m

Page

i

iii

vi

vii

viii

Chapter Page

Everyday L i f e in the Fell K~usehold.,,~..~,.~,., 140

The Quakerr Roots of D o r o f h y S d t h ~ ~ ~ w ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ w ~ ~ 152

5 , "WONT TO SPgAK PtAIN AND TO THE PWRPOSEm: LUCY ELLISON AND DOROT'HY FOSTER A B ~ ~ ~ ~ e e w ~ w w 166

Number Eleve in Renshaw Street: The WSPD in Liverpoolm,,,~wm,.,,w,.,~~,,,..,e,,, 17 8

A M o t h e r and D a u g h t e r in the W a w x V a Waro.o~.,wm 197

6 . DOROTHY SMITH'S FORMATZVE YEARS, 1926 - 1955~w~..~e~.. 215 The Place Family Life in the North R i d i n g of Y~rkshire,~.~.~~~~~~,.,~~.,,,,.~.,,~,~...,.,,~,, 2 17

Boarding School, 1935 - 1 9 4 3 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ w w ~ . ~ ~ . w . ~ . . , . 230

Woodbrooke College, 1944 - 1946,,,,,,.,.....,.,. 239

The London School of Economics, 1952 - 1955,.,,. 248

7. DOROTHY SMITH IN CALIFORNXA, 1955 - 65: STUDIES IN SOCIAL 0 R O A N Z Z A T I O N w o . o o o o w o o o o m o w o o w 275

Waiting in the Wings: F e m i n i s m in Sociology, 1955 - 1 9 6 5 . , , ~ . ~ ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~ . ~ . ~ . . ~ ~ . , . 293

Patterns of American Womanhood, 1955-65.,.., , . , . 299

Chapter Page

S e t t i n g the Scene: Student Activism, the Georgia Straight and the Status of W a m m , , , , , , , ,

The SOK and the Vancouver Woanenr s Movement: Faminist Principles in the Collected W o r k s of Dorothy E, Smith, 1968 - 770-.-0-.,,,,...-m-.,., The Vancouver Women8s Revolution: Econopllica, Events and Org~i~ations.,-~~~~~.,~~.,..,,...,,

The Social Organization of Knowledge and the Toronto Women's M o v e m e n t , 1977 - 1989.m0m,-~-..

Introduction to Toronto Women's Liberationmoo -.. Feminist Publishing in Toronto.-.,..,.., , - -- ,., ,

APPENDIX I: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF DOROTHY E- S M I T I I ~ ~ e - ~ ~

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks for his contribution to this sociological enterprise goes first to my supervisor, Dr, James L. Heap, Dean of Education, Ohio University. Appreciation also goes to the members of my committee, Dr, Kari Dehli (OISE/UT - SESE) and Dr. Michael Comelly (OISE/UT - Curriculum) . I am especially grateful to Sandra Acker, a member of the oral defense committee, for her extraordinary support at the time of my oral defense-

I extend thanks to Dorothy E. SmLth and her family; her brothers, Ullin T, Place of Boltby, Thirsk, and Milner Place of Huddersfield, and their wives, Peggy and Dorothy, respectively, Also Dorothyr s friend, Anne Canham, from Carlisle, England, and her husband Philip.

The completion of this project would never have been possible without the consistent thoughtfulness and emotional support of the SESE support staff, M a r y Howes, Cheryl Williams, Olga Williams and Kristine Pearson. Also Reuben ~oth, my friend and supporter for endlessly allowing me the use of his computer to print out my chapters,

Intensive research could not be completed without librarians, considered by me to be among the world's finest people. The first is Freda Foreman, librarian at the Women's Educational Resource Centre (WERC) at OISE/UT- I offer further appreciation to Andrea Trudel and Linda Arsenault at the Archives and Special Collections Department at the Morriset Library at the University of Ottawa, for their help in negotiating the Women's Movement Archive Collection (WMAC) . Further afield, David Doughan, the Reference Librarian at the most superb women8 s history library in the world, the Fawcett Library at London Guildhall University in London, England; and Steve Deeming, the curator of Swarthmoor Hall, the ancient home of the Mother of Quakerism, Margaret Fell.

Many people provided academic and intellectual support. David Livingstone, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies (SESE) at OISE/UT, gave me several occasions for work on various projects . Krista Cowman, at the University of York, England, supplied me with commentary on the fine points of Suffragette history on the Merseyside and in the Birkenhead area, In addition, my former teachers at Lakehead University, gave me much encouragement: Gerd Schroeter, my former theory professor and friend, for his letters, cartoons and customary good humour; and David Nock, who invited me to present a paper with him at the ASA Meetings in 1997, Finally, I would like to thank my friend and former MA supervisor, Pam Wakewich, who first introduced me to the work of Dorothy Smith in her class in feminist theory,

For my daughters lenfly and Kyaa,

vii

Margaret Fell born at Marsh-Grange,

Margaret Fell converted to Quakerism at Swarthmoor.

Margaret Fell dies in her daughter Rachel's arms at Swarthmoor Hall at age 88,

Tom Place born in the village of Langton-on-Swale,

Dorothy Foster Abraham born on Lancaster Avenue in Liverpool.

Women's Social and Political Union formed in Manchester.

Dorothy Foster Abraham arrested and incarcerated in Holloway for three weeks in London.

Dorothy Foster Abraham marries Tom Place at Bidston.

Dorothy Edith Place born in Northallerton.

Lucy Ellison Golding (Mrs. Alfred Clay Abraham) dies in a climbing accident in the Lake District.

Dorothy E. Place begins attendance at the Birklands School in St- Albanfs just outside of London.

Dorothy E. Place graduated from the University of Birmingham with a Social Studies Diploma-

Tom Place dies from pneumonia that he caught while on a fishing trip in Scotland.

Dorothy begins studying Social Anthropology at LSE.

Dorothy graduates with honours from LSE, marries William Reed Smith and moves to California.

Dorothy Smith's son David is born.

Dorothy Smith's son Steven is born.

Dorothy receives her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley,

Dorothy Smith begins teaching at the University of British Columbia.

Dorothy Foster Place dies at the age of 89-

Dorothy Smith begins teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

viii

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

History is nothing but the succession of separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all the preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity- ' (Emphasis mine)

This dissertation studies how the mothers and daughters

in one family, over a genealogical history reaching back to

the seventeenth century, contributed to the production of one

woman's sociology. The thesis is a study of a series of

social settings over time, in which women are the leading

actors, and through their work on behalf of other women, and

fired by a belief in the principle of women's equality,

contributed to the creation of a sociological method for

examining objectified and textual forms of knowledge, named

the Social Organization of Kn~wledge.~ The woman whose life

and work is studied here is Dorothy Edith Smith, n6e Place, a

world-renowned sociologist, who has spent twenty-one years

(1977 - 1998) of her career at the Ontario Institute for

Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Ontario,

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels . 1976, The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress, P. 58.

From here on the Social Organization of mowledge will be represented as the SOK. It should not be confused with the sociology of knowledge. The differences between the two will be explained in Chapter Two.

Canada, She has accumulated forty-four years service to the

discipline of sociology. It is a dissertation in which women

are asserted to have reirforced the invention of an

intellectual product, through the power of their own labour,

the material conditions of which they were a part, and their

individual commitments to women's equality,

The thesis will argue f r o m a perspective of historical

sociology, that one woman's contribution to sociology began

centuries ago and is a result of the organising power of

women's particular knowledgeb), their ordinary practices that

were a part of their everyday lives, andl how their skills and

strengths as women, passed on from generation to generation

ultimately influenced the development of a sociological

method. The historical sociology of the creation of the SOK

begins at the time of the conversion to Quakerism of Margaret

Fell and her household in 1752, and in the way that members of

the Quaker Movement adopted the unprecedented belief in the

equality of women and their right to preach in the church,

into the foundations of their spiritual life. It was this

belief, I argue, that was present in the lives of Lucy Ellison

Abraham (Mrs. Alfred Clay Abraham, Dorothy Smith' s

grandmother) and Dorothy Foster Abraham (Dorothy's mother) and

what was, in the course of time, transmitted to Dorothy,

providing an underlying strength and example to pursue a

demanding career in sociology, despite the fact that she was

single parent, and a woman in a discipline that was controlled

by men. In this thesis, I interpret that this kind of

inheritance likely enabled, strengthened, encouraged, and

2

provided the precedent for her adoption of feminist beliefs in

the Vancouver Women's Movement of the early 1970s. A feminist

belief system in turn coloured every aspect of her way of

doing sociology and the production of the S O L

The creation process documented here took place over an

interim of some three hundred and fifty years and covered a

geography spanning three countries, England, the United States

and Canada. Through an intergenerational force that was kept

going through mothers and daughters, the hope of women's

equality was kept alive, producing, against all odds and

despite the active repression that accompanied its

transference, a significant contribution to sociology and the

sociology of knowledge. The most important source of evidence

for the intergenerational transference of this feminist belief

system comes from a book which Dorothy Smith lent me for the

purposes of this dissertation, which was likely handed down

through the women on her mother's side of her family from the

time of Margaret Fell, from the origins of the Quaker Movement

in the seventeenth centurp3 It is a first edition of

Margaret Fell's collected works, called A Brief Collection of

I questioned Dorothy Smith as to the history of the ownership of Fell's collection of writing. This is her reply: "1 got the collection of Fell's writing from my mother. It must have been passed down in my motherf s family, but I don8 t know the route. I am pretty confident that it would not have been purchased. If it had been owned by someone else, their name would likely have been in the book-ft (E-mail Communication, Monday, July 6, 1998) - Written inside the front cover are the inscriptions: I) "The Gift of Sarah Meade to Sarah Sheppard the 14th of y. 2Mo:th - 1713: 2 ) Sarah Sheppard E Goldingrs great great grandmother her daughter was married to G Cockfield. 3) the signature of Dorothy Foster Place, Dorothy Smith's mother, written after she was married: 'Dorothy F. Place8 -

the Remarkable Passages and Occurrences Relating to the Birth,

Education, Life, Conversion, T2avelsr Services, and Deep

Sufferings of that Ancient, Eininent, and F a i t h f u l Servant of

the Lord, Margaret Fell (1710) published by members of Fellr s

family after her death. and signed by her fourth daughter,

Sarah Meade-

It is a dissertation which investigates historical forms

of the women's movement that are juxtaposed with the emerging

lives of the generations of women in Dorothy Smith's family.

This thesis explores how the dynamics of women's activism in

its variations have attracted and sustained the attention of

these generations of women, allowing the women in her family

to become a force for change in their own particular

circumstances. Women's experience has usually meant work in

the household, consequently I argue throughout the thesis that

the skills involved in domestic labour are a productive force

which have been appropriated by succeeding generations of

women in the accompanying historical forms of the women's

movement. These women have used domestic labour in

resourceful and inventive ways in their efforts to reproduce

and bequeath a belief in women's equality to their daughters,

which ultimately became a part of Dorothy Smith's sociological

method, the Social Organization of Knowledge. To state it

concisely, the argument for this thesis is that the

generations of women in Dorothy Smith's family, and the

women's movements of which they were a part, through their

domestic labour over the centuries, and by their example, have

assisted her in the production of her SOK method. My task

4

here is to show how this was accomplished- In the late 1960s

and early 70s. Dorothy Smith's sociology became radically

transformed as a consequence of her participation in the

women's movement, in ways that reflected its organizational

and political practices, These practices were based on the

affirmation of the experience of women. This had an impact on

Smith's first imagining of the SOK and its emphasis on direct

experience. During the height of the Toronto Womenrs Movement

in the 1980s. and continuing to the present, Dorothy Smith's

work has been committed to the study of the social

organization of women's experience.

I first met Dorothy E. Smith in October, 1994. She had

been invited to Lakehead University, where I was completing my

MA in sociologyr to give a lecture. My MA thesis4 was a study

of the creation of her feminist theory called 'the standpoint

of We shook hands shortly before she gave her

presentation. What initially drew me to Dorothy's work was

her 'standpoint of womenr theory, and the fact that it

originated in women's experience. To me, it meant that my own

past, which I had until then taken for granted, took on a

value which I had never attributed to it before. When I came

to OISE/UT to do PhD work, I discovered more. It was

Dorothy's method of teaching, the point that she was

Smyth, Deirdre, 1995. "The Creation of Dorothy Smithr s Standpoint Epistemology: A Feminist ~ ~ ~ r o ~ r i < t i o n of Male theorist^.^^ MA thesis, Lakehead University.

Smith , D. E. 1979b. "A Sociology for W0rnen.I' In: Sherman, Julia A. and Evelyn Torton Beck, eds . The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of mowledge, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. P. 163-172.

interested in her student's expressions of their actual

experience, I found it interesting that she encouraged

students to start a serious intellectual project from their

own circum;stances, and to build on it in the learning process,

I remember how 1 decided to study her work. I had

written a review of The Conceptual Practices of Power: A

Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (1990a) for Pam Wakewichrs

feminist theory course- When I began thinking about a topic

for my MA thesis, I first thought of writing about what I

knew, which was the discipline of ballet, because I had taught

it for many years. 1 discussed the topic with my theory

teacher, Gerd Schroeter one afternoon, which turned out to be

a gradual process of talking myself out of writing a critique

of what I felt was the unnaturalness of the dance environment,

Moreover, I wanted to study a meaningful form of sociology

which would require serious effort- Since we had been

chatting for a long time, I got up to leave, and on the way

out of his office, I said to him, " I ' m going to write m y

thesis about Dorothy Smith." And that was the beginning. As

I continued to think more about my choice, it made sense from

a professional, sociological, and a feminist standpoint. Men

have always taken up intellectual projects which critique and

analyze the work of other men as a stepping stone to an

academic career. 1 have consciously taken up a womanr s work

to study, to demonstrate that it is possible for women to

study the examples put forward by other women.

&acing the Genes : Historical Sociology and Historical Materialisra

A Few Laced Genes is categorized as an instance of

interpretive historical sociology, which has been used to

examine the sociohistorical conditions that were available to

Dorothy Smith in the creation of her lifework. It is not an

ethnography, biography, intellectual portrait, critique, or a

narrative, nor does this thesis use Dorothy Smith's method.

Further, I make no definitive claims of causality. in other

words, the women's movements studied here are not argued to be

the single underlying producer and origin of Dorothy Smithrs

approach to sociology- The strategy I take to characterize

the connections between women's movements and the work of

Dorothy Smith is one of informed interpretation based on

historical evidence. data which is disciplined by the

theoretical approach which 1 have formulated in Chapter Two.

The strength of these connections are represented by words

like 'logicalr, 'deductiver. 'plausibler, 'likelyr,

'reasonabler and in some cases 'obvious'. The linkages

between the social conditions which are argued to have given

rise to Smith's work must be seen as substantive, so the

interpretive procedures I use here are based on verifiable

historical documentation. Scholars who are familiar with her

work may find this method disconcerting, but I decided to take

up this analytic direction for several reasons. You will

find, as the thesis progresses, that I am as interested in

history as I am in sociology. I have a meticulous approach to

my work, which stems, I believe, from a skill in forms of

needlework which require an attention to fine detail- 1

further have a background in Cecchetti ballet, which demanded

the execution of difficult forms of movement and an eye for

technical precision. My reading for this thesis has resulted

in a high respect for historical work which painstakingly

documents the precise components of ordinary life during an

historical period, such as Isabel Ross' Margaret Fell: the

M o t h e r of Quakerism (1949)

I felt that the method I have taken in writing an

interpretive historical sociology of Dorothy Smith's ancestry,

life and work was the most appropriate frame to profile the

feminist quality of her work. To me, something which required

a considerable time to create and which used a variety of rich

materials in its construction, eventually unfolded to become

something of value. There is no question of the present

stature of Dorothy Smith's contribution to sociology. She is

the first woman in the history of the discipline to break into

the sacred inner circle of classical sociological theory,

which has heretofore been made up of male writers. Her work

is now regularly included in introductory sociology texts and

undergraduate texts on sociological theory- Using h i s to r i c a l

sociology is an interpretive method, an exegesis which

provides the historical background of a sociological

procedure.

A few years ago, I read Gerda Lernerr s The Creation of

Feminist Consciousness: From the Midd le Ages to Eighteen-

seventy (19931, a book which had an enormous effect on me. It

taught me the power of the historical process, how something

8

consequential, such as feminist consciousness, or in the case

of my dissertation, a sociological method, was not created in

the course of one biological generation, but could have

threads and connections which stretched back for centuries. I

could further use the analogy of geology here to explain what

I mean. Geology is the study of pressure over time, how the

creation of a commodity like coal, for example, could take *

millions of years. Taking the fastidious approach of showing

the creation process of a sociological method was something

which I thought would engage a community of feminist scholars,

as well as others who were interested in the work of Dorothy

Smith. It was Dorothy who originally presented me with the

facts of her feminist ancestry, and it became a magnet whose

appeal was impossible for me to ignore, and although Dorothy

Smith herself places a lesser significance on the place of her

feminist ancestry, I. felt that it would intrigue an academic

community which likely knew little about her.

Finally, Dorothy Smith has an enormous, world-wide

reputation. Using the method of historical sociology was a

means for me to think independently of her and a way of

confronting her writing without simply regurgitating her work

in ways which I had seen done over and over again in the body

of criticism that has grown up around her sociology. As a

scholar, I saw my responsibility as one of creating new

knowledge, so writing an historical sociology of the ancestry,

life and work of an important sociologist was one way of

accomplishing this* In this dissertation, I am the researcher

and Dorothy Smith is the sociological subject of study. As a

9

knower of her lived life, she is the authority, but I am

capable of creating an informed representation- Although I

have valued and insisted on her participation and shaping of

my work, there was a clear boundary where I: had to become a

scholar who was completely independent of her,

As a subdiscipline, historical sociology had its

beginnings in cultural anthropology, and was traditionally

concerned with social origins and the history of the social

life of human beings and their institutions- A primitive

example of historical sociology is the Gilgamesh Epic and its

Hebrew adaptation in the Book of Genesis, a history of the

generations of peoples who succeeded Adam and Eve? Early

historical sociology was heavily influenced by social

Darwinism and the comparative method in anthropology, which

sought to establish laws of social evolution through the

compilation and comparison of various historical cases of

social institutions such as the family. These early

sociological 'lawsr were applied to human belief systems, so

that Franklin H. Giddings created what he called 'emotional

typesf, such as 'American Quicknessf, and 'Athenian

Vi~acity'.~ One of these outmoded 'lawsr that might have been

applied to this work, were it now appropriate in contemporary

sociological research, was 0. Tarders imitation theory, found

Barnes, Harry Elmer. 1948. H i s t o r i c a l Sociology: Its Origins and D e v e l o p m e n t ; T h e o r i e s of Social Evolution from Cave Life to A t o m i c Bombing. New York: Philosophical Library. P. 6.

' Giddings , Franklin H. 1906. Readhgs in Descriptive and Historical Sociology- New York: Macmillan- P. 196-7.

10

in his The Laws of Imitation (1903) . It could be applied to

the intergenerational 'imitationr of a belief in women's

equality extant in Dorothy Smith's family. Tarde argued that

there were two types of imitation, and that example was never

copied exactly: 1) custom imitation, or the copying of

tradition; and 2) mode imitation, or the copying of new

fashion^.^ Rather than being useful here, however, these

'laws' are now just a quaint reminder of sociologyrs past,

Another early prototype of historical sociology which is

a classic work for feminist scholars is Frederick Engelsr The

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) ,

In a similar vein, Edward Alexander Westermark' s History of

Human M a r r i a g e (1891) and Robert Briffaultr s The Mothers

(1927) are illustrations of the use of an uncritical,

comparative method.g In North America, W, I, Thomas was also

interested in primitive culture, and his Source Book for

Social Origins (1909) brought a scepticism to the broad

generalizations used in the comparative method. A Few Laced

Genes is both an illustration of a single case study, in that

it is the social history of women in one family, and a use of

the comparative method, in that it compares the attendant

historical forms of women's activism that accompany the lives

of the women in that particular family. Rather than

attempting to prove the existence of 'laws' of social

Ibid, p, 157.

Barnes, 1948, op. cit-I p. 39,

Ibid, p. 50.

I1

evolution, this thesis seeks to uncover the meaning in the

changing course of women's activism connected to the

historical emergence of the SOK method,

Feminist versions of historical sociology have emerged as

a conseqgence of the impact of the women's movement, but

women's history is by no means a recent branch of knowledge.

As a discipline, Natalie Zemon Davis informed us that womenrs

history, as it was taken up in the early 1 9 7 0 ~ ~ was not an

original form, An ancient framework for the creation of

womenr s history was the genre of llWomen WorthiesI1, a construct

which goes back to Plutarch. This kind of women's history

consisted of historical biographies of outstanding women which

had the underlying moral objective of demonstrating that women

could and ought to benefit by instruction. Christine de

Pisan's C i t y of Ladies (1405) is an example of this model.

These biographies had several aims, in that they were created

to demonstrate the extent of female intelligence, to produce

an example for other women to follow, and to claim that since

women had achieved great things, there was no limit to what

they could do if given the opportunity and the education.ll

This dissertation in historical sociology has been formulated

as a legacy of the "Women WorthiesI1 found in the traditional

paradigms of women's history,

One important question in the method of historical

sociology is that of causality. Skocpol has analyzed several

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1976. lgWomenr s Historytr in Transition: The European Case. Feminist Studies, 3, 3-4. p. 83-103, P, 83,

current approaches in historical research: 1 applied

universal prototypes to history (deductive) ; 2) investigated

patterns of causality (inductive) ; and 3) produced explicit

historical interpretations (interpretive) .12 This work is

characterized as ineerpretive historical sociology, and seeks

to establish the meaning which women drew from their

experience in various women's movements. By the phrase

'interpretive historical sociologyr, I intimate that I have

employed a number of interpretive schema, for example, women's

household labour and everyday life, women's work for women's

equality , and geographical relevance, to interpret the

historical evidence 1 collected through the research process.

The work in this dissertation does not make causality claims:

1) from the feminist activism of women from one generation to

another; or 2) the women's movement as the sole origin of

Dorothy Smith's sociology. Rather, it is concerned with the

problem of situating the individual, in this case the life of

Dorothy Smith, within the construct of an historical

sociology, It means looking at the historical stock of

materials that w e r e available to Dorothy Smith in her creation

of the Social Organization of Knowledge. It further means

concurrently tracing the formation of her identity as a

sociologist and a feminist. History, as well as the social,

provides the substance that is used in a process of identity-

formation,

l2 Brown, David K. 1990. IfInterpretive Historical Sociology: Discordances of Weber, Dilthey and Others.Ir Journal of Historical Sociology, 3, 2, 166-191, P. 185.

13

For the purposes of tracing the history of an identity-

formation, Philip Abrams makes the distinction between

biological and sociological generations. A sociological

generation takes in a span of time in which an identity could

be assembled on the basis of an unchanged system of meanings

and possibilities, and could envelop several biological

generations, or be a space of time as short as ten years.

Within the time frame of a sociological generation, like the

early Quaker Movemect and the Militant Suffragette Movement

examined in my thesis, types of identities are shaped, and so

shape the possibilities for generations, identity tmes, and

identities in the future.13 A critical sociological

generation for Dorothy Smith, for example, was the interval of

the Vancouver Women's Movement from 1968 - 1977, in which her

identity as a sociologist and a feminist was formed as a

consequence of the meanings she herself drew from this

particular historical period. At the same time, she had the

examples of Margaret Fell, Lucy Ellison Golding and Dorothy

Foster Abraham, as women in past sociological generations who

w e r e also feminists, to assist her in the creation of a new

version of feminist identity, I argue in this thesis that she

seized this historical moment to create a specific identity

for herself as a sociologist, and that her work reflects the

meaning she drew from this experience. Through the identity

that was offered to her in an intergenerational experience of

feminism in her family, and the imaginative use of the

13 Abrams , Philip. 1982. Historical Sociology. Ithaca, New York: Cornefl University Press- Po 256-

14

historical moment of the Vancouver Women's Movement, Dorothy

Smith was able to create an identity for herself as a feminist

sociologist, shaping, over the course of her sociological

career, a new contribution to the sociology of knowledge, her

method known as the Social Organization of Knowledge,

I was also wanted to produce a form of historical

materialism which was sensitive to the material conditions of

womenf s lives, their labour, and the qualities of the

movements they created, The idea to have women's household

work, a familiar interlocking form of experience for women as

forming the uniting thread of this work came from Dorothy

Smith herself- One day in the OISE/UT cafeteria, she

described to me the process of making marzipan in her mother's

kitchen:

She [Dorothy's mother] knew how to do so much because she spent part of her life working on a farm, so she knew how to make bacon, ham, all those kinds of things. She had all these skills- I remember having the job of grinding up almonds to make marzipan for Christmas cake and you had to grind the almonds extremely small and you had this sieve. It was made out of horsehair, very fine, and you were a little girl and you spent hours doing this and she was never satisfied, it had to be finer, you had to get it finer. It was all done by hand- 1 mean I loved to be in the kitchen with her- She had a woman who helped her from the village and they made all the bread, two or three times a week, on this big white kitchen table, the top which was scrubbed, and filled up with loaves of bread. - -there was this wonderful hot bread and this wonderful smell and we would have it with lashings of butter.'*

I4

during Unstructured lunch in the

Interview by the author with Dorothy Smith OISE/UT cafeteria, August 21, 1997.

I unexpectedly became conscious of w h a t had been obscured

because it had be- taken f o r granted, that the most ordinary

thing for women to do was to work in the home, it was

something they have always done, and frequently this involved

the passing on of the skills of their labour to their

daughters. It could become a bridge joining an historical

study of women and women's movements, mothers and daughters,

and the creation of an intellectual pro j ect . To support an historical materialism, there is a

conceptual motif, found in Karl Marx and Frederick E n g e l r s The

German Ideology, which I feel is useful in tying together the

several generations of women and forms of women's activism

t h a t I have studied. This is the idea, suggested in the

opening quotation at the beginning of this chapter, of

productive forces. There are few Marxist writers who have

tackled an examination of this abstract theoretical term, but

1 will mention the analyses of two who have, and have

formulated what I propose for the intention of this term in

relation t o this dissertation and in regard to an historical

materialism for women, their labour in the household, its

relation to their political activism, and the outcome of these

forms of labour, Dorothy Smithrs intellectual product called

the Social Organization of Knowledge.

A well known analysis of Marxrs understanding of the

productive forces is G. A. Cohenr s Karl Marx's Theory of

History: A Defence (1978). The productive forces and its

related term, 'productive powersr are what one has to build

with in any project involving labour. C o h e n argued that Marx

16

placed a 'primacyr on the explanatory nature of the productive

forces, and that they tended to change over time.15 Most of

Cohenfs study was an argument against the primacy that Marx

placed on this, and the persuasion of Marxist theorists as to

the correct nature of this primacy. According to Cohen, the

productive forces, in the way that Marx. formulated them and

used them, are not part of the economic structure, Cohen

presented the productive forces as 'what are used to produce

thingsr, Le., the 'labour power, the productive power of

producing agents: strength, skill, knowledge, inventivenessf,

and emphasized them as technological strength.16

In Jon Elster's M a k i n g Sense of Marx (1985), the meaning

of the productive forces is largely a reworking of G, A,

Cohen' s work:

The productive forces must be (i) ownable, even if not necessarily owned; (ii) developing throughout history in the sense (broadly speaking) of reducing the labour content of the goods produced; (iii)- capable of explaining the form of the relations of production and (iv) capable of being fettered by these relations.17

In this thesis, it was my objective to show how the concept of

productive forces became useful as an explanatory term. Using

Elster's precepts regarding the nature of the productive

forces, it was possible to create a meaning for this term in

" Cohen G. A. 1978. Karl Marx's Theory of History: a Defence, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, P. 134.

l7 Elster, Jon. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. P, 243,

regard to a historical materialism far women, as it applied to

the particular histories that are examined here, Firstly,

Marx himself never considered women to be a part of the

economic structure, isolated, as they often were, in the

household, and even if they did participate in the labour

force, their labour power was 'below all calculationr ,lS What

is categorized in this dissertation as a 'productive farcer in

the creation process of the Social Organization of Knowledge,

is the labour of women in the household as it develops over

time, and the 'strength, skill, knowledge, inventiveness' that

the women in Dorothy Smith's ancestry and immediate family

used to reproduce the belief of women's equality, Domestic

labour, according to Elsterfs list of principles, is argued to

be at first 'ownabler by men in Margaret Fell's time, and as

it develops historically, controlled by men. Further,

household work has changed over time, appropriated

politically, as it was, by women in various creative ways to

increase their own status in society, in the historical forms

of the women's movements that are studied here. The skill and

inventiveness required in the execution of women's domestic

labour can be used as a device to explicate historical changes

in womenr s activism, and since womenr s political

accomplishments were almost always accompanied by forms of

repression through male-controlled governing positions of

society, it encompasses the concept of 'fetteringr that Elster

alludes to as well-

l8 The Woman Question (1951). P. 2 7 - 2 8 .

18

Method

The procedures which I have employed for the data

gathering for this work have been for the most part founded on

traditional sociological methods, I have used in-depth

interviewing techniques, participant observation, as well as

standard library and archival research, In the data

collection process, which has materialized over the last five

years (1993-1998), I have built on a substantial amount of

material that I had already collected when writing my MA

thesis, I have a complete collection of Dorothy El Smithf s

published work, including book reviews, a number of her

xnpublished papers, and a complete list of the accumulated

citations to these works taken from Social Sciences Citation

Index. In addition, I have a comprehensive anthology of the

growing body of criticism of her work that has appeared over

the course of her career.

In the course of my MA and doctoral research, I have had

the opportunity to conduct interviews with a number of people,

some of them members of Dorothy Smith's family, and one person

who is a close friend of hers, as well as several interviews

with Dorothy Smith herself. The interviews with Dorothy

Smith, as well as all of the others that I conducted for my

dissertation followed the procedures established in the

ethical review process required by the Ontario Institute for

Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. All

participants were given written notice, before they

participated in the interview, that the material gathered

would be used in a dissertation, and would likely be used for

19

publication, They were presented with a loosely structured

list of ten questions, which they were given the option to

amend, if they wished. In addition, Milner Place was formally

asked permission in writing to use an excerpt from one of his

poems for the title of the dissertation. Finally, Dorothy

Smith was furnished with a draft of the thesis, Anne Canham,

Milner Place and Ullin Place were supplied with a diskette of

my dissertation accompanied by a letter which encouraged them

to submit to me, and which I subsequently received, revisions

and corrections which I incorporated into the thesis upon the

completion of my oral defense.

My first interview with Dorothy Smith took place at

Lakehead University in October of 1994, which I term

throughout the dissertation as the "Preliminary InterviewIt.

It came about partially in Pam Wakewichrs office at Lakehead

University, and partly at the Thunder Bay Airport where

Dorothy and I were waiting for her departure to Toronto,

Later that fall, I took part in another exchange with her in

her office at OISE/UT, on November 11, 1994, where we talked

primarily about the later stages of her career and her

'standpoint of womenr theory. Once I started studying in the

Sociology Department at OISE/UT, I began a series of

interviews with Dorothy Smith, the first of which was a

structured interview on her childhood and boarding school

experience. We also had one informal interview during lunch

in the OISE/UT cafeteria. Dorothy and I have lunched together

on several occasions, where she related much about her life

and work. We have maintained a regular contact by e-mail.

20

Three of these extended interviews took place in England,

in the Fall Term of 199% The first was in Carlisle, Cumbria,

in the Northwest corner of England up near the Scottish

border- This interview transpired with Anne Canham, nee

Clarkson, an old friend of Dorothy's who she met at school

during World War II, '~ Anne met me at the Carlisle station

while a large brass band played Beatlesr music in celebration

of the christening of a new train. She lives with her husband

Philip, a retired Church of England clergyman, in an

immaculate house with a traditional English garden. When I

was there, she took me for a drive in the surrounding

countryside, where we visited an 11th century church and

looked an ancient stone circle called Long Meg and Her

Daughters* Anne and Philip took me to church in Carlisle

Cathedral, a magnificent piece of architecture,

My next interview occurred in Kuddersfield with Dorothy

Smith's youngest brother, Milner Place. In complete contrast

to my experience in Carlisle, but one equally interesting,

Milner took me to lmch in an English Pub fittingly called

I1Abrahamf su2', and we chatted until it closed around 3 r30 pm,

whereupon we moved down the street a bit to another pub and

continued talking, Milner lives in a rich pocket of cultural

l9 Anne Canhamr s maiden name was Anne Clarkson* In the references to her in Chapters Four and Six, I will refer to her as Anne Clarkson, as during the time period under study, she was not as yet married-

'' Dorothy Smith's grandmother's name was Lucy Elizabeth Abraham. She was married to Alfred Clay Abraham, and consequently. Dorothy Smith's mother's maiden name was Dorothy Foster Abraham-

activity, and is part of a thriving artistic community. He is

a published poet, the author of several books of poetry, His

book called P i l t d o w n Maa and Bat Wontan (1994) is a series of

verses which he says are influenced by his talks with Dorothy

about women's experience, One of the poems in this book,

called IIDown Draughtn1, is the source of the title of this

dissertation, The relevant passage is meant to convey the

presence of Dorothy's genealogy rather than the biological

connotation of the word 'genesr- It is the image of

succeeding generations of women that Milner meant to convey in

his poem2=:

Here in the cave, my child and I; - my child, outsprung of thighs, 0-K-, a little sperm, a few Iaced genes, but of my blood, teeth, flesh and bones; calcification of my milk -22

Milner and his partner, also named Dorothy, drove me to the

country around Huddersfield, where I was able to observe

several abandoned mills for the processing of wool that were

in use during the time of the industrial revolution, I also

saw the narrow canals which Karl Marx talks about in Das

Kapi ta l , where women performing the same work which was

sometimes assigned to horses hauled materials to and from the

mills. Milner and Dorothy also showed me some tiny weaver's

cottages from an earlier era when economic life was still

21 In a letter to the author dated November 11, 1997, Milner Place writes: When I invented and wrote Bat Woman I was very conscious of both Dorothy and my mother looking over my shoulder, but now, thanks to you, when I read it again my grandmother has j oined them, "

22 Place, Milner. 1994, Piltdown Man and Bat Woman. Birstall, Batley, West Yorkshire: Spout Publications. P.20.

contained in individual households. Huddersfield's buildings

were still, in some instances, covered in the black grit which

had been an effect of the factory smoke that had blanketed

Northern England in Marx's time, Milner kindly lent me his

father's three remaining diaries, which Tom Place began

writing at the age of sixteen, and I took notes from them on

the train from Huddersffeld to Thirsk,

My final interview in England was with Ullin T, Place,

Dorothy Smith's oldest brother, who lives in Boltby, Thirsk, a

few miles outside of Northallerton where she was born. Thirsk

is part of an English landscape made up of rolling hills

divided by stone walls and hedges, The view from the stone

terrace at Willowtree Cottage, Ullin and Peggy Placer home,

looks out over a classic English setting, where you could hear

the neighbourfs dogs barking at rabbits and watch people

riding horses along winding country lanes. Ullin took me to

see Sowber Gate, Dorothy Smith's family home during her

childhood years, and the secluded l a t e 12th century churchyard

where Thomas Place is buried beside his little sister, Emma.

Poignant inscriptions on their grave stones read:

Thomas Place of Sowber Gate Born January 16, 1872/ d, June 28, 1948

"His Ways were Ways of Gentleness And All His Paths were Peace, If

Emma Place Died February 12, 1873 Aged 7 Years

"Tender Shepherd thou hast stilled Now thy little lamb's brief weeping Oh how peaceful pale and mild In her narrow bed she's sleeping And no sigh of anguish sore Heaves that little bosom more. l1

Ullin further took me to several of the Place children's

haunts in the Yorkshire Dales around Wensleydale, where

Dorothy played as a child exploring the hills with her

brothers, One of the most romantic places I have ever seen,

the experience of seeing the Yorkshire Dales was the most

breathtaking part of my research trip to England, I conducted

the interview with Ullin Place in his study at Willowtree

Cottage, and he hauled down a huge box of family memorabilia

from his attic for me to look at, including old childhood

photographs of Dorothy, newspaper clippings, and old papers

all of which were invaluable to my research.

As an exercise in participant observation, I attended and

tape recorded all of Dorothy Smith's classes in the Fall Term

of 1996. As I had already taken the two courses with her the

previous year, the fall of 1995, the content of these classes

was already familiar to me. These were OISEfUT courses 1928F

Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge and BDT 3928

Advanced Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge,

which Dorothy Smith taught that year in association with her

former student, James L. Heap This resulted in a collection

of tape recordings, for which I kept companion notes, co-

ordinating the tape counter with relevant commentary of what

was taking place in the classroom, in terms of the conceptual

frameworks were being discussed- This satred a lot of time and

expense regarding transcription- Not only did I not have to

transcribe all of the recordings verbatim, I had a ready

reference for any supportive commentary that 1 would be able

to use throughout the dissertation. These tape recordings

24

were employed indirectly in

Organization of Knowledge:

augment my understanding of

examine.

Chapter Three, called "The Social

An Overviewn, where I used them to

the conceptual frameworks that I

For data documenting the diverse recorded forms of the

women's movement I made use of several fine collections of

women's historical material, and archival work quickly became

a passionate interest of mine, In the Toronto area, 1 worked

for several weeks in the Women's Educational Resource Centre

(WERC) on the eleventh floor at OISE/UT assisted by the

librarian, Freda Foreman. I also worked at the New College

Library at the University of Toronto, the Robarts Library, the

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library on several occasions, the

Metro Reference Library, and the quaint little library

belonging to the Society of Friends (Quakers) close to OISE/UT

at 60 Lowther Avenue.

I was also worked in libraries outside of Toronto, On

three occasions I travelled to Ottawa to work in the Women's

Movement Archive Collection (WMAC) housed at the Morisset

Library at the University of Ottawa- Here, the archivist,

Andrea Trudel and her assistant Linda Arsenault made

innumerable trips retrieving files for me from their

incredibly rich collection of materials, where I: was able to

gather valuable data on the Canadian women's movements in

Vancouver and Toronto. In addition, I spent a week and a half

working in

in London,

Librarian,

the Fawcett Library at London Guildhall University

England, where I was assisted by the Reference

David Doughan. He was very helpful to me, in that

25

I was a newcomer, both to archival work and to England- This

library was exciting beyond measure, and yielded a treasure-

trove of data, in that I came across, quite unexpectedly,

specific historical documentation of the Suffragette

activities of Dorothy Smith's mother and grandmother, Dorothy

Foster Abraham and Lucy Ellison Abraham, n6e Golding. It was

material that Dorothy and her brothers had been unaware of

until that time, Finally, I worked in a private library at

Swarthmoor Hall, just outside of Ulverston in the North of

England. The curator, Steve Deeming, a practising Quaker,

left me to work in the Great Hall unattended while he went

about his chores. The books available here were on Quaker

history, some not available anywhere else in the world.

This extensive research process resulted in an enormous

collection of materials which had to be carefully scrutinized

and designated for inclusion in the dissertation, using the

interpretive schema mentioned above on page 13 in the section

which described my use of interpretive historical sociology.

The selection process was largely based on the theoretical

guidelines which I have constructed at length in Chapter Two,

in the segment on theorizing different women's movements. The

choice of materials was performed with these strictures in

mind, but with an eye to what was relevant geographically,

details that gave a history of the everyday material

conditions of the lives of the women being studied,

particulars relating to domestic labour, to the economic

concerns of women's movements, and to the historically

relevant 'productive forcesr that were available to the women

26

involved, In this way, I would try to imagine what their

lives were like as they were actually lived and include what

fitting historical evidence I had at m y disposal, In some

cases, I chose materials because I felt they would add a

richness to the historical account in which I was working, and

they might interest the audience for which the dissertation

was intended. I chose items for inclusion both out of my own

interest and for the education of my readers, In the choices

made from interviewing data, I was further prompted by

theoretical restraint, in that I was sensitive to factual

material provided by the interviewees which supported an

account of Dorothy Smith's everyday family life, domestic

labour as a productive force, the economic resources of

women's movements, possible historical origins of the SOK, and

the presence of forms of women's activism.

Synopsis of Chapters

Chapter Two establishes the theoretical principles which

are to guide the choices of data throughout the dissertation,

It is comprised of two components: 1) a theory of women's

movements, which constitutes the historical and social setting

which gives rise to the Social Organization of Knowledge; and

2) a section devoted to a critique of classical and neo-

classical forms of the sociology of knowledge, which forms the

rationale, motivation and point of departure for Dorothy

Smith's creation of the Social Organization of Knowledge. In

Chapter Three, a conceptual framework for the Social

27

Organization of Knowledge is formulated, based on the primary

concepts which Smith employs for her method of studying

objectified and textual forms of knowledge, These are:

social organization, direct experience, document and text, the

text-reader conversation, botanizing and finally, disjuncture.

The concepts are historicized, to provide an understanding of

their uses and development.

4tWomenrs Equality and the Quaker Ancestry of Dorothy

S m i t h t r , Chapter Four, is the first of the chapters documenting

historical forms of the women's movement, and studies the

origins of the Quaker Movement in England- Margaret Fell,

often called the 'Mother of Quakerism', is a direct ancestor

of Dorothy Smith, and I provide evidence which points to the

attendant presence of Quakerism in her upbringing and young

adulthood, Here, I establish the first instance of a distinct

form of women's domestic labour, the starting place for a kind

of analysis which is contained throughout the thesis. Chapter

Five documents another form of feminist activism, this time

the militant Suffragette work of Dorothy SmithrS mother,

Dorothy Foster Abraham, and her grandmother, Lucy Ellison

Abraham, nee Golding. This is accomplished in consecutive

layers of the protest activities of the Women% Social and

Political Union (WSPU) in Great Britain, starting with the

London Chapter, moving to the Liverpool, and finally focusing

on the Birkenhead area, and the work of Dorothyr6 mother and

grandmother. These two women worked in all of these separate

but interdependent spheres of the WSPU, so a breakdown of all

three locales has been provided,

28

In Chapter Six, 1 look at the logical origins of the SOK

concept known as 'botanizingr. in the kind of boarding school

education that Dorothy Smith received prior to and during

World War 11, I study her first contacts with social life,

through the social work training that she received at

Woodbrooke College from 1944 - 1946. Finally, I explore her

discovery of sociology and social anthropology at the London

School of Economics, from 1952 - 1955, documenting the conspicuous formative influences that she would have received

from the world-renowned teachers at the school,

Chapter Seven is an investigation of some the theoretical

origins of social organization that Dorothy Smith learned in

graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley.

During this period, she spent a year studying organizational

theory, which likely has served as a foundation for her future

intellectual work. I examine her doctoral dissertation, from

the standpoint of two of the organizational theorists that she

uses. In Chapter Eight, I produce an historical sociology of

the Vancouver Women's Movement, and the kind of work that

Dorothy Smith created in this environment. Here, I present an

interpretation of possible linkages between themes in her work

at this time and the organized womenrl movement and Dorothy

Smith's thinking on these lines. Chapter Nine contains an

inquiry into Dorothy Smith's work from 1977 to the present,

1998- I look at her first years in Toronto, the apex of the

women's movement and its obvious impact on her sociology; the

1990s, where Smith confronts poststructuralist theory; and

include a selective history of the Toronto Women's Movement.

29

CHAPTER Two

THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND TEE SOCZOG000 OF KNOWIiEDGE: THEORIZING TEE CRUST AND THE CRUMB.'

This chapter will serve two separate functions, one that

is represented as a 'crustr and one as a 'crumb' . It

organizes the principles that will guide the rest of the

dissertation, and marks the boundaries of the data that is

included, The 'crustr is an allegory for the dissertation's

most salient component, Dorothy Smith's ancestry, life and

work, and the ongoing historical forms of the women's

movement, of which she and the women in her immediate and

ancient family werelare a part. The 'crumb' is metaphorical

for the subordinate focus of the thesis, a critique of

classical and neo-classical forms of the sociology of

knowledge, which forms the logic behind Dorothy Smith's desire

to change sociology, resulting partly in the creation of the

procedure called the Social Organization of Knowledge.

Women's movements are given a principle focus because their

various manifestations have been an interest of Dorothy

Smith's for thirty years of her life. Although it can be

observed that an equal portion of her attention was given to

sociology, I will argue that she used what she learned from

the women's movement to change aspects of the discipline which

she felt were no longer practical. The sociology of knowledge

assumes a lesser position, and serves the purpose that a grain

From the proverb: "If your wife be crust, mind that you are the crumb.tt Brown, Raymond Lamont. 1970. A Book of Proverbs. Newton Abbott, England: David and Charles. P. 109,

of sand does in an oyster, the source of irritation around

which a pearl grows and evolves, the 'pearlr in this case

being the SOK. The sociology of knowledge is argued to be a

sphere of sociology which has lost its meaning, especially for

women members of the discipline, and whose canon of

literature, created by and for men, became a form which

Dorothy Smith resisted. It is a central argument of this

thesis that the women's movement, in its ongoing historical

forms, acts as a productive force for change.

The dissertation is itself a sociology of knowledge,

employing the method of interpretive historical sociology to

explain the productive forces that were available to Dorothy

Smith in the development of her scholarship. Quite often, the

women's movement is depicted as having its origin in the

thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, but I argue that Dorothy

Smith's feminist imagination was ostensibly assisted by the

examples of the strong women in her family. The thesis begins

with the model of the exceptional leadership ability of her

Quaker ancestor, Margaret Fell, and continues with the example

of her grandmother, Lucy Ellison Abraham, and her mother,

Dorothy Foster Place. Lucy Ellison and Dorothy Foster Abraham

were active members of the Womenfs Social and Political Union

(WSPU), the militant faction of the Suffragette Movement in

England. The feminist historian Gerda Lerner argued that

throughout European history, women were educationally deprived

because of a lack of continuity, that there was no passing on

of learning from one generation to another, and therefore

women were continually forced to create knowledge 'as though

31

no woman before her had ever thought or Here I

show that Dorothy Smith's case is an exception. The tough-

minded women who were her predecessors present an anomaly to

Lerner's argument. These early influences in Dorothy Smith's

childhood and teenage years, likely not taken seriously at the

young age at which they were encountered, provide part of the

material for the formation of her identity as a feminist

sociologist during the Vancouver Women's Movement from 1968 - 1977,

This chapter also provides an analysis of the 'crumbr

portion of my opening metaphor, the sociology of knowledge. I

will analyze the epistemological limitations that have been

put forward by various critiques, by Dorothy Smith and others,

relating to classical and neo-classical forms of the sociology

of knowledge, that prompted Professor Smith to assume

responsibility for 're-makingr sociology, of which one outcome

was the innovation she terms the Social Organization of

Knowledge. This part of the analysis is important, because it

represents the logic behind her life-long sociological

pro j ect . I introduce the sociology of knowledge as it has

originated in the thinking of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and

Emile Durkheirn as illustrations of classical work; and Karl

Mannheim, Barnes and Bloor, and Peter L, Berger and Thomas

Luckmann as examples of neo-classical forms,

In the sociology of knowledge segment of the thesis, a

Lerner, Gerda. 1993. The Creation of F e m i n i s t Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press. P. 166,

dynamic of rebellion is created. It is an examination of

writers in the sociology of knowledge, and is not an

examination of Dorothy Smith's uses of sociological theorists

in the ongoing development of her work- As a canon of

sociological literature written by and for men, the sociology

of knowledge is rejected by Dorothy Smith, My choice of

writers reflects a simple overview of this canon of

literature, including only those who I feel have made the most

influential contributions, These writers are not necessarily

ones who Dorothy Smith has referred to in her writing, as both

her critical use or dismissal of their work is significant-

It would not make sense, for example, to include feminist

theorists which she has used to augment her thinking, because

these writers were her peers, and she was not, at least in the

beginning of the women's movement, actively rebelling against

their thinking, It was men that feminist theorists confronted

in their early work, and men with whom they were angry13

Here, it is important to differentiate between 'theoristsr and

'sociologists of knowledgef- In the case of the sociological

fathers, these two roles overlap, but when the sociology of

knowledge emerged as a distinct subdiscipline in the 19209,

writers became associated with the single genre of the

sociology of knowledge.

This chapter has identified the sociological puzzle or

M y MA thesis is a study of the male theorists which Dorothy Smith appropriated to create her 'standpoint of womenr method- Called "The Creation of Dorothy Smith's Standpoint Epistemology: A Feminist ~ppropriation- of Male ~heorists l1

(19951, it is a study of her use of Hegel, Marx, Schutz and Garfinkel.

sociological problematic to be solved through writing the

thesis. For Dorothy Smith, the problematic was sociology

itself and she undertook the task of 'doing sociology

differentlyr early in her career-4 My assignment here was

smaller, and a description of its character is contained in

Karl Mannheim's Ideologic und U t o p i e (1929). where he argues

that 'there are modes of thought which cannot be understood as

long as their social origins are obscuredf .* What was the

problematic for my thesis in a sociological sense is what

would have remained obscured concerning Dorothy Smith's work

were her collected writings to remain as they now exist,

largely unexamined with the exception of a small but growing

body of criticism, published in article, review or essay form.

This criticism is, for the most part, I argue, superficial.

(See: Bandyopahyay, 1974; Harding, 1986; Cheal, 1990;

Collins, 1992; Connell, 1992; Harding, 1992; Lemert, 1992;

Clough, 1993, Doran, 1993; Hennessey, 1993; Weeks, 1995; Mann

and Kelley, 1997; Denzin, 1997; Helanan, 1997) . When I say

superficial, 1 mean that the essay or journal article form is

inadequate for in-depth studies, not that the authors of these

criticisms have created work that is without substance,

although the latter can certainly be confirmed in a few

Smith, D. E. 1994. "A Berkeley Education. In: Meadow-Orlans, Kathryn PI and Ruth A. Wallace, eds. G e n d e r and the A c a d e m i c Experience : Berkeley Wamen Sociologists . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. P- 5 5 .

Mannheirn, Karl. C19291. 1936. Ideology and U t o p i a : An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. P. 2.

instances. My task as a sociologist is demystificatfon.

As a final metaphor to explain the function of this

chapter, I turn again to my experience as a dancer, which

taught me about discipline- Every ballet exercise at the

barre begins with an arm movement called a 'preparationf - A

dancer's arm moves to the front and then to the side and is

often accompanied by a stretch of the foot as well. It is

performed to a few bars of music from the actual exercise.

The movement is deceptively simple, A whole chapter could be

written on the theory and training required to perform that

one unembellished movement. This chapter is a 'preparationr

for a long, intricate and demanding exercise. It will contain

'a f e w bars of musicf from the work to be done. Here, I have

looked at some aspects of the development of Dorothy Smithrs

thinking, and confronted what 1 have learned in my reading on

the women's movement and the sociology of knowledge. This

chapter is concerned with discipline, the creation of an

appropriate system of principles that will allow me to

rigorously restrict the choices I have made to complete the

exercise. The disciplining that took place in this chapter

put into place the organizational tools that were necessary to

manage what became a huge collection of materials, In ballet,

you cannot move every which way the wind blows, or it would

not be ballet, similarly, a dissertation means a scholarly

exercise where of necessity your thinking and writing must be

strictly prescribed, or it would not be a dissertation.

Inventing a Sociology of Rnowledge t A Theory for D i f f e r i n g W a ~ e n ' s M o v e a u m t s

Reverberations from the organized women's movement meant

that the way that the sociology of knowledge was written

changed forever, and in the 19709, feminist sociologists began

to write things differently- Their epistemologies, subject

matter, and methodologies were drastically revised to deal

effectively with the material conditions of women's lives.

The precedent within the sociology of knowledge for using a

social movement as a backdrop for knowledge creation comes

from the work of Karl Mannheim, who expanded on the historical

materialism of Marx. One of Mannheimrs conceptual frameworks

was the notion of 'contextual historicismf:

[The] sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical -social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only gradually emerges, .,it does not sever the concretely existing modes of thought from the context of collective action,

The women's movement as an ongoing social force that has been

realized in several historical and geographical locations is

what Mannheim would have formulated as a utopia. He would

have argued that the women's movement wasfis 'incongruous with

the state of reality within which it occursr.' The women's

movements depicted in this thesis, as they have existed since

the time of Margaret Fell, and the political activism that has

been taken up by the women involved, has largely been based on

Mannheim, 1936,

Mannheim, 1936,

OP-

OP-

a struggle for women's equality with men, In the sundry

historical contexts wherein the women's movement has ebbed and

flowed, women's equality with men has almost never been a

reality, not in its history and not in its present ontology in

the 1990sr despite what the status quo or the ideological

pressures of neo-conservatism would have us believe, and

despite the successes that the recent 'renaissancef for women

has achieved in the last twenty-five to thirty years- Thus,

one objective that the women's movement strived for, women's

equality with men, is frequently 'incongruousr with present

actualities.

The women8 s movement, embodying as it does a huge

literature and a vast number of representations of women's

lives, must be theorized in such a way to reflect the

empirical reality of Dorothy Smith's historical lineage and

lived life as well as her 6lan vital (lifework) - The womenf s

movement is also more than simply a political movement, as is

so often depicted. It also includes many cultural expressions

of feminist consciousness - in art, music, theatre and

literature. r have included examples of feminist culture,

particularly since Dorothy Smith has frequently demonstrated

an interest in the feminist arts, especially poetry,

To a some extent, I: will allow what I know about Dorothy

Smith's life and thinking to shape the limitations of what

data is included here- For example, Professor Smith once told

me that she was not explicitly 'taughtr feminism from her

mother and grandmother, or by having the figure of Margaret

Fell in her family background- Rather, what these women

37

imparted to her was a sense of the necessity for women's

independence, that women w e r e as capable as m e n , as deserving

of a good education as men, qualities which came from the

Quaker way of doing things, In contrast, she was also brought

up to have a deep respect for the skills required for women's

work in the home, - "1 didn't want to be a housewife, but I

honoured the work.u8 I hope to narrow my documentation to

women's everyday practices in the household, and analyze the

ways in which these endeavours were translated into the

political activism in differing historical settings of the

women's movement,

Another goal here is to make a case for the continuous

existence of feminist consciousness from the time period of

militant Suffragette activism in England (1905 - 1915) to the

present day in Toronto, Canada, The example of the Quaker

leadership of Margaret F e l l in Dorothy Smith's life comprises

an exception to this constancy, as there is a considerable gap

of 200 years from Fell's death in 1702 to the suffrage

activism of Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy Foster Abraham-

Albeit that the intensity and concrete formations of feminist

activism have changed over time, I attend to these changes,

demonstrating that feminist thinking and activism did not

entirely disappear, as is commonly thought, once women

Unstructured personal interview by the author with Dorothy Smith during lunch in the OISE/UT cafeteria, August 21, 1997.

achieved the right to vote.9 The claim for an ongoing

feminist consciousness that did not wane entirely between the

First and the Second World Wars, strengthens my argument that

there was a transference of a belief in womenrs equality

through the generations of women in Dorothy Smith's family.

Guida West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg have theorized the

progression of women's movements from a feminist perspective,

identifying four types of reasons why women have been drawn

into social protest: I) economic survival; 2) nationalist

or racial/ethnic issues; 3) humanistic/nurturing issues (eg.

world peace, the environment); and 4 ) women who become

activists on behalf of their own rights as women (the

suffragists, battered women and child brides) ,I0 The choices

of data in this thesis were selected with these motivations

for feminist activism in mind- Further, I: constructed

accounts of localized women's movements, that is, I have

followed the women's activism as it has been enacted in the

geographical sites where Dorothy Smith and the women in her

family have lived and worked.

More recent studies have shifted a focus on 'discontents,

grievances and psychological dispositionsr as explanations for

the rise and decline of social movements to an interest in the

availability of resources - 'money, expertise, access to

publicity and the support of influential groups outside the

West, G u i d a and Rhoda Lois Blumberg, eds. 1990. Women and Social Protest. New York: Oxford University Press. P. 278,

West and Blumberg, 1990, op. cit . , p. 13.

3 9

movementf *u Termed resource mobilization theory. this

approach is used to facilitate the exposure of the vital

character of the social movement under scrutiny. This kind of

inquiry is particularly suitable to the militant Suffragette

Movement, the Vancouver Womenr s Movement from 1968 - 1977, and the Toronto Women's Movement from 1977 to the present. The

Women's Social and Political Uion (WSPU) kept meticulous

records of the events and drives that were held to raise

money. Their financial records were superbly kept, due to the

excellent management skills of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who

was the societyr s treasurer. l2 Similarly, although the data

is not as accessible, the Women's Movement Archive Collection

at the University of Ottawa has considerable evidence of the

kinds of financial support and the media to which the

Vancouver and Toronto womenf s movements had access.

My framework for data selection includes accounts of

events which are evidence of women's confrontation with the

issue of racism in the organized women's movement. It can be

argued that Dorothy Smith has had to deal with the question of

racism at two levels: 1) in her own thinking, through

criticism that has been levelled at the 'standpoint of womenr

theory, notably in the symposium on her work published in

Sociological Theory in 1992. Her former student, Himani

Bannerji, refers to Dorothy Smith's struggle with 'her own

- -

West and Blumberg, 1990, op. cit.. p. 2 8 0 .

l2 Rosen, Andrew. 1974. Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women's Social and P o l i t i c a l Union, 1903 - 1914. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, P. 63.

work, problems of change with respect to inner and outer

racismf .= 2) The racism that is/was extant in the womenr s

movement, a widely acknowledged reality (See: Davis, 1981;

hooks, 1981; Harding, 1986; Smith, 1987; Stanley, 1990;

Goodleaf, 1993 ; Bannerji, 1995 and Agnew, 1996) . In creating

these accounts, 1 have avoided sentimentality, and a

standpoint of 'white guiltr, as I: am a white sociologist,

which is 'paralysing and self -def eatingr , l4 Further, I

concurred with Lise Vogel who stated that she 'resented the

common assertion that issues of race and class were not of

interest to [white] feminists until the 1980s'.~~ I have

provided evidence to the contrary, within the context of the

Canadian women's movement in Vancouver, from 1968 - 1977.

Avoidance of the issue of 'racef until the early 1980s was an

'ideologically dominant accountr of the way that women's

movement has been historicized, and not always accurate.16 I

have included two historical events involving the incidence of

racism in the womenrs movement relevant to Dorothy Smith: I)

the Indo-Chinese Conference held in Vancouver in 1971 where

Dorothy Smith was a delegate; and 2) the events surrounding a

confrontation with structurally endemic racism in The Women's

l3 Bannerj if Himani . 19 95. Thinking Through : Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti -Racism. Toronto : Womenr s Press, P* 111.

l4 Ryan, Barbara, 1992. Ferninism and the Women's Movement: Dyllamics of Change in Social Movement, Ideology and Activism. London : Routledge + P . 13 1.

" Vogel, Lise. 1995. Woman Questions: Essays for a Materialist Feminism. London: Pluto Press. P . 100 .

Press, part of the Toronto Women's Movement and a publisher to

which Dorothy Smith had submitted a prospectus for a book-

Finally, some thoughts on periodization, w h i c h must

accompany a project in historical sociology. Joan Kelly tells

us that through the development of feminist historiography,

traditional ways of dividing up time have become unsettled.''

Here, I expect to let the material that I have accumulated

dictate the way that it is divided up into time periods, and

since this data deals almost exclusively with wonen's lives,

it will of necessity include time periods that corres2ond with

the materiality of those lives, In the case of Margaret Fell

(1614-1702) , her conversion to Quakerism took place in 1752,

and most of her activity for women w i t h i n the Quaker Movement

took place within the next forty years. Her last trip to

London took place at age of 76, so a way of creating a time

period for the work of Margaret F e l l would be to look at the

years from 1652 - 1690 .le

Similarly, the militant Suffragette Movement and the

activism of Lucy and Dorothy Abraham provide a way of

confining the years of study, The Women's Social and

Political Union was formed after a violent incident at the

Manchester Free Trade Hall at a Liberal election rally in

l7 Kelly, Joan. 1984. Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly- Chicago: University of Chicago Press. P o 3.

Fell, 1710, op. cit., p. 2-14.

42

1903 ?' The first mention of the Abraham in for Votes f o r

Women (the first official publication of the WSPU) came on

October 7, 191OZ0, and they continued their involvement with

the organization until the outbreak of the First World War in

1914, Consequently, the periodfzation for the suffrage

activism of Dorothy Smith's mother and grandmother will be

from 1903 - 1914. It is an uncomplicated task to assign periods of study to

Dorothy Smith's lived life, She was born in Northallerton,

North Yorkshire on July 26, 1926- In 1955, after graduating

from the London School of Economics, she emigrated to the

United States with her husband, William Reed Smith, so a way

of periodizing her early life would be to divide it from 1926

- 1955. In the course of her academic career, sne has moved

several times, and these changes in geographical location lend

themselves easily to the creation of time periods. She

studied at the University of ~alifornia at Berkeley from 1955

- 1966, spent a brief time at the University of Essex at

Colchester from 1966 - 68, taught at the University of British Columbia from 1968 - 1977, and has remained at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of

l9 Pankburst, Dame Christabel. 1959. Unshackled: The Story of How W e Won the Vote. Edited by Lord Pethick Lawrence. London : Hutchinson. P . 50 -51.

20 Mrs. A. C. Abraham, Dorothy Smith's grandmother, is first mentioned in Votes for Women on this date, She is referred to in regard to a meeting that would have been held at Grange Road, Birkenhead (a village close to Liverpool) where she would have been the guest speaker, along with Miss Ada Flatman, who was the second paid organizer for the WSPU in Liverpool.

Toront~ from 1977 to the present day, My periodization of the

women's movements will correspond to these life changes, with

the exception of the period at Essex,

I have created a theorization of the women's movements in

this dissertation that lends itself to praxis. I began with

Mannheim, a traditional way of beginning an enterprise in the

sociology of knowledge, but whose own epistemology offers

little in the way of assistance for the construction of a

sociological enterprise that is concerned with women's lives,

I am concerned with a representation of the women's movement

that includes women's political as well as cultural activism,

and one which demonstrates an awareness of the ebbs and flows

of feminist consciousness that occur over time. It has

attended to the reasons why women became involved in feminist

activity, and accounted for the practicalities which are a

part of women's organizing with respect to money, connections

and access to the media, Evidence of the existence of racism

in the Vancouver and Toronto women's movements are included.

Finally, I have provided a rationale for periodization, in

that the thesis uses the method of historical sociology.

Problematizfrrg the Sociology of Knowledge

Then she replied, "Daughter, to give you a way of entering into the question more deeply, I will first carry away this first basketful of dirLtt2'

In sociology, the origins of social thought are usually

associated with the French Revolution and Enlightenment

thinkers, Les Philosophes - Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and

Mary Wollstonecraft, As a political event, the French

Revolution is a starting point for the awareness that leads to

sociology, During the Enlightenment, a separation occurred,

where the creation of new knowledge, rather than being

connected to established religion and the organized church,

became associated with the veneration of science. Science,

rather than God, became the widely accepted way to explain

phenomena. Previously, during the time of Renaissance

Humanism in Europe (16th century), social philosophy was

intimately connected to Christianity. For example, Martin

Luther's social thought consisted of a rejection of religious

brotherhoods as a form of social organization, as he believed

* that they inevitably became self -centredt . 22 Rather, he

advocated a community which emanated from a social theory

Pisan, Christine de. [I4051 . 1982. The Book of the C i t y of Ladies. New York: Persea Books, P. 16. These words are spoken by Lady Reason in The Book of the C i t y of Ladies, written in 1405. Lady Reason commanded Christine to lay the foundation of the city. I am making an analogy here - the work of our sociological fathers, or the 'foundationf of sociology, is represented as 'this first basketful of dirtf.

22 Trinkhaus Charles. 1983. The Scope of Renaissance Humanism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. P. 304.

based on ethics and 'religious sub jectivism' . 23 In contrast,

the work of L e s Philosophes displayed a discontent with their

political and economic system and the domination of the

Church, They argued that ideas should be based on science,

reason and rationality.

In this section I have highlighted the limitations of

some forms of the sociology of knowledge that have been

debated in succeeding generations of scholarly critiques. I

have argued that each new formation of the sociology of

knowledge that has emerged has been based on the criticism and

limitations that are 'discoveredr by the scholarship which

replaces it, I have established relationships between these

various authors, in some cases with each other. They all have

a connection to the work of Dorothy E. Smith, either one where

she has referred to their work or one where she has not,

In addition, I have developed a structure that attends to

the 'problematicg of each of the schools of the sociology of

knowledge studied, The concept of 'problematicg , or

problematique, attained currency in sociology in the late

1960s through the work of Louis ~lthusser.~~ Althusser

borrowed it 'from Jacques Martin to designate the particular

unity of a theoretical formationf ,25 He used the expression

in much the same way as Thomas Kuhn employed the word

23 Ibid.

24 Marshall, Gordon, ed. 1994, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. P. 418.

25 Althusser, Louis. El9651 . 1977. For M a n . Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Verso. P. 32.

'paradigmr or the way that Michel Foucault, a student of

Althusser's, created the idea of an e p i ~ t h e - ~ ~ The

Althusserian sense of problematic, grammatically, a noun, is

different from the usage employed in the work of P e t e r L,

Berger and Thomas Luckmann and Dorothy Smith who use the word

grammatically as an adjective, i-e,, 'the everyday world as

problematicr ,27 Berger, Luckmann and Smith employ it in the

connotation of a puzzle or problem of the social order which

can studied. Further, 'problematicr is treated differently in

the work of Berger and Luckmann and that of Dorothy Smith.

The 'problematic' for each author in the sociology of

knowledge shifts historically in meaning and use and I have

provided a sense of the ways in which it has been used and

understood,

The originators of the thinking that is now accepted as

the classical forms of the sociology of knowledge are G.W.F.

Hegel, because of his obvious connections to Marx's work,

Hobbes, Tbennies, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Frederick

Engels, and Emile Durkheim - the sociological fathers. I look

at the work of G - W - F . Hegel, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheirn .

Karl Marx must be studied in any serious analysis of the work

of Dorothy Smith, and she has criticized the work of Emile

Durkheirn. Hegel is included because of his connection to what

have become known as feminist standpoint epistemologies.

26 Jary, David and Julia Jary, eds - 1995 . Coll ins Dictionary of Sociology. Second Edition. Dlascow: Harper Collins. P. 524-

27 Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Smith, 1987.

47

Classical Fozms of the Sociology of Knowledge

~ormal sociological theorizing an4the sociology of

knowledge began in the work of Auguste Comte, who coined the

term sociology, and constructed his Law of Three Stages, or

the three stages of development in human thinking. He founded

his vision of sociology on a scientific model, using biology

as the prototype for the new discipline. Shunned by the

academic community, his eccentric ideas formed the basis of a

critique that was taken up by Karl Manc, and more intensively.

by Emile Durkheim. His best known work, Cours de P h i l o s o p h i e

Positive (1830) . did not receive one review and his mature years were accompanied by mental breakdown and increasing

idiosyncrasy. In his mid-thirties, he adopted a practice

called 'cerebral hygiener, wherein he refused to read any new

contributions to science, eventually limiting himself to

reading and re-reading a single book, The Imitation of

~ h r i s t . ~ ~ Cava ab homine unius libri (Be cautious of the man

of one book!)

Auguste Comte was conservative in the extreme when it

came to ideas about 'the Woman Question' and women's

emancipation, despite his long time connection to the Utopian

socialist, Saint-Simon. He argued against equality of the

sexes, believed in 'the natural subordination of womenr and

tried to provide a biological basis for women's intellectual

inferiority in his Cours de Philosophie P o s i t i v e ( 1 8 3 0 ) . He

" Coser, Lewis A. 1971. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. New York: Harcourt , Brace, Jovanovich . P . 4 - 18 -

felt that women would be attracted to him as disciples because

of the stress he put on the emotion of love, and he called the

female sex 'Wornan..-the spontaneous Priestess of H~manity'.'~

Durkheim based his theory on a critique of Auguste Comte,

but Marx and Engels based their early ideas on a confrontation

with the philosophy of G-W-F- H e g e l . There is a minor

connection to Hegel for Dorothy Smith, to be found in Sandra

Hardingrs ground-breaking analysis of four 'standpoint

theoristsr, in The Science Question i n Feminism (1986) - These

were Dorothy E, Smith, Hilary Rose, Nancy Hartsock and Jane

Flax, who refer to the master and slave metaphor in the work

of Hegel in the creation of their 'episternologie~'.~~ Harding

characterizes their use of Kegel this way:

The feminist standpoint originates in Hegel ' s thinking about the relationship between the master and the slave and in the elaboration of this analysis in the writings of M a r x , Engels, and the Hungarian Marxist-theorist, G. Lukacs. Briefly, this proposal argues that men's domination in social life results in partial and perverse understandings, whereas women's subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and less perverse understandings. Feminism and the women's movement provide the theory and motivation for inquiry and political struggle that can transform the perspective of w o m e n into a I1standpoint" - a morally and scientifically preferable grounding for our interpretations and explanations of nature and social If fe?

29 Kandal, Terry R. 1988. The Woman Question in Classical Sociological Theory. Miami : Florida International University Press, P . 74-79.

30 Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in F e m i n i s m . Ithaca. New York: Cornell University Press. P. 141-160.

31 Harding, 1986, op. cit., p. 26.

Scholars who use Dorothy SSmihrs SOK method for the discovery

of how a particular knowledge claim organizes social life

often begin with the 'point of departurer termed by her as

'the standpoint of ~omen'.'~ The metaphor from Hegelian

philosophy that Dorothy Smith refers to briefly in the

creation of the 'the standpoint of womenf came from his

Philosophy of Mind, first published in 1807, The section of

this work that is cited by Dorothy Smith, as well as the above

mentioned feminist writers, is a sub-section under the title

of 'Self-Consciousnessr called 'Independence and Dependence of

Self Consciousness: Lordship and B~ndage'.'~ In Hegelian

philosophy, the human relationship of lordship and bondage is

a primary one, 'the immediate relationship established by

nature between two persons'.34

Dorothy Smith rejects the idea that her thinking is in

any way indebted to Hegelian philosophy, or the 'lordship and

bondagef metaphor, although she admires Sandra Karding 'for

taking on the big boys in philosophy with a big smile on her

face' in the early women's movement in the 1970s.'~ She is

does not characterize her 'standpoint of womenr as an

l2 Smith, D. E. 1979. Sociology for Women.11 In: Sherman, Julia A- and Evelyn Torton Beck, eds . The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of mowledge. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. P. 163-172.

'' aill lie, 3. B., tr. 1967. The Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel. London: George Allen and Unwin. P. vii.

34 Harris, IF. S. 1983. Hegelgs Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801 -1 806) . Oxford: Clarendon Press, P , 120.

35 Unstructured interview by the author during lunch with Dorothy E. Smith, August 21, 1997.

epistemology, and calls it a method. Hegel is important to

the sociology of knowledge because of Mancrs heavy criticism

of him, and to the SOK because the 'master and slaver relation

was referred to in creations of the feminist standpoint,

T. B. Bottomore states that although Marxr clearly aspired

to develop a 'science of societyr he never used the term

'sociologyR, despite the fact that the phrase was widely

circulated by his contemporary, Auguste Comte. Given that

Comters work was receiving considerable attention in France

and England, Marx began to read it, but only after 1866. He

held Comte and his followers in low esteem:

[He] judged it greatly inferior to Hegelr s writing- Despite its anti-theological appearance, the positive philosophy seemed to him "profoundly rooted in the Catholic soilt1. He scornfully remarked, in connection with one of Comtefs English disciples, "Positive philosophy means ignorance of everything positiveu . 36

Marx dismissed Comte's work without feeling it necessary to

criticize it in detail, and most likely formed his opinions on

the writing of Camte's followers in England and France. His

antipathy was related to the certainty that positivists wished

to impose their doctrine on the labour movement, and he also

rejected any f o n of ideology, especially Comters Religion of

Humanity, 37

Beginning the creation of a science of society at the age

of 25, Marx based his early work on a critique of G.W.F.

36 Bottomore, T. M. 1956. K a r l M a r x : Se lec ted Wri t ings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill. P. 13.

37 Ibid, p . 14.

FIegelr s PhiIosophy of Right (1821) . He had received his doctorate in 1841 from the University of Jena, where he

submitted a thesis called "On the Differences Between Natural

Philosophy of Democritus and Epicuras . The dissertatf on was also an inquiry into Hegelian philosophy. Marxrs commentary

on Hegel was part of a larger clamour that arose from liberal

writers at the time, who viewed the Philosophy of Right as 'an

authoritarian doctrine of the stater." The style of Marxrs

commentary on the Philosophy o f Right was to work from a small

quotation of Hegel's work, and to follow with some criticism:

Hegel* 2 7 7 . If The individual functionaries and agents [of the state] are attached to their office not on the strength of their immediate personality, but on the strength of their universal and objective qualities- Hence it is an external and contingent way that these offices are linked with particular persons "

Marx'a Commentary-. Hegel speaks here as if the activities of the state were related in only a "contingentw way to individual personalities. This is absurd- The functions of the state are necessarily related to individual persons, because of the essentially social nature of individual human beings. 39

Marx' s critique of the Philosophy of Right was accomplished in

1843 in Paris, where he and his wife Jenny had emigrated from

Germany to escape a reactionary social atmosphe~e.'~ The

notation on the Philosophy of Right was the beginning of an

38 Baillie, 1967, op. cit., p. xxviii.

39 Quoted in: K a i n z , Howard P. 1974. Hegel's Philosophy of Right w i t h Marx's Commentary: A Handbook for Students. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. P. 54.

*O Coser, 1971, op. cit., p. 61.

attempt by Marx, in his early writing, to trace the linkages

between particular philosophies and the social context from

which they emanated, particularly in respect to the class

positions of individuals 'and the historical situations of

those who uphold themr ,41 When the sociology of knowledge was

created in Europe in the 19209, and Hegelrs popularity was

revived, this initial writing of Marx is widely understood to

be its starting place. During his lifetime, Marx was unknown

in academic circles.

The Holy F a m i l y or C r i t i q u e of Critical C r i t i q u e (18451,

the first collaborative project of Marx and Engels, was an

attack on 'the insipid pretentious articlesr that were

published by the 'Freer group of Young Hegelians in the

publication R h e i n i s c h e Z e i tung (Rhine Gazette) . 42 M a r x became

the editor of Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, and assigned the

nickname of the 'Holy Familyr to the Bauer brothers and their

disciples, By attacking this faction, Marx was at the same

time criticizing the idealism in Hegel's philosophy. The

Bauer brothers used Rheinische Z e i tuag as a vehicle for their

reactionary propaganda, i . e, , their elitist ideas that only

'selected individualsr made history and ordinary people, the

masses, were passive 'ballast in the historical process'.43

Here is a humorous excerpt by Engels:

41 Ibid, p- 53.

42 D ~ x o ~ , R., tr. 1956- K. Marx and F. Ekzgels. The Holy Family or C r i t i q u e of Critical Critique. London: Lawrence and Wishart. P. 278.

43 Ibid.

It goes without saying - and histoq, which proves that everything goes without saying, also proves this - that Criticism does not become mass in order to remain mass, but to redeem the mass from its massy massiness, that is, to raise the popular way of speaking to the critical language of Critical Criticism- It is the lowest degree of humiliation for Criticism to learn the popular language of the mass and transfigure that vulgar jargon into the transcendent intricacy of critical criticism (19) .

This first volume written by Manc and Engels was a scathing

invective directed at what they felt was the Bauer brothersr

offensive and partisan idealism, as well as an outrageously

amusing lampoon of their style.

The K o l y Family is the initial setting in Man' s work to

point out that it is human beings who make history through

their own interaction, that there is no abstract process that

makes things happen. Here, Marx establishes that ideas of

themselves are without agency, that men and women are required

for their realization in the world. For example, in the

segment written by Marx called "The Revealed l1Standpointl1

Mystery1@, he criticizes Bauer's attempt to re-make Hegelian

concepts, Bauer audaciously renames Hegel's concept of

'Absolute Knowledger and calls it Criticism and changes the

term ' self-consciousness' (the H e g e l i a n term for sub j ective

thought) to standpoint. Marx points out the limitations of

using the term Criticism:

It must be shown, on the contrary, how the state, private property, etc., change human beings into abstractions, or are products of abstract man, instead of being the reality of individuals, of concrete human beingse4'

This critique of M a r x toward "criticismr is almost identical

to the objection to traditional sociology that Dorothy Smith

begins to formulate in her graduate student days at the

University of California at Berkeley, in that she could not

find real life in the abstractions that sociology at that time

used in its theory and practice. For the SOK, Dorothy Smith

employed this kind of thinking to question the process that

takes place when knowledge becomes an objectified form, when

human activity becomes objectified,

The German Ideology, written between September, 1845 and

the following summer of 1846", is unquestionably the most

important work of Karl Marx to influence Dorothy Smith's

creation of the S O L Its ideas have continued to attract her

throughout her career. Marx's overall problematic in the

Althusserian sense is the evolution, throughout his work, of

the way that ideas and material conditions are conceptualized.

Althusser identifies The German Ideology as a point in Marx's

work where there is an epistemological break. Marxrs former

problematic is one of 'ideologyr, whereas in The German

Ideology he formulates Max's new theoretical formation as

'the science of historyr .46

The complete version of this book is 700 pages long, and

contains an even more sophisticated critique of Marx's German

contemporaries, Feuerbach, St irner and Bauer , than The Holy

45 From: Arthur, C. J., ed. 1970. The G e m a n Ideology. P. 1.

Althusser, 1977, op. cit., p. 33-34.

55

~amily ." It is herer in Part I, that M a n c and Engels

formalize their We2 tanschauung called historical materialism,

as well as the idea that 'man produces himself through

labourf ." For Dorothy Smith, the most salient theme in The

G e m Ideology is Mancrs emphasis 'on the practical activity

of men [sic] f 4 9 :

the circumstances which are held to shape and form consciousness are not independent of human activity, They are precisely the social relations which have been historically created by human action. Hence the importance of "practicew in Marxr s work,

Part I1 of The German Ideologytakes up a critical analysis,

line by line, of Max Stirnerr s book called Der Einzige und

sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own) (1844). The final part of

The German Ideology sets out for the first time what Marx and

Engels envision as a 'true socialismr, Here, they insist on

the need 'for studying real social relationsr

The use of The German Ideology as the primary

epistemological ground for the construction of her method is

referred to by Smith as 'an extrapolation of materialist

ontology'; however, she sees the materialism in The Geman

Ideology as limited, in that it 'stops short at a materialism

47 Ibid, p. 1.

4B Arthur, C * J., ed. 1970. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Geman Ideology: Part One. New York: International Publishers. P 21,

Smith, D. E. 197433. "The Ideological Practice of Sociology.@@ Catalyst, 8, 39-54. P. 42.

Arthur, 1970, op. cit., p. 21.

Ibid,

enabling the investigation of the social relations and

organization of consciousnessr~s2 She argues that it was the

material reality of Marx's age that hindered him from the

actual

locate

class,

study of social relations - M a r x went so far as to

the production of knowledge within a certain ruling

however :

[The] conditions for the exploration of a differentiated social consciousness, a social consciousness as differentiated practices and relations, did not yet exist- The forms that were prototypical in M a n c r s day, have in our times emerged as a complex of loosely co- ordinated functions of organization and regulation vested in texts and documents and increasingly in computer software and data banks, Information, knowledge, reasoning, decision-making, control. etc.. become properties of external organf zation and technological forms. 53

The limiting character of Marxrs work for Dorothy Smith was

not due to any failure in the construction of his vision, it

was the underdevelopment of social relations as they were

historically located, i . e . , 'history itself has supplied the

reality of what could formerly be arrived at by a conceptual

leap ' . 54 The SOK, it could be w e d . was founded in Ma=' s

historical materialism but was contingent on a certain

historical development, What Marx and Engels argued in The

German Ideology is that consciousness cannot be separated from

'' Smith, D. E. 1990b. Texts. Facts and F e m i n i n i t y : Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. P. 6- 7.

53 Ibid, p. 8.

54 Ibid.

the individual, and hence, the actions of individuals, 55

To a lesser extent, Dorothy Smith has referred to T h e

Grundrisse: Foundations of the C r i tique of Political Economy,

originally a notebook outlining a project of a six. volume work

on economics, and was eventually realized as the three

published volumes of Kapi t a l . 56 She identified T h e Grundrisse

as Marxrs critique of Hegel, who created philosophy that

allowed for a disjuncture between abstract thinking and the

experience of real human beings5' ,-

H e g e l fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from-abstract to concrete, reproduces itself as the concrete in the mind- But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. sB

In Hegelian philosophy, there was no possibility for a

knowledge that was socially organized, because the concrete

existed only in the mind. Dorothy Smith also cited The

Grundrisse in "The Sociology for Women" (1979) . Here, The

Grundrisse is used to augment the reader's understanding of

the powerlessness experienced by individuals in local social

settings under what she terms 'the relations of ruling'. When

55 Smith, D. E. 1987a. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P. 123.

56 M a n , Karl. 1980. Grundrisse. Edited by David McLellan- London: Macmillan. P. 12.

57 Smith, D- E. 1990a. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Khowledge. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P. 209,

Ibid, p. 2 0 8 .

the social relations in production became the abstraction

known as 'commodity'. the organization of human activities

became 'external and beyond the power of individuals to

control' ." For the SOK. the implication was that direct

experience of human beings was permeated by organization

external to that experience.

The Poverty of Philosophy, written in the winter of 1846-

1847, quickly followed the completion of The G e m

Ideology. 60 It was a critique of Proudhonr s Philosophy of

Poverty (1846), and evidence of the breach between them. To

Marx, Proudhonrs work was flawed because he failed to

understand that the abstract categories which represented

economic relations were ephemeral. For Proudhon, the nature

of human beings was not tied to an historical setting, but to

economic conditions. In Marxrs sociology of knowledge, the

context was important, but it was also time-bound:

Economists explain how production takes place in the above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth, M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, abstract thoughts, has merely put into order these thoughts, which are to be found alphabetically arranged at the end of every treatise on political economy. The economist's material is the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhonr s material is the dogma of the economist^.^^

59 Smith, D. E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. P. 95.

60 Marx. Karl. 1963. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers. P. 7,

M a r x , 1963, op. cit., p. 105.

The Poverty of Philosophy. although cited in n a m e only in the

work of Dorothy Smith, also contributed to the development of

the sociology of knowledge. Marx refined Proudhonrs work by

suggesting that the history of ideas (the sociology of

knowledge) must be seen as more than a chronological list. but

as part of a sociohistorical setting-

In The Poverty of Philosophy, M a n differentiates between

productive forces and material reality- Humans have no

control over their productive forces. which they inherit from

a former generation:

It is superfluous to add that men [sic] are not free to choose their productive forces - which are the basis of all their history - for every productive force is an acquired force, the product of former activity. The productive forces are therefore the result of practical human energy; but this energy is itself conditioned by the circumstances in which men [sic] find themselves, by the social form which exists before they do, which they do not create, which is the product of the preceding generation,62

This passage and Marx's formulation of the productive forces

supports Dorothy Smith's argument above, that in Marx's time

the social consciousness necessary for the examination of the

way that knowledge organizes social life was not possible.

The productive forces necessary for allowing the examination

of knowledge's organizing qualities w e r e produced by Marx, but

at the same time unavailable to him.

Frederick Engels, more than Karl M a r x . provided the most

creditable beginnings for a theory of socialist-feminism in

The Origin of the Family, P r i v a t e Property . and the State

62 Marx, 1963, op. cit., p. 181.

(1874). K a r l Marxrs direct treatment of 'the Woman Questionr

was very sketchy indeed, and is limited to cursory examination

in The German Ideology, Das Kapital , and receiving only

slightly more attention in The Manf fes to of the C o m m u n i s t

P a r t y (1848) , In The Gernan Ideology, Marx referred to the

emancipation of women in the chapter called True Socialismm,

but rather than advocating this belief directly, he refers to

it only as a vehicle for criticizing the 'sheer nonsenser of

Herr GricULrs treatment of saint-~imon? Women are theorized

in The German Ideology only as part of a larger analysis of

the family.64 There are two important references to the

exploitation of women in Das Kapi ta l : one is an account of

the death of the twenty-year-old milliner, Mary Anne Walkley,

from overwork; another is with regard to cheap labour, where

he intimates that the hiring of women and children depreciates

the value of the man's labour power, and that women were still

hired to haul canal boats or 'narrow boatsr65, and women's

63 M a n , Karl and Frederick Engels. 1976. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. P. 525,

64 Vogel , Lise . 1983 . Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. P. 49-

65 'Narrow boatsr are small, thin, wooden boats covered in on the top like a tiny house-boat. They are still used in England as pleasure craft. Today, they are usually painted in pastel colours, and there may be more than one colour used on the boat. Originally, they were used to haul materials in small canals to and from the woollen mills during the industrial revolution. They would be dragged in the canals by horses or by women. The women would be waist deep in water while performing this work.

use-value was 'below all calculationr , 66

F i n a l l y , The Manifesto of the Communist P a r t y (1848) . provided a larger analysis of the subordination of women, His

linkage of the position of women in marriage to that of

prostitutes was d e m e a n i n g to all women, as if prostitutes were

not for the most part women, and often the supporters of a

family, and in so doing, 'reduced the family relation to a

mere money relationr . 67 Despite these awkward beginnings,

which reflect the sexism that was a part of Marxrs historical

setting, this attention to 'the Woman Questionr was part of

the source for the emergence of Marxist-feminism in the late

1960s, which Dorothy Smith adopted with such interest in the

Vancouver Women's Movement.

It could be argued that as a sociologist of knowledge,

Emile Durkheim was Marxrs opposite. Where Marxrs thinking

about the social was connected to economics and ideology,

Durkheim8s social thought was linked to a moral sense, to the

idea of boundaries, the external constraints that are imposed

on human lives, and the notion of a collective consciousness.

Two generations later, Durkheim was still talking about the

same ideas created by Auguste Comte, and his career mirrors

the same stages as Comtersr in that there was an enthusiasm

that was evident at the beginning which waned at the end?'

66 The W o m a n Question: Selections from the Writing of K a r l Marx, Frederick Engels, V. 1- Lenin, Joseph Stalin. 1951. New York: International Publishers. P. 27-28.

67 Vogel, 1983, OP. it., P. 51.

68 DurWleim, E m i l e . 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press, P. 9 .

The dedication to the English translation of Dulrkhef mr s

Suicide (1951), reads: T o Those Who, with Durkheim,

Understand the Life of Reason as a Moral Commitmentr,

In his first book, The Division of Labour in Society,

based on his dissertation published in 1893, I argue that

Durkheim drew from Comters w o r k extensively in an uncritical

way. Durkheim believed that his forerunners 'aroused a great

deal of scepticism towards sociologyr and was most likely

concerned with presenting Comte in a favourable light?' In

theorizing that the division of labour in society was the

setting w h e r e social solidarity can be found, Durkheim uses

Comte to support this view. Here Durkheim quotes from Cours

de Philosophie Positive:

[One] applies it [the division of labour] to the totality of all our diverse operations of whatever kind, instead of attributing it, as is ordinarily done, to simple material usages, It is thus the continuous repartition of different human endeavours which especially constitutes social solidarity and which becomes the elementary cause of the extension and growing complication of the social organism,

This non-judgemental treatment of Comte continues throughout

The Division of Labour in Society (1933), becoming an

extrapolation of ComteDs conception of the family, human

happiness, as his authority on demography, co-operation, the

biological basis for sociology, the history of an hierarchy of

69 Thompson, Kenneth, ed. 1991. Readings from Ernile Durkheim. London: Routledge, P. 15.

Durkheim, Emile, 1933. The Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press. P. 62.

Ibid,

the sciences and evidence for the moral imperfections of the

division of labour, its anomic qualities and the indictment of

'degrading the individual by making him [sic] a machiner . 72 In

contrast, Warren Schmaus argues that Durkheirn was critical of

Comte, and saying that he 'failed to establish a tradition of

research in sociologyr and did not allow for 'an intellectual

division of labour' . 73 However, Schmaus supports this

reasoning based on the examination of original journal

articles written by Durkheim around the turn of the century,

and not from the book, The Division of Labour in Society,

first published earlier in 1893. Schmausf scholarship on

Durkheim's later work reveals a critical approach to Comte:

According to Durkheim, Comte's sociology reduces to the single problem of discovering the law according to which all societies develop- Once Comte solved this problem through proposing the three-state law, Durkheim said, there was nothing left for anyone to do. 74

To Durkheim, Comte's Law of Three Stages was limited in

usefulness for historical analysis as well, in that it

'expresses no causal relations but only a lrsummary glancem of

the history of mankind [sic] ' ."

Durkheim's mature writing also included a critique of

Marxrs religious views found in

73 Schmaus, Warren- 1994-

a review that he wrote in 1897

Durkheimgs Philosophy of Science and In te l lec tua l P. 21,

74 Ibid,

75 Ibid,

- - the Sociology of Khowledge: Creatinq an Niche. chicago : university of chicago P r e s s .

of Antonio Labri olar s Essai sur la Conception Mat&iaZiste de

lW..stoire (Essays on the Materialist Conception of ~istory) :

Not only is the Marxist hypothesis unproved, but it is contrary to facts which seem well established- Sociologists and historians tend more and more to meet in the confirmation that religion is the most primitive of all social phenomena. From it, by successive transformations, have come all other manifestations of collective activity: law, ethics, art, political forms, and so on, Everything is religious in principle. ''

Durkheimf s form of the sociology of knowledge is based on a

critique of the limitations of Comte's Law of the Three Stages

and the anti-religious posture of Marx-

Dorothy Smith wrote a feminist critique of Emile

Durkheirnrs The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) in an essay

called lrSociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchyw

(1989). She stated that early sociological writing created a

'constitutional f o m for sociology, in that Durkheim and

others created the 'normal practicer of writing objectified

knowledge, that continues to organize the way that present-day

sociological texts are written.77 Durkheim's rules create

objectifications which 'ascribe agency to law or customr so

'thinking and feeling can now be treated as objectified agents

acting on and controlling individualsr7':

Such methods operate within and give technical substance to the parameters of

'6 Quoted in: Thompson, Kenneth, ed. 1991. Readings from Ernile Durkheim. London: Routledge. P. 30.

77 Smith, D- E. 1989~. llSociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy. l1 In: Wallace, Ruth, ed. Feminism and Sociological Theory, London: Sage. P. 45.

the discursive space organized by the founding fathers- They realize as sociological practice 1 ) a discursive universe vis-a-vis which the subject is positionless - she cannot locate its presences in relation to the actual. site and situation of her reading; (2) the suppression of the presence of subjects as others whose presence defines the reader, who are related to the reader in and through the text; (3) the constitution of the boundaries demarcating sociology from other disciplines and establishing an internally referential universe of entities; (4) the constitution of a self-contained discursive world that does not require (let alone insist on) a reflexive grounding in actualities for its sense or, while dependent on actual individuals to produce what it recognizes as phenomena, require their active presence to be registered in the textJ9

Smithrs argument was that through Parsons treatment of

Durkheim, agency was transferred to sociological concepts, and

though Robert Merton suggested the creation of middle-range

sociological theory, and Kingsley Davis declared the collapse

of functionalism in 1959, the organization of sociological

knowledge was already established by the fathers of sociology.

This space was allocated to an analysis of Lady Reason's

'first basketful of dirtr, the epistemological limitations of

some of the fathers of sociology, establishing what is

'problematicr or paradigmatic in the work of these classical

authors. I have incorporated the weaknesses that have been

observed from traditional sources, as well as Dorothy Smith's

feminist critiques. My argument is that new epistemologies in

the sociology of knowledge are often imagined and formulated

on the perceptions of the weaknesses and limitations found in

'' Ibid, p, 48,

the work of writersr contemporaries, as well as their

forerunners,

Critical theory was established through the process of

Karl Marxrs analysis and final rejection of Hegelian idealism.

The critical style, initiated by the Young Hegelians and

refined by M a r x , has become an important part of the w a y that

much of sociological inquiry is practised, Indeed, without

criticism, sociologists w o u l d be left w i t h very little to do,

and our knowledge would have failed to develop as it has.

Without M a n c , sociologists would have become, according to

Comte, unemployed Great Priests of Humanity! Ma=, by his

cursory attention to 'the Woman Questionf provided the

theoretical linkage needed to bridge the gap between the

sociology of knowledge and the organized women's movement.

Durkheim, in his early work, apologized for sociologyr s

eccentric beginnings by attempting to demonstrate the

strengths of Comters seminal w o r k Cours de Philosophie

Positive (1830) . When he finally did render a critique of

Comte, it was accomplished after a careful analysis, unlike

Marx, who summarily dismissed Comters positive philosophy,

Perhaps the greatest epistemic weakness in the erudition

created by the founding fathers of sociology was their failure

to acknowledge, and their blindness to, the knowledges that

are particular to women. This has been taken up in the

feminist critiques of Dorothy Smith. Comte, for example, even

though he must have been aware of emancipatory themes that

were being advocated for women through the work of his mentor,

the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, failed to include them in

67

his own sociology, and, when theorizing marriage and the

family, put forward a biological argument for women's

inferiority.

Dorothy Smith appropriated M~Kx's materialism based on

the interaction of human beings in the world, as being the

starting point for the construction of the Social Organization

of Knowledge. She argued that Marxgs liability was not

contained in his epistemology, but in the particular

development and organizational- character of the social

relations that existed at the time of his reading an& writing.

However, she does criticize the work of the founding fathers

through an analysis of Durkheim, which she extends to all of

them by implication, with the possible exception of Marx. She

could not find the experience of women or men in their work

because of their mode of writing 'positionlessg versions of

howledge. Their epistemologies, with their weaknesses,

limitations and defects continue to organize the way that

sociology is conceptualized, written, and actually practised.

Neo-Classical Modela of the Sociology o f Knowledge

The social nature of knowledge creation was determined

through the work of the early sociological fathers. The

sociology of knowledge became a recognized subdiscipline in

sociology in the decade following World War I, through a

renewed interest in Hegelian philosophy and the work of Marx.

Karl Marxrs sociology had been disseminated beyond the

boundaries of Europe to the U.S.A., through considerable

68

numbers of Americans who studied there, particularly in

Germany and France- An extensive school of Marxist sociology

flourished, and one European survey covering the years from

1918-1925, counted '500 fairly important works-..on various

themes of Marxr s sociology~

By the beginning of the 19309, Marx's thinking had become

familiar to the faculty in the larger universities offering

degrees in the social sciences. It was this school of

quarrelsome debate among Marxist scholars that gave rise to a

new field called the sociology of knowledge, whose primary

contributors were Lukacs. Mannheim and S~heler-'~ Karl

Mannheim, in particular, is frequently acknowledged as the

creator the sociology of knowledge, but, as in the case of

most claims, this one is extravagant. German philosophers

had been writing about the social origins of knowledge for

some time, and this kind of approach was already extant,

though not named as such. in the work of the sociological

fathers. Karl Mannheim is examined here because of his

acceptance as one of the founders of the subdiscipline, and he

has been infrequently critiqued in the work of Dorothy Smith.

A poignant account on the life and intellect of Karl

Mannheim was written by Edward Shils, called simply, Varl

Mannheim" (1995) - When Shils died on January 23, 1995, it

80 Bottomore, 1956, op. cit., p. 45.

'' Nock, David A. 1993. Star Wars in Canadian Sociology: Zxploring the Sociology of mowledge. Halifax: Fernwood. P - 22.

was reprinted in The American Scholar. Shils' mentor, Louis

Wirth at the University of Chicago. met Mannheim in Germany in

1932, and became interested in his work, Wirth hired Shils to

be his research assistant, and instead of continuing with the

original research project that he was hired for, Wirth asked

Shils to help him translate Ideologie und Utopie , which

Mannheim badly wanted translated into English. Mannheimrs

objective was to become famous in the United States, and he

kept writing to Wirth about the translation. Shils said that

he 'was as fidgety, for no good reason, as a hen on a nest of

woodpeckers ' . Political instability dominated Mannheim's first year of

teaching at the University of Budapest. There were three

revolutions in one year. beginning in October, 1918. Although

there was no threat to his position, Mannheim chose a self-

imposed exile in Germany that year, He obtained a job as a

privadozent in sociology at the University of Heidleberg, when

Max Weber still held the chair. Here, his work on the

sociology of knowledge, specifically, several essays and

Ideologie und Utopie (1929) earned him an international

standing as a sociologist.s4 The second exile, one from which

Mannheim never recovered, occurred when Hitler was elected in

1933, and he fled to England to the London School of

Economics, which hired several scholars who were Jewish

83 Shils, Edward. 1995. "Karl M a n n h e i r n . " The American Scholar, 64, 2, 221-235. P. 226.

B4 Stewart, W. A. C. 1967. Karl Mannbeim on Education and Social Thought. London: George G. Harrap. P. 7.

European refugees, on compassionate grounds After the

forced emigration from Germany Mannheim was devastated, and it

left him, although a world-renowned sociologist, with a deep

sense of insecurity? The effect of the mass

destruction of the First World War on Europe generated a

renewed interest in Manc. Many European intellectuals thought

of the war as the realization of Marx's prophecy of the demise

of capitalism, particularly in Russia and Central Europe.''

Mannheirn was by no means an avowed Marxist (he was a liberal-

democrat) although he agreed that at that time in history.

there was evidence of increased power in the proletariat,

From Ma=, he certainly acquired the ideological nature of

thought, yet, 'he wanted to go beyond a Marxist orthodoxyr ."

Like many intellectuals in Germany who were his contemporaries

at the time of writing Ideologie und Utopie, he gave Marx and

Marxism a great deal of attention. Mannheim's 'problematicr

was the reworking of Marx to create a theory for writing the

history of ideas.

Mannheim felt that an intellectual's

concept of ideology was largely dependent

of Marx to which they adhered, and he set

Utopie to provide a history of its uses,

understanding of the

on the explanation

out in Ideologie und

The sinister meaning

Ibid, p . 12.

Shils,

Mannheim, Karl. 1952. Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Edited by Karl Keckskemeti . London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. P. 4,

88 Ibid, p. 4 .

that ideology often carries with it actually originated, he

tells us, with Napoleon:

The modern conception of ideology was born when Napoleon, finding that this group of philosophers [the mideologists~ in the tradition of Condillac, who rejected metaphysics] was opposing his imperial ambitions, contemptuously labelled them wideologistsm, Thereby the word took on a derogatory meaning which it has retained to the present dayea9

Through the development of Marxist theories. the meaning of

ideology underwent a metamorphosis. In Marxism, ideology was

associated with notions of class and political economy, and

its connotation went 'beyond the mere psychological level of

analysis.,.to pos i t the problem in a more comprehensive.

philosophical settingr

M a n provided a view of ideology that connected it to

'collective thinkingr, which evolved according to group

interests and a material ontology- In Marxist theory,

ideology lost much of its unfavourable tone:

As sociologists, there is no reason why we should not apply to Marxism the perceptions which it itself has produced, and point out from case to case its ideological character. Moreover, it should be explained that the concept of 'ideologyf is being used here not as a negative value judgement, in the sense of insinuating a conscious political lie, but it is intended to designate the outlook inevitably associated with a given historical and socia l situation, and the W e 1 tmschauung and style of thought bound up with iLg2

Mannheim, 1936, op. cit., p. 72.

Ibid, p. 74,

Ibid, p . 124.

92 Ibid. p. 125.

Further along in his analysis, Mannheim observed that Marxism

also addressed the issue of ideology as being 'a tissue of

His idea was that another group's thinking could be

explained by their social circumstances, and that ideology

could comprise a form of attack on another group's principles.

For him, knowledge was often linked to individual ideologies,

such as that taught in universities .g4

Karl Mannheim sought to improve what he called Schelerrs

' impractical and unclear' system by creating an objectifying

method for examining various knowledges, His critics have

usually resorted to arguments of relativism, which he

endeavoured to circumvent in three ways that he thought would

facilitate objectivity: I) that acknowledgement of the

problem would supply part of the answer; 2) as knowledge is

perspectival, the reconciliation of several perspectives will

bring about objectivity; and 3) the idea that the

intelligentsia were a classless, detached group. 95 All three

of these 'escape-hatchesr received stormy criticism.96

Dorothy Smithr s feminist critique of Mannheim is raised

around the issue of objectified forms of knowledge- Her

quarrel with the work of the founding fathers of sociology,

especially Durkheim, is extended to include MannheimOs

93 Ibid, p . 139-

94 Neck' op. cit . , p. 22.

95 Novick, Peter. 1988, That Noble Dream: "The Objectivity QuestionN and the American Historical Profession- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, P. 159-60.

sociology of knowledge, The following passage illustrates her

criticism of Ideologic und Utopie:

Thought is held to be a function of the life situation of the thinker, We can in effect forget about the thinker and move directly from the statements to the interests or perspectives identified with that life situation, into which the thinker is collapsed- The presence of the subject is redundant, needed only as a vehicle for the causal nerms. Subjectivity is not a necessary term in that relationOg7

The method Dorothy Smith developed called the Social

Organization of Knowledge seeks to rectify this specific

criticism, by making case for direct experience and

subjectivity as a starting place for knowledge.

Karl Mannheimrs sociology of knowledge never really

achieved any lasting influence, Later developments in the

sociology of knowledge (Barnes and Bloor, Berger and ~uckmann)

occurred 'without Mannheimr . 98 Sociologists who attempted to

keep the Mannheimian debate alive in the 1970s did not manage

to create a research method based on this work. Wittgenstein

and K u h n solved most of the epistemological problems generated

by Mannheirnrs work, and feminist work in the sociology of

knowledge has had contributed as well.99 Mannheim aspired to

become an eminent thinker on the standing of Kant, an

expectation that was never realized-f00

Smith,

Pels. Dick. 1996. "Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge : Towards a New Agenda. Sociological Theory, 14, 1, 30-48. P. 30.

LOO Shils.

The new sociology of scientific knowledge, based

originally on Marxist theory, formed after the watershed of

positivism and post-positivism that emerged after the

publication of Thomas K h ' s The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions (1962) * M a r x and Engels attitude to technology

was ambivalent, and, at some points characterized scientific

knowledge as belonging in the Unterbau (the economic sector or

the understructure), while at other times, they wavered and

located it as part of the CTberbau (the superstructure). One

source of the sociology of scientific knowledge was a paper

published by Boris Hessen, a Russian scholar in the history of

science, called "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's

Principiaw (193 1) . This essay was characterized as 'a

veritable manifesto of the Marxist form of externalismr, and

Hessen's work influenced the begi~ings of the M-ist

sociology of science in North America. lo'

These Marxist sociologists of science, as well as

Mertonian sociologists, who were active primarily from 1935 - 1965, continued to separate 'the conceptual content of science

from its social context8 .Io2 David Bloor, Barry Barnes,

Donald MacKenzie and David Shapin at the University of

Edinburgh sought to remedy what they viewed as 'a lack of

nerve and willr in the intellectual enterprise of the early

Marxist sociologists of science and believed there was no

lol Bunge, Mario. 1991. "A Critical New Sociology of Science." Philosophy of 21, 4, 524-560- P - 527.

Examination of the the Social Sciences,

distinction between the social context and the actual content

of s~ience.'~' The 'failure of nerver argument is crucial to

the Edinburgh Schoolrs Strong Programme, emanating from the

epistemological weaknesses of Mannheirn, who 'failed to carry

through the activist, relativist, and symmetrical impulses of

his own sociology of knowledge8 .la4

The scholars of the Edinburgh School, as it came to be

known, entered into what some sociologists regarded as an

abandonment of their disciplinary standpoint, by stating their

intent or 'problematicr was to study social causality as it

existed externally to the scientific sphere, through a

critical study of the actual content of logic, mathematics and

natural science. The four principles of the Strong Programme

were constructed to incorporate 'the same values that are

taken for granted in other scientific discipline^^.'^^ Here

is a partial iteration of these rules:

1) It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief states or knowledge. 2) It would be impartial with respect to the truth and falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure- Both sides of this dichotomy will require explanation, 3) It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation- The same types of cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs, 4) It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have to be explicable to sociology itself .lo"

'03 Bloor, David. 1991. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press- P. 4.

lo' Pels, 1996, op. cit., p. 3 8 .

Bloor, 1991, op. c i t , , p. 7.

Ibid.

Thomas Ki&n was the unequivocal hero of the Edinburgh School,

but Kuhn himself was uncomfortable with this role- The men in

this scholarly community adopted that part of Kuhnrs a r g u m e n t

which dealt with revolutionary science (the term 'revohtion'

was extremely popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s) even

though he had sought to describe both normal and extraordinary

science. Kuhn was not a radical but 'a moderate global

externalist historian', and he became concerned with his

reputation in the scientific corcununfty, due to the kind of

attention he was receiving from the Edinburgh ~chool,'~'

men so, Kuhn is still regarded as the inventor of the

sociology of scientific knowledge:

Why, then, has Kuhn been hailed as the father of the new sociology of science? For different reasons, namely because he is a relativist and a conventionalist, because he is inclined to favour irrationalism over either empiricism or rationalism, and because he rejects the idea that logic and method are stronger than intuition, analogy, metaphor, social convention or fashion, lo8

As well as appropriating the work of Thomas Kuhn, the

Edinburgh School developed the new sociology of science from

readings of Wittgensteinrs philosophy, primarily because Bloor

observed two aspects of his work as useful to sociology: 1)

the sociological and naturalistic sides of his thought and 2)

'he was remorseless in stressing the priority of society over

the individual , log To Bloor, Wittgenstein did not 'lose his

B ~ g e , 1991, op- c i t . , p. 538.

Bloor, of ffiowledge.

D a v i d . 1983. Wi ttgenstein: A Social New York: Columbia University Press.

Theory PI 1.

nerve' as Durkhefrn had, by limiting his sociological

explanations to a dependence on descriptions of primitive

religions, but failing to see his own social sphere as a

source of theory,110

Critical attacks were abundant for Barnes and Blcorrs

Strong Programme. Paul A- Roth commented in Meaning and

Method in the Social Sciences (1987) that if it werenf t for

the reflexivity clause, the Edinburgh School's Strong

Programme would have few redeeming qualities.r11 Roth

described the Strong Programme as 'voodoo epistemologyr,

arguing that the 'causality principle is unacceptably

vaguer.l12 His main criticism was that adherence to this set

of rules 'offer led] no prospect for generating an epistemology

independent of potentially distorting interestsr.'*

The criticism of the Strong Programme was so caustic that

David Bloor published a Second Edition of mowledge and Social

Imagery in 1991, with an afterward that addressed groups of

critics individually. Despite widespread censure, he refused

to substantively change the original postulates of the Strong

Programme in the new edition, and still supported a

'naturalistic understanding of knowledge in which sociology

Ibid, p - 3 .

Roth, Paul A. 1987. Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences. Ithaca, new York: Cornell University Press. P. 154.

11* Ibid, p. 188.

I* Ibid, p. 200.

plays a central roler This excerpt does not by any means

document the full extent of the criticism:

Rnowledge and Socia2 Iinagery has won few friends and many enemies, It has been denounced by sociologists as 'sociologically irrelevant ' and a ' failure (Ben-David, 1981, 46,541; by anthropologists as 'socio- centricr and incompatible with the 'unicityf of human nature (Archer, 1987); by cognitive scientists as 'recidivistr and 'recycling classical * . . text-book mistakes ' (Slezak, 1989) ; and by philosophers for being 'manifestly preposterousr and 'catastrophically obscurantistr (Flew. 1982) . Behind these errors critics have seen the sinister hand of ideology and have identified it as Marxist, irrationalist, anti-scientific and behaviourist,'l5

Additionally, the Wittgensteinian influence was criticized on

the grounds that the new sociology of science's ethnographic

description dissolved into a kind of positivism, and its

obsessive concern with the single laboratory setting is an

unsuitable bias in sociology. Steve Woolgar's work in the

sociology of scientific knowledge, called Science: The Very

Idea (1988), contained an analysis of Dorothy Smith's work on

textual analysis in "'Kt is Mentally Illw (1978) .'16 Smith

cites this kind of work uncritically on several occasions: 1)

to describe the 'extemalist' nature of knowledge; 2) to

demonstrate how the facticity of scientific accounts comes

aboutu7; and 3) Latour and Woolgar8 s Laboratory Life:

'I4 Bloor, 1991, op. cit.. p. ix.

Ibid, p . 163.

116 Woolgar, Steve. 1988. Science: The Very Idea. London: Tavistock Publications, P. 73-74.

I" Smith, 1990a, op. cit., p. 66, 71.

Social Construction of S d e n t i f i c Facts (1979) , to show how

ordinary language works in the recurrent contexts of social

organization.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmannr s The Social

Construction o f R e a l i t y : A T r e a t i s e in the Sociology of

mowledge (1966) was/is likely one of the most well-read books

in the sociology of knowledge. A few years ago it celebrated

the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication, and at least

two articles were written for this eventr Hans George

Soeffnerrs wReconstruction Instead of Constr~ctionisrn~~ (1992)

and Thomas Eberle8s "A New Paradigm for the Sociology of

Knowledge" (1992) - The book was important because it

'translatedr the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz into

sociological language. The Social Construction of Reality

(1966) was an effort by Berger and Luckmann to distance

themselves from the German as well as the Mannheimian

tradition in the sociology of kn~wledge.~'~ Berger was

concerned that previous formulations of the sociology of

knowledge had been 'overly concerned with the study of the

theoretical8, neglecting

society' in the everyday

in the 1920s, Berger and

Smith, 1990b, op.

'whatever passes for knowledge in a

world. 120 AS their predecessors did

Luc3intann located the beginnings of

Frisby, David. 1983, The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge i n Germany, 1918 -1933. London: Heineman Educational Books, P. 225.

120 Hunter, James and Stephen C. Ainlay, eds. 1986. Making Sense of Modern Times: P e t e r L, Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. P. 13-14.

their sociology of knowledge with a venture to understand

Marx, especially the concepts of the Unterbau/U&erbau

It is here that the controversy has raged about the correct interpretation of Marxrs own thought. What concerned Marx was that human thought is founded in human activity ("labourt1 in the widest sense of the word) and in the social relations brought about by this activity- 12'

They argue that their own exegesis represents an advance on

earlier thinking about Marx, particularly that of Scheler,

whose explanation of the linkage between the substructure and

superstructure was a vague conjecture based on 'some sort of

relationship between thought and an underlying reality other

than thought ' - u2

Berger and Luckmann's seminal work was a reworking of

Schutz into a more contemporary sociological epistemology and

combined Schutzr theory with the social psychology of Mead.

Peter B e r g e r had already begun the work establishing the

theoretical relationship between the sociology of knowledge

and the work of Mead in an essay called "Identity as a Problem

in the Sociology of Knowledger1 (1966) . Everyday life was 'an

ordered realityr which became objectified by the actor, and

was experienced as either temporally or spatially close or

remote. T h e everyday world was interpreted as 'problematicr,

that is, the material structure of everyday life was full of

121 Berger, Peter L- and Thomas Luckmann- 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. P. 6.

122 Ibid.

puzzles and complexities, What was problematic formed the

sub j ect matter of sociology- f23 The Soc ia l Construction of

R e a l i ty (1966) studied social interaction, identifying ' face-

to-facer reciprocal action as the most important. The quality

of action's dfrectedness or indirectedness, its degree of

anonymity, and its predecessors and successors all played an

integral role in a specific encounter, Relationships were

posited on a 'continuum of typifications ' or ' typif icatory

schemes which af eected social interaction-lz4

Language was of the utmost importance, and the most

significant sign system in human so~iety."~ A system of

meanings employed by a given society could therefore be

detected in its language. Language was also useful because it

made possible for individuals the ability to deal with what

they may or may not have experienced, and to accumulate

meanings and knowledge that could become inherited by future

generations. Through language, it was conceivable to

transcend the realities of everyday life, for example, in the

interpretation of a dream. The power of language enabled a

social actor to objectify his or her own existence, or allowed

for the build-up of a variety of 'semantic-fields' which could

be 'modes of indicating degrees of social intimacyr, thereby

allowing for the analysis of a conversation with regard to

lu Ibid, p. 19.

12* Ibid, p . 30-33.

12' Ibid, p, 41,

intersubjective closeness .U6 They use the example of the

French use of the words ' tur and ' vousr which both mean 'your ,

Intimacy can be detected on the basis of which word is used,

Use of the word 'tur in French cccurs in an intimate setting,

whereas the use of 'vousr signifies formality.

Berger and Luckmann also engaged with what they refer to

as the 'social stock of knowledgef, which included knowledge

of one's situation and its limitations. For example,

howledge of one's own work was likely to be very good,

whereas knowledge of othersr vocations was likely sketchy.

They saw human knowledge as structured in terms of relevances,

knowledge was socially distributed and possessed differently

on individual bases. They believed that knowledge of everyday

life meant being aware of the relevance structures of

others."' Locating themselves in the sexism of the 19608,

they remark, 'I know that "woman talkN is irrelevant to me as

a manr

The form of Berger and Luckmannfs sociology of knowledge

was that of phenomenological inquiry, a way of describing

experience, and a theory which sought to uncover various

layers of the social structure. The human social world was

presented as a product of conscious processes, the physical

world and how it was perceived. Their analysis marked an

important shift in the sociology of howledge, from the

126 Ibid.

12' Ibid, p . 42,

"a Ibid, p . 45.

history of ideas to that of the social construction of

everyday reality.ug There is a dearth of criticism of

Berger and Luckmannrs work in North American scholarship, but

George Ritzer has faulted them for their preoccupation with

subjective reality- He claimed that they admitted to a need

for a Manc in order to achieve this, but did not comply with

this fundamental declaration. 13' Criticism of Berger and

Luckmann is more widely accessible in European sociology,

Thomas Samuel Eberlers tribute to Berger and Luckmann on the

event of the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Social

Construction of Reality (1966) , called I1A New Paradigm for the

Sociology of Knowledgem (1992), records one of their

shortcomings, like Ritzer, as the preoccupation with

subjective constr~ctionism.~' Another critique was the work

of Luis Sola, "The Impossible Marginalization of Epistemology:

Reflections on the Sociology of Knowledge of Berger and

Luckmann.lW Solars argument was that they clung to a

positivist tradition by continuing to make the 'hair-splitting

distinctionr between the theoretical and the empirical, which

he asserted are mutually dependent, and whose boundaries are

129 Ibid, p. 14-15.

I 3 O Ritzer, George. 1992. Contemporary Sociological Theory. Third Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill P . 253,

Eberle, Thomas Samuel, 1992, "A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge: The Social Construction of Reality after twenty-f ive years, " Schweizorische Zei tschrif t fur Soziologie, 18, 2, 493 - 5 0 2 ,

nebulous and difficult to define.u2 Uhfortunately for North

American scholars, many of the critical reviews of Berger and

Luchannrs work have been written in German, Swedish and

Spanish and are published in European journals-

Dorothy Smith has analyzed the everyday world as

'problematicf in a radically different sense. Contrary to

previous meanings of the term she 'shiftCs] it out of its

ordinary place within a scientific or philosophical discourse

and treat [s] it as a property of an actualf ty lived and

practisedr .=' An examination of the references to Dorothy

Smith's body of writing reveals that there are no citations to

Berger and Luckmann's well known book, She confronts many

similar themes in her own work, the interest in Schutzf

phenomenology, everyday life, in subjectivity, and in the

reading of Marx, yet she never engages with Berger and

Luckmannrs model of the sociology of knowledge. Many of these

authors' concepts are comparable to one another, for example,

Berger and Luckmannrs notion of 'institutionalization' and

social control is similar to Smith's 'the relations of

rulingr. Smith's lack of attention may be due to the

dissimilar ways in which she and Berger and Luckmann 'dor

sociology. What Berger and Luckmann have accomplished is

13' Sola, Luis. 1991. "The Impossible Marginalization of Epistemology: Reflections on the Sociology of Knowledge of Berger and Luckman.." Estudios Filosoficos, 40, 115, 555-561.

Smith, D. E. 1987. The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P, 91. For a more complete explanation of how Dorothy Smith has used the term 'problematic' see the index of this book.

purely theoretical, and although Dorothy Smith's Social

Organization of knowledge was based on theory, it was a

definite method, or an orderly, logical way to proceed in the

discovery of how objectified knowledge organized peopler s

lives- Although Berger and Luckmann began with Marx, he was

not given a serious analysis, which Dorothy Smith certainly

gave to Marx in her work. The subjectivity of Berger and

Luckmann was based on social psychology, and was conjectural

when it came to human motivation. They created scenarios and

imaginable exemplars in human behaviour, while Dorothy Smith

offered simply 'direct experiencer, leaving the researcher the

option to fill in whatever that experience may have been.

Berger and Luckmann argued that objectivity was internalized

by a human being, whereas Dorothy Smith followed the premise

that objectified forms of knowledge were contained in texts,

and were aperspectival. The area of investigation for Berger

and Luckmann and Dorothy Smith was fundamentally different, in

that her primary interest was in the 'textr as an organising

mechanism, whereas Berger and Luckmann made categories of

everyday life their field of study. She has never used their

work because she felt that although their contribution to

sociology was considerable, it was very different,13*

l 3 Personal communication with the author by telephone with Dorothy E. Smith, November 11, 1997.

8 6

Conc~usion

My objective for this chapter was to build a clear

outline of the theoretical direction and the guidelines to

which I adhered for the rest of the dissertation, I was

confronted with the task of narrowing and organizing a huge

mass of material that had accumulated in the course of my

research and so have provided practical ways for this data to

be arranged- I created principles to turn to when I needed to

make a decision as to whether or not a particular item, event,

person or idea should be included in my account. The theory

is simple and straightforward. The women's movement as a

social movement, with its relation to the household labour of

women, is described and analyzed in order to show how it

shaped the conditions enabling one woman's thinking in

sociology. Part of the rationale behind this sociological

enterprise was to provide a clarification of the lack of

understanding that has ox is likely to occur when the social

origins of an individual's thinking remain unexamined. This

chapter sought to explain the reason for Dorothy Smith's

desire to 'remake' sociology and her creation of the Social

Organization of mowledge, providing an overview of the

limitations of classical and neo-classical forms of the

sociology of knowledge,

CHAPTSR TIIREB

SOCrAL ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE: AN OVERVTEOQ

"YOU don't need to have nightmares, just stay awake-uf

Dorothy E, Smith is known principally for her work in the

area of feminist theory, but a good measure of her career in

sociology, especially in the last eight years (1990-1998) has

been devoted to the development of a method for studying

objectified, mainly textual forms of information. These

objectified forms of knowledge are detached from the human

activity from which they are constructed and give a 'bird's

eye viewr of the direct experience they are attempting to

describe. * She has been concerned with how this kind of data

affected what happened to real human beings in the course of

their everyday lives, or the sequence of 'what happens next8,

a method which she called 'the Social Organization of

Knowledger , The SOK is characterized as a procedure, but it

has a theoretical base that draws partly from the historical

materialism of Karl Marx and is feminist in its composition,

though it is capable of dealing with studies that are not

feminist in their style. In this chapter I offer an analysis

of the SOK that has not been attended to by Smith, in a form

that is not available in her publications.

First, this chapter is a descriptive precis of the

One of Dorothy Smith's quips at the end of a class, sometime in October, 1996.

Explanation of objectified forms of knowledge from a tape recording of Dorothy Smith's class called Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge, on September 19, 1996.

conceptual approaches of the SOK and how it differs from the

traditional sociology of knowledge, The Conceptual Practices

of Power (1990a) is Dorothy Smith's collection of essays on

the sociology of knowledge, so 1 will include examples from

this book as a way of illustrating how this method has been

formulated by her. Marie Campbell and Ann Manicom have

recently edited ffiowledge, Ejrperience and Ruling Relations:

Studies in the Social Organization of mowledge (1995), which

provided a number of essays written by Dorothy Smithr s former

students, and is, in fact, a textual. realization of the SOK

theory and method, Illustrations will be selected from this

work.

Secondly, I will produce an historical overview of how

this method has evolved in Smith's work, noting the points

where the women's movement and her thinking might be seen to

intersect. This account will be based on an analysis of all

of her published and a selection of her unpublished writing,

Thirdly, I: represent in an immediate way what it was like to

be a student in one of her classes, constructing a description

of the dynamics of that environment. This will be recreated

from a collection of tape recordings of two lecture series

called 1) Advanced Studies in The Social Organisation of

Knowledge (EDT 3928F) and 2) The Social Organization of

Knowledge (EDT 1928F) , which I compiled in the fall term of

1996.

A chronological frame that accommodates the contextual

transformations of the SOK method, and its characterization

from the standpoint of a student, extend the ways in which it

89

is already available in textual forms and assist in the

comprehension of this procedure. 1 approach this analysis

conceptually, as there are several ideas in the SOK which not

only change over time, but are at the same time transformed by

distinct social and intellectual forces - Moreover, while I

identify parts of the SOK as 'conceptsr, 1 stress that they

form the way to go in a procedure. The following lexicon is a

kind of SOK 'dictionary', and the principal components are :

'objectified forms of knowledger, 'social organizationr,

'direct experience', 'documents and 'text (s) ' , 'botanizingr ,

' text-reader conversationr , and finally, 'dis juncturer , The

subsections of this chapter will deal specifically with each

of these elements by showing the historical emergence of them

supported by examples from Smith's original work, The

analysis presented here is not meant to be one that is rigid

or prescribed, as that is not the way that Dorothy Smith would

wish the SOK to be taken up, rather, it is an outline of

suggestions, a guide rather than a set of rules.

Social O~ganization

Dorothy Smith began to publish her work in 1959, four

years before she graduated from the University of California

at Berkeley, when her first son David was only two years of

age- She was actively involved in the management of a home,

as well as her work as a graduate student. Smith's first

publication was based on her doctoral research, a study of the

organizational practices of a state mental institution- This

90

paper was called "Legitimate and Illegitimate Deviance: The

Case of the State Mental Hospitalm (1959). The style of this

paper adhered to a conventional, even functionalist way of

doing sociology- There are extensive references to Talcott

Parsons' analysis of 'the sick roler from his book, The Social

System (1951)- Despite these obvious constraints, she was

interested in the way that the older concept of 'lunatic1

rather than the contemporary characterization of the mentally

ill as 'sick peopler still continued to 'organizer the way

that mental asylums dealt with the problem of mental illness.

The voices of the people who made up the concept of the

'mentally illr never entered into her account. The frontline

worker, however, was given a voics, and a vocal presence, in

the second excerpt below, was also given to the physician:

As an attendant in charge of a ward once explicitly stated to a patient in rrry hearing: "You are here because you are not capable of thinking for yourself and It m here to do your thinking for youw.

I have divided in my own mind the custodial patient from the patient who will be leaving the hospital -- of course, they all do, but practically there are those who are more likely, It is treatment for all of them, but for the custodial patients it is more a question of making them feel better,-,From an interview with a doctor on the staff

The mentally ill, the real people who are being studied in

this account, are given no authority for their own experiences

Smith. D. E. 1959. "Legitimate and Illegitimate Deviance: The Case of the State Mental Hospital.I1 Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2, 1, 15-39. P. 26,

Ibid, p - 32.

as patients, and only the recognized members of the staff of

the state mental hospital are given the power to speak for

them. This was the conventional way of doing sociology when

Dorothy Smith was a graduate student, a method which reduced

the presence and actions of people in the world. human beings

which sociologists as practitioners claimed to be studying, to

the level of a concept. The sociological practice of writing

'positionless accountsr5 was still an accepted part of

sociological writing.

By the time her thesis was completed in 1963, her second

son Steven was only a nine months old and her husband had left

her. She was a single parent without a job- The way that

her dissertation was written formed at least part of the

theoretical foundation and a way of thinking that is a part of

the SOK. Here is her account of what happened with her

doctoral dissertation:

I decided that the thesis was all wrong, I'd tried to write two theses in one. 1 didnrt want to give up either, but I can't remember now what the other one was. But in order to write the one thesis that I decided should be written, I needed to understand organizational theory- I dropped writing for a year to read organizational theory. I did that on my own. And when I' d done, I: rewrote my thesis very rapidly.' (my emphasis)

For an analysis of the sociological practice of writing 'positionless accountsr, see Dorothy Smith's study of Durkheim in: "Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchyf1 (1989) . In: Wallace. Ruth. ed. Feminism and Sociological Theory. London: Sage- P- 44-48.

Smith. D. E. 1994. "A Berkeley Ed~cation.~~ In: Meadow-Orlans, Kathryn P. and Ruth A. Wallace. 1994. Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists . Lincoln. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. P. 50.

The role of organizational theory in the later construction of

the SOK is a central one. From this intensive study came her

interest in what actions came next in a series of events.

smith was interested, in her dissertation, in proving

that although the power behind the organizational structure of

the state mental hospital was nominally in the hands of the

physicians, or the psychiatrists, who were at the top of the

hospital hierarchy, the real organizational power was

generated from the frontline workers who dealt with the mental

patients on a day-to-day basis, Even at this early stage of

her career she was interested in disjuncture, or the

difference between what was present ideologically and

theoretically and what was actually happening:

[In? particular the analysis will attempt to make clear why a professional structure of controls which in theory should counterbalance the potentially irresponsible usage of power at the periphery does not work as it should,'

This doctoral work reflected the conventional methods and ways

of writing that dominated sociology in the late 1950s and

early 60s- Her thesis topic was taken up because it was

fitting, and because her husband, William Reed Smith, also a

doctoral student in sociology at the University of California

at Berkeley, was conducting research in the same mental

institution-' Her thesis supervisor, Erving Goffman, who had

written Asylums in 1962, told her dryly that 'there was

- - --

' Smith, 1963, op. cit., p. 47,

From a personal interview by the author Smith at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. November 11,

with Dorothy E,

1994.

nothing new to be written about state mental hospitalsr -' If one looks carefully at this early work, some obvious

intellectual origins of her later thinking can be found.

The first twelve years of Dorothy Smith's career were

spent on the analysis of various forms of organization. Her

first two publications based on her doctoral research were

studies of the organization of the state mental institution.

She also published an article on the complexity of medical,

organizations, based loosely on her thesis work in 1966, and

finally, in 1971, she wrote an article on the organizing

qualities of household space, or how the architectural

arrangement of family dwellings organized the behaviour of

individuals, family groups and communities. "Household Space

and Family Organizationm (1971) , like her doctoral thesis,

studies disjuncture or the difference between prevailing

ideological expectations of the particular community regarding

the disciplining of children and 'what actually happensr:

[An] informant reported that on a university housing estate where the children played in a common court surrounded by private apartments, communal norms prohibited using physical punishment. This area, and therefore the behaviour of adults to children in this area, was highly visible- The interior of the apartments, on the other hand, was secluded. My informant reported that he and his wife resolved the problem of discipline this rule created for them by bringing the child inside the apartment before smacking him. The peculiarity of this only came home to him when he discovered accidentally one of his

Smith, 1994, op. cit., p. 50.

94

neighbours doing the same.

The year that Dorothy Smith spent studying organizational

theory independently has provided much of the direction that

her intellectual interests have taken, even to the present- To

understand her method, it is critical to understand how this

came about, that her interest in social organization came even

before her formal adoption of feminist beliefs and the study

of M a n . It came about when she was a part of a way of doing

sociology that was conventional but which she always felt did

not reflect the real world and its actualities, Smith has

never abandoned this early grounding and fascination with

social organization.

At the level of her doctoral research, Dorothy Smith's

thinking on social organization was only beginning to be

formed, and she depended on the classical and contemporary

literature available at the time of writing her dissertation.

Works like Robert Michels Political Parties: A Sociological

Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy

(1915) formed the basis of the organizational principles in

the theoretical portion of Smith's dissertation. Michels

argued that to build a successful political party, the

internal policy should one where power was vested in the hands

of a few people in a dominant class.'' Her analysis of

Smith, D. E. 1971. DHousehold Space and Family Organization. l1 In Davies, E, 1. and K. Herman, eds. 1972. Social Space, Toronto: New Press. P. 85.

IL Smith, D . E , 1963. Vower and the Frontline : Social Controls in a State Mental Hospital." A Doctoral Dissertation Prepared for the University of California at Berkeley. P, 244.

Michelsr theory noted the power of an organization to

inf lueace 'what comes next' :

As Michels formulated "the iron law of oligarchytr it is a "tendencyI1 arising from the fact of organization for the attainment of definite ends, The term lr tendencytt is taken here to mean that given certain specified conditions, certain specific consequences will follow- l2

Also, Peter M. Blau and W, Richard Scott's Formal

Organizations: A Comparative Approach (1962) , was used for

the theory in her doctoral thesisJ3 Her conception of the

term social organization changed over time and within the

context of particular articles. In tr'Kr is Mentally Illtt

(1978)' for instance, social organization was an 'unintended

consequenceJ or an unplanned phenomenon that results from

social relati~ns-'~ Social organization, in the sense which

Smith usually uses it, was comprised of the taken for granted

aspects of social life, a world that is of itself, ordered,

and it is the sociologistrs task to uncover the 'tidinessr

that is inherent in human society.

I' Smith, D. E. 1965b. ttFrontline Organization of a State Mental Ef~spital.~~ Administrative Science Quarterly, 10, 3 , 381-399, P, 396,

1.3 For a more detailed analysis of the emergence and conceptualization of social organization in Dorothy Smith's early work, see Chapter Seven,

Smith. 1990b. op. cit., p . 13.

Direct Experience

In 1968, Dorothy Smith accepted a position at the

University of British Columbia after a brief, uncomfortable

stint (1966-68) at the University of ESSPY, Colchester, where

she taught organizational theory? Changes that came about

as a result of the incorporation of Marxism and feminism into

her thinking, and her immersion into the politics of the

Vancouver Women's Movement were about to make themselves felt

in the development of the SOK- Her early teaching did not

reflect a finished version of the method, as we learn from

James Heap's Foreword to KhowZedge, Experience and R u l i n g

Relations

The above

When I arrived on the campus of the University of British Columbia in 1969 I heard from my fellow students that I ought to take at least one course from Dorothy Smith. I did, Three times- The course was entitled 'Interpretive Procedures,' and it introduced us to Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, and Dorothy Smith. We came to earth from our flights of abstraction when we worked with texts or what we then called 'accountsr,,, political speeches, paintings, media reports, and research articles. It was in working with these accounts that we were able to discover what we could say, and what it made sense to say, using (and finally comprehending) the terms we had been absorbing: social organization, interpretive procedures, null point, reflexivity, practical ac~omplishment.~~

passage written by James Heap describes an early

formulation of the Social Organization of Knowledge. Smith's

l5 Tape recorded interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith at OISE/UT, November 11, 1994,

Heap in Campbell, 1995, op. cit., p. ix.

course in Interpretive Procedures, a forerunner of the SOK,

was imagined from its inception as a method:

The assumption made in this course is that actors use systematic procedures for making sense of what happens, what has happened and what others are doing; that it is possible to study these, to develop descriptions, analyses and ultimately and optimistically formal models of how it is done; and that such analyses will have something to say about the properties of form and organization which social action must have if it is to be intelligible.''

The reading list for the Interpretive Procedures class

included work by Herbert Blumer, Harold Garfinkel, Erving

Goffman, Michael Polanyi and Alfred Schutz, Specialized

reading in the area of linguistics and philosophy, including

Polanyi ' s Personal mowledge: Towards a Post-Cri t i c a l

Philosophy (1958) , was further suggested for students who

wanted additional study material-''

The University of British Columbia, however, was a

consematfve bastion within the intellectual community of

Vancouver. The Vancouver Women's Movement and Women's

Liberation began at the more leftist and radical environment

of the newly established Simon Fraser University, when female

leftist-activists formed the Feminine Action League 'to deal

with their exclusion from meaningful participation in the

l7 From the course outline in Interpretive Procedures 512 taught by Dorothy Smith in the Fall of 1970. I am grateful to my supervisor, James Heap, for providing me with a copy.

Is Ibid, p. 2.

struggles on ~ampus~.'~ Their first political act, in June

of 1968, and one that they did not consciously connect to

Women's Liberation, was to occupy the Board Room at Simon

Fraser University. The Board Room was eventually turned into

a child care centre, This was the beginning of a powerful

grass roots movement geared specifically to the advancement of

the status of women, that was to spill over into the entire

Vancouver community, including the more right-wing University

of British Columbia.

In Canada as a whole, the Royal Commission on the Status

of Women had been established on February 16, 1967, and in

April, 1968, a series of public hearings began to be held in

several Canadian cities, The actual Report of the Commission

was published on September 28, 1970-20 Women, and women's

issues were at the forefront of public consciousness, and

there was, at the same time, a widespread ferment of student

and leftist activism in Canadian universities. For Dorothy

Smith, the first stage of her conversion to Marxist-feminism

was the taking up of Marxism, and feminism followed very

quickly thereafter.+* The first fruit of this metamorphosis

in her scholarship was the article, "Women, the Family and

Corporate Capitali~rn~~, published in Women in Canada (1973).

l9 From the Women's Movement Archive Collection (WMAC) . Vancouver Women's Caucus. Item 161, "Women's Caucus - A History and AnalysisI1.

20 Report of the Royal C o d s s i o n on the Status of Women in Canada. 1970. Ottawa: Information Canada. P. ix.

21 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewichrs office, Lakehead University, October 18, 1994.

This particular work formed an important linkage in the

development of the S O L It consolidated the concept of social

organization with Dorothy Smith's recent appropriation of

Mancism, and her acceptance of the politics of feminism. This

chapter in Women in Canada (1973) is devoted to working out

Marxist ideas of social organization, including the private

sphere of middle-class and work5ng-class women under the

structure of corporate capitalism, Here, Smith provided a

brief discussion of how sociology had been traditionally

concerned with the construction of abstract categories that

say 'nothing about the social organization of relationsr .=

An examination of Dorothy Smith's earliest work in

sociology establishes just how radical the change was in her

thinking that came about as a consequence of her participation

in the Vancouver Women's Movement, and her acceptance of

feminist beliefs in the early 1970s- This change was one that

she has reiterated and emphasized throughout much of her

One way to provide evidence of this is to examine

the change that occurred in her sociological treatment of

direct experience, Writing an original contribution to a book

called A Sociological Framework for Patient Care (1966) . she called attention to direct experience in the essay "The Role

of Sociology in Medicine? Standard sociological accounts at

22 Smith, D. E. 1975. I1Women, the Family and Corporate Capitali~rn.~~ Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2 0 , 5 5 - 9 0 . P. 60.

23 This change in Dorothy Smith's scholarship and the impact of the early Women's Movement on her thinking is an experience which Professor Smith has mentioned to me on a number of occasions in the course of personal interviews,

this time diminished and even eschewed the relevance and value

of direct experience and personal accounts, The use of the

first person in sociological writing beyond anything further

than its scant use in acknowledgements, notes and the

conclusions of essays was considered f nappropriate ,

unscientific and a serious intellectual gaffe. Observe her

assessment of personal experience here in an analysis of

complex organizations:

As occupational, roles become parts of more complex structures and as they become more specialized, personal qerience becomes increasingly inadequate as a reliable source of information about social relationships. The complex structures within which the individual operates cannot be grasped by any straightforward rule-of-thumb approach,24

The human subjects that are a part of her sociological account

in this instance have no voice, no names, no gender and no

race - they axe simply 'the patientr, 'the psychiatristr, 'the nursef, and 'the general practitionerr, I have included this

example to exemplify the magnitude of the change that takes

place in her way of doing sociology only a few years later.

The theoretical basis for the SOK had, by 1973, been

established through her appropriation of Marxist concepts, but

the SOK was still missing the vital ingredient of direct

experience, This was the next stage of its formation, one

that I argue has a logical connection

women's experience that took place in

to the affirmation of

the organized women's

24 Smith, D. E. 1966. The Role Medicine." In: Folta, J . R . and E . S .

of Sociology in Beck, eds. A

Sociological ~ramework- for Patient Care. New York: John Wiley. P, 55.

movement in practices l i k e consciousness-raising- The

intellectual groundwork for 'direct experienceR came from the

philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenological

sociology of Alfred Schutz. Dorothy Smith began reading

Merleau-Ponty w h i l e she was still at the University of

California at Berkeley. in the early 1960s. His essay, "In

Praise of Philosophytt (1963) argued in favour of subjective

experience :

Perception grounds everything it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within,2s

Similarly, Alfred Schutz theorized the value of subjectivity,

as he felt that most sociologists produced their work under a

rather 'naive realismr, L e . , he felt that sociology wasn't

grounded philo~ophically.~~ Despite the intellectual basis

and support for the use of 'direct experiencer, 1 argue that

its more meaningful derivation to Dorothy Smith, was one that

was emotional and political, rather than scholarly, and came

from the early women's movement. At the time, it was unlikely

that womenrs direct experience as it had been affirmed in

women's consciousness-raising groups would have been taken

seriously by the larger academic community.

The first mention of 'direct experiencer is contained in

an important series of papers that Smith published in 1974,

25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. In Praise of Philosophy. Translated by John W i l d and James M. Edie. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. P- 16.

26 Grathof f , Richard, ed. 1978. The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. P. x.

work which consolidated in a critical way the precepts and

praxis of the SOK. IrWomenfs Perspective as a Radical Critique

of Sociology1t (1974a) contained the original citation of

'direct experiencer as a revolutionary procedure for beginning

studies in sociology:

What I: am suggesting is more in the nature of a re-organization which changes the relation of the sociologist to the object of her knowledge and changes also her problematic- This re-organization involves first placing the sociologist where she is actually situated, namely at the beginning of those acts by which she knows or will come to know; and second, making her direct experience of the everyday world the primary ground of her knowledge, 27

One of the key ingredients of the SOK, direct experience, or

lived actuality, was supported in part from the influence of

the widespread practice in the early the women's movement of

consciousness-raising or. as they were nicknamed, C-R

groups. 28

These collectivities were the first sweeping expressions

of feminist activism that emerged in the mid to late 1960s.

One of the earliest in California was a group called

' Sudsof loppenr which formed in San Francisco in 1968 :

In those early meetings we talked a great deal about how we perceived the role of women in our society, our attitudes towards ourselves and other women, our

'' Smith, D. E. 1974a. llWomenrs Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology. Sociological Inquiry, 4, 1, 1-13. P. 11,

Dorothy Smith did participate in the practice of consciousness raising in the Vancouver Women's Movement, and her activities in this regard are documented more extensively in Chapter Eight.

very real problems with men in our private lives and on our jobs and, of course, what we hoped the group could be for us- Many women wanted the group to become a large family where needs could be met that w e r e not being met in their private lives (homes - communes 1 and jobs - 29

Consciousness-raising groups were a well-spring of political

energy, the place where the personal became political, They

were created largely as an antidote to the oppressiveness of

traditional psychotherapy and were characterized as 'intimate

and supportive talk sessf onsr or 'rap groupsr . 30 It was

generally recommended that groups be small, usually no more

than fifteen members, no leader, and organized over no

specific period of time, meeting about once a week. It was

considered crucial at these meetings that women express

themselves in personal, subjective and specific ways. Women

often began their discussions around childhood experience and

moved on to other life experiences. Consciousness-raising

groups were a vital part of the early women's movement in the

United States in the mid-to-late 1960s, and quickly spread to

Canada. At the UBC, The Womenr s Office, a hub of feminist

activism in the university, offered consciousness-raising

groups at noon and in the evenings for students-31

29 Allen, Pamela. 1970. Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women's Liberation. New York: Times Change Press, PI 11,

30 The first issue of MS Magazine, Volume One, Number One contains an article with a description and recommendations for forming consciousness-raising groups. The sketch here is based on this article,

31 WMAC. University of British Columbia. Womenf s Off ice. Item 152.

Members of the then male-oriented discipline of sociology

would not have endorsed a method which drew from women's

direct experience as it came from gatherings of women intent

on giving authority and meaning to their existence. Male

members of Marxist and radical student groups at the time,

particularly, w e r e known for levelling accusations at members

of the organized women's movement that feminist claims 'lacked

theory' or were 'lacking in Women needed a

language to speak for themselves and there was a necessity for

an 'authoritativer sociological method which attended to their

experience.

The earliest reference to the phrase, the 'social

organization of knowledger appeared in 1974, in the essay "The

Social Construction of a Documentary Realityt1 :

[The] problem might be better described as concerned with "the social organization of knowledgeu rather than its " sociology. It For we take first as a basis for our inquiry that knowledge is socially accomplished. 33

T h i s paper introduced the idea of 'document timer, or an event

that has become stabilized as text and the social organization

of its making has di~appeared.~~ 'Document timer has a

conceptual history of its own and changes as her work in this

area progresses in the 1990s, the era of poststructuralist

32 Smith, D. E. 1977b. Marxism and Feminism: A P l a c e to Begin, A Way to Go, Vancouver: New Star Books - P. 33.

33 Smith, D. E. 1974c. "The Social Construction of a Documentary Reality. " Sociological Inquiry, 44, 4 , 257-268. P. 257.

theory, to become 'textual timer , 35

While this article looked at the practices of working up

a sociological account, and the 'interpretive proceduresr that

were a part of the reading of an account, bringing Schutz'

phenomenology and the ethnomethodology of Cicourel and Pollner

into the picture, her theoretical scope widened even more in

work that was published the same year, ''The Ideological

Practice of Sociologyu (1974c), and its reading of Manc which

emphasized 'the practical activity of actual living

individualsr provided further authority for the 'direct

experiencer ingredient of the SOK, 36

Two books came out of Dorothy Smith's experience at the

University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Women's

Movement : 1) Women Look at psychiatry (1975) , which was an

analysis of the organizing practices of conceptual frameworks

created by male members of the psychiatric profession, which

were oppressive to women; and 2) Marxism and Feminism - A Place to Begin, A W a y to Go (1977) , a defense of Marxism as a

way to understand women's oppression- This latter book,

especially, underscored the importance of direct experience,

but in itself, Smith stressed that this kind of understanding

was not enough:

We talk about the domination of men and how men oppress women, as if the personal experience of oppression could be seen as the general and dominant mode in which the society is organized, And then we talk

Smith,

36 Smith, Do E- 1974b- ''The Sociology, " Catalyst, 8, 39-54,

Ideological P, 42.

Practice of

about a golden age of matriarchy in compensation. It is a means of restoring to us some sense of our power - a power women were supposed to have had some two thousand years ago, who knows when? But we do not see that power cannot exist apart from actual individuals organizing and working concertedly and hence that the power oppressing us is an actual organization of the work and energies of actual people, both women and men,37

By the time Dorothy Smith left the University of British

Columbia in 1977, most of the unstructured recipe for the SOK

had been formulated. Dorothy Smith thought of the method not

as a recipe, but 'a w a y to gof 3a, but I would argue that when

a cook knows what shers doing, a recipe is only 'a way to gor

- she knows the ingredients, but puts them together in her

own way - a little of this, a little of that. The key

ingredients which had been drawn together at this point in

time were social organization, direct experience, the theory

of Karl M a r x , feminism, ethnomethodology, phenomenology and

the site of the document as a principal organizing tool in the

everyday life of human beings. What was now missing was the

concept of the 'text', the practice of 'botanizingr, the

notion of a text-reader conversation, and more importantly,

'the standpoint of womenr as a starting place for sociological

inquiry. The remaining makings of the SOK were imagined and

prepared in Toronto, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in

Education.

" Smith, 1977r OP. cit. P.

38 Smith, Dorothy E. 1997b.

18,

"From the Margins : Womenr s Standpoint as a Method of Inwiry in the social-~ciences.~~ Gender, Technology and Development, 1, 1. P. 133,

107

The fully developed formulation of S m i t h r s SOK method

that examines how knowledge is created, and how it organizes

social life, taught by her in the Fall of 1996, could begin in

the direct experience of the investigator, and the distinct,

subjective, knowledge that he/she has accumulated in the

course of experiencing a lived life. has acquired while being

formally educated, has been a part of a work place or any

other social environment. The subject matter that is decided

upon for study is frequently contingent on this kind of

localized knowledge, and can be connected intimately to the

firsthand interests of the person(& conducting the

investigation. The affirmation of the value, worth, merit,

advantage and importance of individualized and subjective

knowledge (s) could be the starting place for the study of any

field of inquiry. This kind of subjective beginning is

limited, and is likely to change to a broadened analysis in

the course of the research:

Distinctive methods of telling and hearing characterize a telling of experience that intends, is grounded on, and conforms itself to the lived actuality, Again. 1 stress that the primary narrative is merely one mode, and no claim is made for the greater accuracy of accounts made in it ,39

It is possible for the researcher to begin this procedure by

conducting an exercise in self-knowledge, to think carefully

about the kinds of experience that would ultimately prove to

be a useful contribution to a specific sociological

Power: Univers

Smith, D. E. 1990a- The Conceptual Practices of A F e m i n i s t Sociology of Khowledge. Toronto: ity of Toronto Press. P- 157.

problematic, or a part of everyday life that presents itself

as puzzling. The method usually starts with the exercise of

the imagination and as students in this method, we were

immediately compelled to think sociologically.

Students and researchers who used the SOK method often

began with their direct experience of a particular issue, for

instance, Gary Kinsman started his essays with his experience

as a gay activist; Nancy Jackson initiated her analysis of

curriculum reform in her experiences at community colleges in

British Columbia in the mid-1980s and Gerald A. J. de Montigny

grounded his study of professional social work in the

experiences of his own casel~ad.~~ Within the classroom

environment that I recorded at OISE/UT, Dorothy Smith was

attentive to studentst stories and their experiences as

professionals in the working world, as well as their

experiences in intimate relationships and the area of their

personal lives. One explanation of 'direct experiencer, for

instance, came from a student who was talking about the birth

of her first grandchild - how she was present at the birth and

what it meant to her. Dorothy Smith used this studentf$ story

to construct this explanation of how social organization

existed in localized forms.4'

'* Campbell, Marie and Anne Manicom, eds . Knowledge, EXperience and Ruling Relations: S tud ies in the Social Organization of Knowledge. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. See: Kinsman. p. 80-95; Jackson. p. 164-180; and De Montigny, p. 209-220.

From a tape recording of Studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge, September 19, 1996.

Document and T e x t

Through the advocacy of a group of faculty members,

Dorothy Smith secured a professorial position in t h e

Department of Sociology in Education at the Ontario Institute

for Studies in Education in T O K O ~ ~ O , starting in the Fall Term

of 1977.~~ She arrived in Toronto to confront a form of the

women's movement that was far different from the grass roots

movement that she had grown accustomed to in Vancouver, Here,

the women's movement was highly organized and firmly

established politically and culturally, and the Marxist-

feminist community were not interested in the potential

contributions from the periphery that Dorothy Smith had to

offer- She received an indifferent reception from some

members of the women's movement in Toronto when she first

arrived. 43

Representatives of the early Toronto Women's Movement,

for example, were responsible for the organization of the

original meetings of the National Action Committee on the

Status of Women. After the publication of the Report of the

Royal Commission on the Status of Women on September 28, 1970,

a National ad hoc Action Committee on the Status of Women

formed and began to hold meetings in Toronto. The first

meeting, on January 30, 1971, was held on a Saturday morning

at the University Women's Club on St. George Street, near the

Personal communication with James L. Heap, Friday August 23, 1996-

43 Personal interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, OISE/UT, November 11, 1994,

University of Toronto. The thirtyfour women in attendance

came from twenty-two elite or middle-class groups such as the

Business and Professional Women's Club, the Canadian

Federation of University Women, the National Council of Women,

the Catholic Women's League and the IODE." The founding

conference, the "Strategy for Change Conventiont1, was held in

Toronto April 7 - 9, 1972. Reporting to NACr s Steering

Committee, the first president related that she 'was appalled

that sixty radical women had been admitted to the conferencer,

expressing particular concern that some were known Trotskyites

and ~omr~tunists,~~ This new environment of was in stark

contrast to the kind of women's movement in which Dorothy

Smith had been involved.

Work became therapy for the shock of such a drastic

change.46 When she arrived at OISE/UT, Dorothy SrrLth took

over a course in The Social Organization of Knowledge from

Professor Ronald Silvers, who had been teaching it from

1972." The SOK, in the interval of the next five years,

44 WMAC. National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Formation - Toronto.

45 Young, Lisa* "Social Movements and Political Parties: A Comparison of the Canadian and American Women's Movements, 1970-1993.11 Paper at the Meetings of the American Political Science Association, New York, Sept. 1-4, 1994. P. 24.

46 Personal Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith at OISE/UT, November 11, 1994.

47 From a personal communication with James L. Heap, December 17, 1997- Ronald Silvers used: Young, Michael F., ed. 1971, mowledge and Control : New Directions for the Sociology of Education, as a text for this course. Concerning the introduction of the course in the Social Organization of Knowledge at OISE/UT in 1972, Ronald Silvers writes: Tt was not easy to introduce the course into the Institute curriculum

became further refined and developed through the plethora of

writing that she produced, Between the fall of 1977 and the

end of 1983 she conducted 54 presentations in Canada, the

United States, Mexico, and England and published 18

articles * 4 8 Although the great majority of her lectures were

feminist in their orientation or dealt with womenrs issues,

seven of these lectures explicitly concerned the SOK - often these public lectures formed the basis for her more formal

j ournal publications.

Many of Smith's journal articles produced during this

interim are now considered classics in the sociological canon,

but ones that strengthened the formulation of the SOK were:

It 'Kr is Mentally Ill : The Anatomy of a Factual Accountut

(l978b) 49; "The Intersubjective Structuring of Time" (1979a) ;

"A Sociology for WomenI1 (197913) ; and "On Sociological

Description: A Method from Marxu (1981) . One lecture, "The

at the time as the sociology department was essentially Parsonian and [interested in] Survey Research. Allowances were being made to introduce new areas because 1 and other new faculty had been hired to bring new dimensions to the program. The course was permitted after explaining to administrators that the Social Organization of Knowledge was related to the Sociology of Knowledge and that the older area of study was well known through the works of Karl Mannheim who had taught education at the University of London. In a sense, I was using ideas from the Social Organization of Knowledge to introduce the area of study," (Communication by E-Mail, Tuesday, January 13, 1998)

48 From Dorothy Smithr s curriculum vitae.

Her famous essay, ' K r is Mentally 111: The Anatomy of a Factual Account" (1978) had in fact been written and submitted for publication six or seven years previously. It had been rejected because it was too long, and she refused to shorten it. She had used the essay on several occasions in classes in Interpretive Procedures at the University of British Columbia before it was actually published in 1978.

Active Text - An Analysis of Two Versions of an Eventtr, a

paper presented at the meetings of the International

Sociological Association in Mexico C i t y in 1982 was an

important moment in the history of the S O L It was this study

that provided the initial work on the concept of a text-reader

conversation, produced from ' the readerf s interpretive

practicesf This paper was published later on in a

collection of her essays whose primary theme was the

organizing qualities of the text, a book published in 1990

called Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations

of Ruling (1990b).

The Toronto Women's Movement diversified in the 1980s to

establish, among several other forms, lesbian feminist

organizing. LOOT (Lesbian Organization of Toronto) was formed

in November of 1976 and disbanded in the spring of 198ODs1

The 1980s were characterized by the proliferation of

organizations formed by minority women and women of colour:

The emergent groups of the past decade include the Congress of Black Women (CBW), established nationally in 1980, Innuit Womenf s Association or Pauktuutit (IWA) , created in 1984, DisAbled Women0 s Network (DAWN) in 1985, and the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible

Smith, D. E , 1982b- "The Active Text t= A Textual Analysis of the Social Relations of Public Discoursewtt Unpublished Paper Presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, August, 1982. P, 2-

51 ROSS, Becki. 1990, "The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976-198OWm Feminist Review, 35, 75-91, P. 76.

Minority Women (NOIVMW) , in 1986 ,'' At this phase of the Toronto Women's Movement, The Feminist

Party of Canada was created, and held its first public meeting

on June 10, 1979, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in

Education. Mary OrBrien and Angela Miles were keynote

speakers.53 The expansion that took place in the women's

movement, as well as the renaissance that occurred, was

reflected in the intensified emphasis on women and women's

issues that Dorothy Smith's work took on, and the way that the

SOK matured at the time.

Dorothy Smith's feminist and scholarly activism during

the m i d to late 1980s was centred around issues of mothering,

single parenthood, and to a lesser extent, violence against

women. In 1985, she began work with a friend and former

student, Alison Griffith, on mother's work as it was organized

by the educational system, and several essays on mothering and

single parenthood were the outcome of this affiliati~n.'~

Smith continued writing in the area of Marxism and feminism,

theorizing how women's work in the home as well as the public

" Phillips, Susan D. 1991. "Meaning and Structure in Social Movements: Mapping the Network of National C a n a d i a n Womenf s Organizations, Ir Canadian Journal of Poli tical Science, 2 4 , 4, 755-782. P. 764.

s3 Zaborsky, Dorothy- 1987. Feminist Politics: The Feminist Party of Canada? Womenfs Studies International Forum, 1 0 , 6 , 613-621. P. 614.

54 From Dorothy Smith' s curricvlum vitae. Alison Griffithfs doctoral dissertation was called "Ideology, Education, and Single Parent Families: The Normative Ordering of Families Through Scho~ling~~ (1984) .

sphere w a s organized by 'the relations of rulingr." Dorothy

has also worked and written in the area of violence against

women. In the fall of 1986 she presented a lecture at the

Faculty of Social Work at the Udversity of Toronto called

"Women and Violencen, This field has been taken up by a

student of Smith's w h o studied this issue, Gillian Walker,

who was influenced by several relevant research papers written

by Dorothy Smith, wrote her doctoral thesis on the topic of

violence against women, called "Conceptual Practices and the

Political Process: Family Violence as IdeologyN (1988) .*' Smith's formal work on the SOK during this time included

an essay, llTextually-mediated Social Organizationw published

in 1984 and a public lecture called "The Social Organization

of Knowledgeu in Santiago, Chile in 1986. Dorothy Smith's

work from the mid to late 1980s was characterized by a

strengthening of her feminist ties, more through the work of

her students than th~ough formal connections to members of the

Toronto Women's Movement. She seems to have developed

collegial relationships with many of her students, developing

intellectual work that took on a collaborative dimension with

55 See: Smith, D .E., llWomen, Class and Familyn (1982a) ; "Women, the Family and the Productive ProcessI1 (1983b) ; "The Deep Structure of Gender Antitheses: Another View of Capitalism and Patriarchym (1984~) ; "The Renaissance of Womenv (1984b) ; Women, C l a s s , Family and the State (1985b); IfFeminist Reflections on Political E~onomy~~ (1989b) ; and l~Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchyu (1989~).

56 For a list of the places where Dorothy Smith looks at violence against women as a topic for the SOK, see: Walker, Gillian. 1990. NThe Conceptual Politics of Struggle: Wife Battering , the Women' s Movement It, Studies in Political Economy, 33. P. 89.

many of them, This part of the decade, although the women's

movement had been declared over for many years, resulted in a

renaissance for k n o w l e d g e production for Smith in the

bailiwick of ferninism and women's concerns.

The 1990s ushered in a renewed interest, indeed, what

could be described as an obsession with the SOK, the text and

textually-mediated discourse for Smith. This was generated by

a response to an overwhelming interest in the text and

'discourse' via postmodern theory in intellectual circles and

its interdisciplinary seepage into or contamination of the

areas of history and sociology. Several of the critiques

levelled at Dorothy Smith's work came from intellectuals loyal

to a postmodern theoretical orientati~n.~' Historical change

in the evolution of the SOK also occurred in one chapter in

The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990a) . "The Social

Organization of Textual Realityt1, chapter three, reflects a

shift in the way that 'document timer was originally

conceptualized in 1974 - here the analysis is extended and renamed 'textual time'." This chapter was originally

published as 'The Social Construction of a Documentary

Realityt1 (1974b) , so the concept of 'document' changed to

'textual', indicating an apparent poststructuralist reference.

57 See: Clough, Patricia, 1993- "On the Brink of Deconstructing Sociology: Critical Reading of Dorothy Smith's Standpoint Epistemology." The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 1, 169-182.

58 Smith, D. E. 1990a. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Khowledge, Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P. 74-75,

116

B o t a n f zing

Another imaginable stage of an investigation into the SOK

was called 'botanizing', or, the performance of a search

similar to archaeological or anthropological fieldwork. It

requfred reaching into the real world for textual or other

types of art i f acts, which may or may not be connected in some

way to the lived experience of the researcher, but at the same

time associated to what Smith has characterized as 'the

relations of rulingr, the bureaucratic practices, government

regulations, and the media, It meant the examination of

various kinds of protocol and ideological restrictions that

constrained and controlled the everyday life of human beings.

Botanizing was the retrieval of sociological 'artifacts' from

a world that is already socially organi~ed.'~ Originally it

was used as an analogy for fieldwork practices in the first

class in the Social Organization of Knowledge class that she

taught at the University of British Columbia and was more

fully developed in her courses at OISE/UT-

The Websterrs Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary defines

'artifact' as 'any object created by man [sic] , especially

with a view to its subsequent user.60 For the SOK, this meant

anything in a textual form, or it may have signified part of a

59 For an explanation of the incorrect assumption that the sociologist must begin inquiry from a conceptual level, because the social world is one of 'wild incoherencer, or what might be understood as the opposite of a 'botanizingr procedure see Dorothy E. Smith's "What it might mean to do a Canadian Sociology: The Everyday World as Problernati~'~ (1975b) . P. 368.

60 See : Webs terr s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1989). P. 8 5 .

tape recording, video recording, a film or a work of art- It

could have taken the form of an actual event, One of the

students in our class analyzed her own wedding, another

student conducted a study of a racist incident between a group

of students and a professor, Text, in particular, lends

itself very well to this kind of investigation, in the shape

of government documents, qgestionnaires, forms of various

kinds, police summons, advertisements, ordinary subway

transfers, and the unremarkable bits of paper that are the

'taken for grantedr past of the everyday life of human beings.

Text was the framework under which I decided to conduct

my own study for Dorothy Smithr s class. My botanized

'artifactr was the Report of the Official Guardian of Ontario,

which I was required to fill in for my divorce which became

final on July 22, 1981. This was a six page questionnaire

accompanied by a letter from Lloyd W. Perry, the Official

Guardian from the Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario.

Since 1949, legislation has been in effect in Ontario, that

the Office of the Official Guardian must, in all divorce

petitions regarding children, conduct an investigation into

the fitness of the custodial parentO6' The organizing power

of this particular document had potentially drastic

implications as to 'what came next' in my own lived life, as

well as the lives of my two daughters, Emily and K y n a .

'Botanizing' was frequently employed for studies in the

Social Organization of Knowledge. Illustrations of this

61 Law Reform Commission of Canada. 1975. Studies on Divorce- Ottawa: Information Canada. P. 189,

method are: I) Roxana Ng's use of the text of Prime M i n i s t e r

Trudeaurs speech in the House of Commons on October 8, 1971,

extrapolated from H a n s a r d , regarding the announcement of the

governmentr s policy on multiculturalism; and 2) Himani

Bannerjirs study of the racist discourse extant in the text of

James Millsr The History of B r i t i s h India (3817) ,62

'Botanizing' as well as being part of the work in Smith's

course in The Social Organization of Knowledge, became a way

that the sociologist in trahing, who was eventually going to

be studying social life as a professional, learned to look at

the world as a source of study and analysis. Everyday life,

rather than being conceptualized of as a place of natural

chaos, became an organized place with recognizable formations

that have been taken for granted. 'Botanizing' trained a

student in sociology to look for the extraordinary within the

ordinary.

An expanded version of the essay IrFemininity as

DiscourseIr in Texts, Facts and Femininity (1990b) , and

originally published in 1988, contained an analysis of the

concept of 'botanizing':

When I was at school, as girls we did not learn natural science, But we did learn 'botanyr and 'botanizingr. 'Botanizingf involved going out into the fields and bringing specimens of flowers or leaves for examination and identification, Here an analogous method is used, Instead, however, of specimens, we bring back for examination texts of or about femininity

62 Both of these examples are found in Roxana Ngrs and Himani Bannerjirs essays in Campbell and Manicomrs Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations: Studies in the Social O r g d z a t i o n of Knowledge (1995).

that give us access to the social organization of these relations?

The original essay contained many examples of the social

organization of femininity, but there was no inclusion of a

method or procedure, i-e., 'botanizing', as there is in the

revised form of this paper,

Text-reader conversation

Any inquiry employing the method of the SOK is comprised

of a 'text-reader' con~ersation~~, or the actual

thinking/speaking dialogue that takes place between the

researcher and the text/event in order to make sense of 'what

was actually happeningr. The text-reader conversation was the

working out of what the reader was expected to accomplish, or

what the text required in a particular circumstance or

situation (as in a questio~aire or form) in order to

effectuate a successful outcome. Marie L. Campbell, for

example, analyzed how nursing students learn to orient

themselves to authoritative texts in the course of their

63 Smith, D. E. l99Ob. T e x t s , Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. P. 165-166,

64 There are several points at which Dorothy Smith discusses what happens when the reader begins to engage with a particular text, and how the text becomes activated. See: The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Bowledge (1990a) , Chapter Seven: wIdeological Methods of Reading and Writing Texts: A Scrutiny of Quentin Bell's Account of Virginia Woolfrs Suicide"; and Texts, Facts and F e m i n i n i t y r Exploring the Relations of Ruling (1990b) , The Introduction. P. 5.

training :

Official texts speak in the absence of nurse speakers, a feature of hospital documentation that is essential to contemporary organization and all kinds of medical and administrative activities.65

The text-reader conversation took place in a real location

and was temporally situated. It organised at the same time as

it constrained human social behaviour. It was the human act

of engaging with a particular piece of paper, document, event,

film, work of art, and actually forming a relationship with

it. The conversation could be internal or a process of the

mind, as in thinking a puzzle through, or it could be a

concrete and overt action, such as slashing out the phrase in

a book in a fury. It was a relationship with the text/event.

The union with the text was evocative, and could emote

rational thought, emotion or boredom as the case may have

been. It could have involved other people, drawing others

into the conversation. Reading a traffic ticket, for example,

may invoke anger on the part of the recipient, he or she may

rage to a passer-by about their plight, they may tear it up in

shreds and discard it on the sidewalk, and this would be a

Eorm of text-reader conversation. The traffic ticket is a

organizing and constraining text, in that it informs the

recipient that there is a sanction on parking their car in a

particular place for too long a time.

For me, the text-reader conversation took place in a

working-class draught beer joint in Northern Ontario called

'* Campbell and Manicom, 1995, op. cit., p. 229.

121

the Inntowner Hotel where I was working as a bartender a E t e r I

left my husband, I filled in the form at work, while the bar

was not very busy, and while sitting at a small table, I was

pleased with the idea that I was being paid to do a personal

task at work that should have been done at home at my kitchen

table, because I did not like my boss. The constraining

effect of the form necessitated that I present myself as a

'good motherf, and, as I had fears about the appropriateness

of working in a bar, sought to present myself in the best

possible light so that I would not lose my children.

During my experience of Dorothy Smithf s class in Studies

in the Social Organization of Knowledge, we were given a

concrete assignment about halfway through the term called a

'text-reader conversationr, This part of the method took

place after 'botanizingr, and to me it involved the initial

investigation of the 'text' that was to be studied- As

students, we were encouraged to retrieve artifacts that were

relevant to our daily lives - SSHRC application forms, grant

proposals, grade appeals procedures, and Graduate

Assistantship applications - the mundane, everyday administrative paper work that was a part of our everyday

scholarly life, Entrenched in our conversations with these

texts was the idea that they contained a definite authority,

in that the outcome of what was placed on these forms could

affect our student lives in meaningful ways. There was always

an over-arching regulatory body that was there in the

background, shaping our thoughts and our decisions with regard

to what was written on these pieces

122

of paper. They had a

constraining as well as a prescriptive character, in that they

had to be assembled so that the information contained on them

'made sensef and was a 'good fitf, An accounts of a situation

had to be produced that fitted the reqirements of the text,

and if the real life situation did not conform, then certain

adjustments would have to be made, The conversation that took

place between the student and the text was a process that took

place in a certain time, grounded in the real world - it was a

course of action or work, Activity was organized by the text-

reader conversation.

The notion of a text-reader conversation was, in Dorothy

Smith's earlier work, formulated then solely in terms of

ethnomethodology, and became, in the 1990s, defined to a

greater degree in terms of Foucault's conceptualization of

The conception of discourse here originates with Foucault in whose work it defines an assemblage of 'statements' arising in an ongoing 'conversationr, mediated by texts, among speakers and hearers separated from one another in time and space.66

Her work in the 1990s also introduced the concept of

'encodingr the version of an account. Encoding was primarily

a selection process (the lexicon, the conceptual schema) that

was present in the production of a particular account, and,

sequentially, could occur after the text-reader conversation.

66 Smith, 1990b. op. cit., p. 161.

123

The concept is drawn from ethnometh~dology.~'

Disjuncture

The SOK procedure might include the disclosure of any

disjuncture (s) or distortions that occurred between what

appeared in the textual form and in what existed in a lived

actuality, either the lived life of the researcher or real

experience of the subjects under investigation. George Smith,

for instance, looked at the disjuncture that occurred between

the lived erotic experience that was understood by gay men and

the controlling ordinances of the criminal justice system,

when the practice of homosexuality was illegal in ~anada?

For George Smith, it was feasible to flesh out this kind of

inquiry by reviewing the appropriate literature, He suggested

the idea of reviewing the literature at the end of a research

paper, so that the analysis of findings provided a 'structure

of relevance' for the literature rather than the traditional

mode of placing the literature review at the beginning of a

study. In this way the knowledge that has been accumulated

was employed to organise pertinent literature, rather than the

literature being allowed to organise the data.69 The direct

67 For an explanation of the encoding process, see The Conceptual PracCices of Power: a Feminist Sociology of Knowledge, P, 151-155,

6a Smith in Campbell and Manicom, 1995. op. cit . , p. 81.

69 This idea belongs to George Smith, an AIDS activist, and colleague of Dorothy Smith's who died in 1994. It is taken from his paper, "Political Activist as Ethnographertt (1990), Social Problems, 37, 4. P. 417. Its origin, in the

experience of the researcher could be used to probe the

validity of other knowledge (s) in a field,

Any study in the SOK would necessarily take disjuncture

into consideration- Disjunctures occwzed between a lived

actuality or experience and what was either prescribed by a

document (a form to be filled in, for example) or what was

imposed by a 'pre-determined conceptual frameworkr in the

production of an account or a text," One illustration of

disjuncture that Smith related in her work is the blatant

lying that occurred in American military reports during the

Vietnam War:

Disjuncture between the enforced categories of reporting and their experience was repaired at the periphery by those doing the actual fighting and reporting, Military personnel at the front line had to find ways of acting so that what they did could be described in the terms they had to report in.''

The disjuncture that occurred in my own study in the SOK, the

Report of the Official Guardian of Ontario, filled in as a

requirement of getting custody of my children, concerned the

representation of myself as a 'good motherr. I could not

entirely misrepresent myself (because my ex-husband was

filling in the same form) but several of the unhealthy but

authentic aspects of my job as a bartender, the cocaine

dealers who carried guns, the bar brawls with their attendant

work of Dorothy Smith, comes from her early paper, "Women8 s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociologyu (1974a) , P . 11.

Smith, 1990ar op. cit., p. 93.

7L Ibid, p- 98.

flying beer bottles, the occasional rape or attempted suicide

that were a regular part of the bar scene, and on one

occasion, an armed robbery, were silenced* What was included

in the form was the fact that my children went to church, had

regular visits with their father and his family, and were

doing well in school, things that would represent 'normalr

life. What I really experienced in the daily course of

bringing up my children and what was produced for the Report

of the Official Guardian was a disjuncture.

What I have formulated in Chapter Three is partly an

account of what I did and what I learned in Dorothy Smith's

classes in The Social Organization of Knowledge in the fall of

1995 and the fall of 1996. It is further based on six years

of attention to her work, all of which I have read. Her

working out of this procedure is of course, more complex than

this analysis. The procedure of the Social Organization of

Knowledge has been devised by Dorothy Smith to preserve the

presence of real human beings and their actual practices, and

the outcomes of those practices, in sociological research.

The SOK differs from the sociology of knowledge, in that its

main focus is on technique and method rather than theory. The

sociology of knowledge is generally concerned with how a

particular knowledge claim is 'contaminatedr by the 'knowerrs

social situationr ? Conversely. the SOK is formulated in

such a way as to preserve the presence of people and their

lived realities in sociological accounts. Rather than

beginning an analysis from a concept, such as gender, 'racerr

deviance, or mental illness, it starts from real experience as

it has been lived by real people and proceeds outward to

examine other individual and group relationships extant in our

world- Materialities rather than concepts are the core of any

investigation of this nature,

As we saw in the previous chapter, traditional and neo-

classical versions of the sociology of knowledge differ from

the procedure of the Social Organization of Knowledge in

significant ways. For Marx and Engelsrr the problematic was

the relation of material conditions with ideas, and Smith

appropriates their conception of sensory or real activity and

relations of domination, i.e,, the 'relations of ruling'. Her

association with Mannheim is perfunctory and critical, and she

took his rendering of 'positionless accountsr as something to

be avoided in the SOK. The sociology of scientific knowledge

(Barnes and Bloorrs Strong Programme) took a realist approach

to the social, with its problematic being one of causality.

Dorothy Smith used this kind of knowledge for exemplary

purposes in her creation of the SOK. She avoided the social

constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, despite

her interest in phenomenology as well as materialism.

In the previous subsections of this chapter, I have

" Smith, 1974cr p. 257.

127

provided an analysis of the historical evolution of the SOK as

it emerged in Dorothy Smith's early work at the point of her

doctoral dissertation and in her subsequent scholarly journal

publications. I demonstrated how the some of the conceptual

and ontological components of the SOK were created during an

interval of radical social change, when traditional sociology

had lost its ability to accurately represent the realities of

social life and the experience of women. By the 1990s, the

SOK had matured as a method and Smith has in fact been

teaching it at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

for a number of years. It was and still is a well-liked

course, drawing many students to the department, This chapter

has been concerned with the identification, history and

analysis of the various conceptual and procedural components

of the SOK from my own understanding, as one of Dorothy

Smith's students as well as a researcher engaged in

participant observation. This overview of the SOK has

encapsulated the historical patterns of what I found in my

reading of her various publicatiocs and listening to tape-

recordings from her lectures. In other words, I have

'encoded' the SOK, filtering what was important to me as a

student learning this technique, and what Dorothy Smith has

earmarked as meaningful in the course of her teaching.

CHAPTRR FOUR

WOMKNrS EQUALITY AND THE QUAKER ANCESTRY OF DOROTEY SMLTH

This chapter is the story of the feminine leadership and

social conditions which are argued to have given rise to the

belief in women's equality that is manifested in the lives of

the women in this dissertation. It is the starting place for

an analysis of the productive forces which assisted in the

intergenerational reproduction of this belief, in the context

of the skills of seventeenth century women as managers of a

household. This is the historical and social location which

is appointed as the beginning of the way that the Social

Organization of mowledge was shaped and created, starting

some three hundred and fifty years ago in 1652, in the

foundations of the Quaker Movement in England. The Quakers

were one of a number of radical religious groups, among them

Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Baptists, Millenarians, Brownists

and Independents, that were a part of the English Reformation,

which is situated historically from about 1640 - 1660.' A

century earlier, in 1526, the Bible had been translated by

William Tyndale into the vernacular, or English, and secretly

brought into England. English translations were then illegal,

and an energetic trade for it was establishedO2 The religious

' Bacon, Margaret Hope. 1986 . Mothers of Femin i sm: The S t o r y of Quaker Women in America. S a n Francisco: Harper and Row. P. 6.

Kast-, David Scott. 1997. RmThe Noyse of the New B i b l e b q : Reform and Reaction in Henrician Englandn. In: McEachern, Claire and Debera Shuger, eds. Religion and Cul ture in Renaissance England. New York : Cambridge University Press. P. 48.

sects that emerged in the English Reformation were a

realization of the fears of authorities in the 16th century

who sought to suppress the translation of the Bible thinking

'it was as likely to spark dissent as spur de~otion*,~ Of

these various sects, Quakerism was s inwar with respect to

its espousal of women's equality, allowing women to both

preach and actively enter into the government of the church,'

Dorothy Smith can trace her ancestry directly to Margaret

Fell, later Margaret Fox through her second marriage to George

Fox, the mystic, prophet and spiritual leader of the early

seventeenth century Quaker Movement. Margaret Fell is often

cited as an example of early 'feminismr and the pioneer who

was largely responsible for advancing women's equality in the

Quaker religion. Although there is a lineage for Dorothy

Smith through her family to Margaret Fell, she feels that she

was not immediately influenced by the example of Fell's

leadership (she was a teenager when she was introduced to the

work of George Fox) but Quakerism as a religion, and its

inherent value of women's equality was introduced to her in

her youth, and has continued to retain her respect throughout

her life. The tie to Margaret Fell, then, is only one of a

number of connections to Quakerism that merged later on with

other feminist exemplars which eventually affected her

Ibid, p. 46.

4 Bacon, op. cit., p. 7 .

intellectual work.' This chapter is the 3umping-off place for

the history of a belief system which I reason has likely been

transmitted to succeeding generations of women, f r o m the

mothers to the daughters in Dorothy Smith's family, from the

time of Margaret Fell's leadership. It is meant to be simply

a starting place and should be weighted least in importance in

relation to the succeeding chapters, which are meant to

increase in relevance to Dorothy Smith as the lives of Lucy

and Dorothy Abraham (Dorothy Smithr s mother and grandmother)

are examined, and the life of Dorothy herself is presented in

Chapters Six through Ten.

There is an abundance of fine historical work recovering

the life of Margaret Fell, most notably, Helen G. Crosfield's

Margaret Fox of Swarthmore Hall (1913) "; Isabel Rossr

Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism in 1949, and more

recently, Bomelyn Young KunzeR8 Margaret Fell and the Rise of

* Margaret Fell is referred to in Dorothy Smithrs early feminist work, without the mention of her distant relation to her, in "A Peculiar Eclipsing: Womenr s Exclusion from Man' s Culturetr (1978) , Women's Studies International Quarterly, 1, 4, p. 285. Fell is pointed out as an example of a 'repressed political and spiritual intelligentsiar extant in Europe from the time of the translation of the Bible onwards,

Unavailable in Robarts and the Society of Friends libraries in Toronto.

Isabel Ross has a fascinating connection to Dorothy E. Smith. A practising Quaker, her maiden name was Abraham, and she was a cousin to Dorothy Foster Abraham, Dorothy Smith's mother, and very active in the militant Suffragette Movement around Birkenhead and Liverpool, from 1908 - 1915. She was also a founder member of the Liverpool Student Suffrage Organization.

Of the two historical accounts, I prefer Isabel Rossr treatment of the way that Quaker women conducted their day-to- day activities. Her scholarship is meticulous in this

Quakerism published in 1994 as an extension of her doctoral

dissertation work- In this chapter 1 have three objectives:

I) to give an introduction to Margaret Fell and her early

activism around women's equality, by focusing on aspects of

her work in the public sphere as well as the household

labouring skills9and the everyday life of Quaker women; and

2) to provide evidence that women imparted their knowledge and

skills to their daughters, particularly in the case of

Margaret Fell and her daughters, thereby exerting considerable

power and influence over the way succeeding generations of

women lived and thought; and 3) to establish the nature of

the connection and the influence of Margaret Fell, Quakerism,

and the value of women's equality to the life and thinking of

Dorothy Smith.

respect. On the other hand, when I visited Swarthmoor Hall in the course of my research, the curator of the hall, Steve Deeming, a practising Quaker, preferred Bonnelyn Kunze' book, arguing that her status as an academic made her account less 'biasedr, and that previous historical work on the life of Margaret Fell was tainted because of the Quaker authorship of the historians,

Miranda Chaytorrs study of narratives of rape in the seventeenth century notes how women often included their ordinary, everyday labour in their recounting of a rape as a way of affirming their honour and dignLty. Their stories of how the rape occurred would refer to 'some useful activity - bringing home the cows for milking, fetching ale from the alehouse, baking, knitting, peat-cutting, taking hay to the calves in the barnr - See: Chaytor, Miranda, 1995. "Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth CenturyN, Gender and History, 7, 3, 378-407- P. 379.

WIedTing in the Things o f Godaf0

Margaret Fell was born Margaret Askew in 1614 in a large

house called ~arsh- range^ in what, until the recent

reorganization of local government, was the kusness district

of Lancashire (now part of Cumbria) - Today, f t is privately

owned and located a little North of Ulverston, near Morecambe

~ a y . ~ At the age of seventeen, Margaret Askew married Thomas

Fell of Swarthmore*, a lawyer who had been trained at Gray's

Inn in London and was about 16 years her senior, Upon the

event of her marriage she moved to Swarthmore Hall14 in

Fell, 1710, op. cit. p. 331. This title is taken from the introduction to Women ' s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by Scriptures, a pamphlet written by Margaret Fell in 1666 to support women's right to preach, where she stated that women were 'condemned for medling in the things of Godr,

I' Kunze, 1992, op. cit. p. 2 7 . Bonnelyn Kunze provides us with a brief description of Marsh-Grange: 'a rather spacious stone manor house with a front courtyard, which today is surrounded by a high stone wall with a large iron gate at the entrance. It overlooks the ocean and Duddon Sands to the North and Northwest and the rolling Furness fells to the Southeastr .

l2 These historical details are from: Fell, Margaret. 1710. A Brief Collection of the Remarkable Passages and occurrences Relating to the birth, Education, Li fe , Conversion, Travels, Services, and Deep Sufferings of that Ancient, Eininent, and F a i t h f u l Servant of the Lord, Margaret F e l l ; but by her Second Marriage, Margaret F o x , London: J. Sowle .

I have come across three spellings of 'Swarthmoor Hallr in the course of my research: 1) the 17th century spelling 'Swarthmorer; 2) the spelling which was used principally around the t a of the 19th and 20th centuries, 'Swarthmourr; and 3) the form used in contemporary settings, which is 'Swarthmoorr. My work will uses all three spellings, reflecting their historical contexts,

l4 Swarthmoor Hall is located about a mile South of the town of Ulverston, on Morecambe Bay on the Northeastern coast of England. It is now owned by the Society of Friends (Quakers), the property of the London Yearly Meeting. At the

Lancashire, which is now called the District of Cumbria.

During her marriage to Judge Fell, she had nine children,

eight of whom survived (one died in infancy) - seven daughters and one son. Her children, in order of their birth are:

Margaret (c. 1633-1706) ; Bridget (c. 1635-1663) ; Isabel

(c. 1637-1704) ; George (~1639-1670) ; Sarah (1642-1714) ;

(1647-1719) ; Susanna (1650-?) ; and Rachel, the youngest,

(1653 -1732) , lS She was converted to Quakerism sometime after

midsummer in 165216 when George Fox first visited Swarthmore:

T h e n in the Year 1652. it pleasrd the Lord in his Infinite Mercy and Goodness to send George Fox into our Country, who declared the Eternal Truth, as it is in Jesus; and by the Word and Power of the Eternal God, turn'd m a n y from Darkness unto Light, and from the Power of Satan unto God; And when I and my Children, and a great part of our servants w e r e so convincrd and converted unto God, at w h i c h t i m e m y Husband was not at Home, being gone to London. l7

Margaret Fell's relationship to her daughters remained close

throughout her life, and even w h e n they w e r e separated she

wrote an abundance of letters to them, especially in her later

t i m e I visited it, October 3, 1997, the hall was cared for by a resident Warden, a Quaker n a m e d Steve Deeming. During its history since 1759, it has undergone three major renovations. It was furnished with seventeenth century antiques, chosen by the notable expert in this area, Roger Warner-

's Speizman, Milton D . and Jane C - Kronick, transcribers. 1975. "A Seventeenth Century Quaker Woman's Declarationw. Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 1, 1, 231- 245. P - 233,

l6 Shannan, Cecil W, "George Fox and His Family 11". Quaker History, 75, 1, 1-11. P. 3.

l7 Fell, Margaret, 1710, op, cit., p. 2.

years." The anguish that did occur in her relationships with

her children was not as a result of disputes with her

daughters, but rather, an estrangement that occurred between

Margaret and her only son George, who was openly hostile to

Quakerism, lived a dissolute life in London in the late 1650s,

and actively oppressed members of his own family, When

Margaret Fell's estate was taken away from her as a result of

religious persecution, he applied to the King for possession

of her lands, and tried at one point to have her imprisoned."

Evidence of Margaret Fell's work for women's equality as

it was realised in the public sphere can be pinpointed by

three actions on her part: I) her presentation of a petition

on behalf of Quaker women to the Rump Parliament in 1659; 2)

the establishment of separate Women's Meetings with George Fox

in the Quaker sect as early as 1671; and 3 ) the writing of

Women's Speaking J u s t i f i e d , Proved, and Allowed of by the

Scr ip tures in 1666. The first of many public deeds on the

part of Margaret Fell that helped to solidify her work on

behalf of women in the seventeenth century was the formation

of a petition which was taken to the Rump Parliament,

Persecution of the early Quakers was acute, and many of them

w e r e tortured and imprisoned. One of the acts of civil

disobedience practised by Quakers was the non-payment of

tithes to the Church of England, and the suppression of this

became so terrible that a first petition of 15,000 signatures

l8 Ross, op-cit., p. 334,

l9 Ross, op. ci t . , p. 179, 189, 220.

13 5

was given to parliament in June, 1659. A month later, as a

result of the work of Margaret Fell, a further entreaty was

made to the Rump Parliament on behalf of 7,000 Quaker women,

who signed an additional petition. Fell and her daughtersr

signatures headed the list, her youngest child, Rachel, being

only six years of age at the time,20

One of the first Quaker Meetings was organized by George

Fox at Cockermouth in 1653, who related this event in his

Journal, saying "when I came in the house and the pulpit was

so full of people that I: had much ado to get inr .21 Fox

started to institute local Quaker Meetings in 1656, when

conversions to the sect multiplied and the 'Truth began

mightily to The institution and establishment of

separate Meetings for women in the Quaker sect likely took

place through the work of Quaker women in London, in the late

1650s. However, the actual origin of the two London Women's

Meetings, the Two Weeks Women's Meeting and the Box Meeting

are unknown and is a point that is a subject of debate and

conjecture by historians.23 The Box Meeting, which still

holds meetings in London, was given its name because of the

Quaker women's custom of collecting money for the poor in a

box- Its membership was entirely female and the organization

20Ross, op. cit., p. 4 2 ,

21 Penney, Norman, ed. 1924. The Journal of George Fox. London: J. M. Dent. P. 83,

23 Kunze, Bonnelyn. 1994. M - g a r e t Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. London: Macmillan Press. P. 145-146,

was not answerable to any other group within the Quaker

religious order. It is thought that the Two Weeksr Women's

Meeting was established after the Box Meeting and its mandate

consisted of the visitation of inmates and the sick; care of

the poor; negotiating disputes among Friends and seeing to the

moral dilemmas of female members In 1671 George Fox

instituted Women's Monthly and Quarterly Meetings so that they

met at the same time as the men's, but they had different

objectives and tasks for which they were responsible.

In April of 1671. Margaret was released from a stay in

Lancaster prison, and in October, the first Swarthmore Monthly

Women's Meeting was held at the Hall. All of her daughters

w e r e regularly present at these meetings and Sarah Fell was

the first clerk. To get to the Quarterly Meeting meant a

dangerous journey for Margaret. and the hiring of a guide for

crossing the sands.25 Margaret Fell attended these meetings

until the age of 84, four years before she died. The women at

the early meetings at Swarthmore took on the duties nursing

the sick, acting as midwives, and caring for the poor women of

their own membership. Sarah Fell's account book often

25 The sandsr refers to the sea shore near Grange-Over- Sands, near Ulverston, now a tourist attraction. The sands along the sea shore at this location are extremely dangerous, made up of shifting river channels and quick sands which change with the tides. It takes an expert to navigate these very treacherous channels. They are even more unsafe in the winter. and when it is raining and misty, as the guide markings provided by the surrounding hills become obscured. Today, there is only one man who is knowledgeable enough to guide people over the sands, Sedgewick Robinson of Barrow-fn- Furness . of Church

The sands can be seen from the lighthouse at the end Walk in Ulverston.

mentions business tha t took place regarding Women's Meetings,

from entries for her own costs (six pence) noted on March 7.

1675 - 'in expence of m y selfe at forge w h e n I w e n t to a

wornans Meettinge at Hawxheader r26 and the payment of one

shilling and six pence to 'Rich: ffell for a booke for the

weomens Meettinge' .27 Charitable work on behalf of women and

children who were members was plentiful. In November, 1674,

the women's meeting provided 'for an iron pot to Christopher

Woodbine out of women's Meettinge Stocke the pot being for

Jane Colton which is being lent her as long as friends see

fitr2' and in 1676, tuppence to 'Doro: Becke & Doro: Saterthwt

of Hawxheade Meettinge, to bee given t o George Braithwts wife

of feild heade of sd Meettinge being very poore, to buy some

bedclose with'.2g Margaret Fell and her daughters helped with

the humblest needs of women members who w e r e less well off

than themselves, as well as the more dramatic occurrences of

members, such as trips t o London, and the birth of children,

Sarah Fell continued t o be the clerk for the Swarthmore

Meeting until December of 1680, and she wrote a set of

instructions to assist her sisters in executing the job, j u s t

before she was t o be married.

26 Penney, Norman, ed. 1920. of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall. University Press. P. 249,

27 Ibid, p. 68.

2' Ibid, p* 155.

29 Ibid, p . 403,

30 Ross, op. cit., p. 298.

The Household Account Book Cambridge: Cambridge

Of all of Margaret Fell's writing, Women's Speaking

J u s t i f i e d , Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures, written in

1666, is the most well known and is the hallmark of her

feminist theology. According to a study of female writers in

the seventeenth century, women Quakers composed a total of 171

texts between the years of 1641-1700, and Margaret Fell was

responsible for 22 works or 13% of thLs amount -31 Fell wrote

Women's Speaking while incarcerated in Lancaster Castle in

1666. It is a sophisticated argument based on Biblical

references to support women's right to speak and to preach the

word of God, and her analysis is a precursor to the work of

contemporary feminist biblical scholars. 32 The justification

for the silencing of women within the organized Church is

usually supported by Pauline theology: 1) from The First

Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Verses 11 and 12:

"Let t h e woman learn in silence with all subjectionff and " B u t

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over a

man, but to be in silencelI; and 2) The First Epistle of Paul

t he Apostle to the Corinthians, Chapter 14, Verse 34: "Let

your women keep silent in the churches for it is not permitted

unto them to speakff ; and Verse 35: "And if they will learn

anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a

shame for women to speak in the churchw.

Margaret Fell attempted to counter the literal meaning of

3' Kunze, op. cit., p. 131.

32 Thickson, Margaret Olofson. 1995. "Writing the Spirit: Margaret Fellrs Feminist Critique of Pauline Theologyf* . Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 63, 2, 269-279. P. 269.

these statements made by St. Paul with an interpretation and

reasoning as to the reality of his intended meaning in writing

the letter. She suggested that these statements forbidding

women to speak had been taken out of context, and that readers

of the Bible should read to the end of the passage ('Let the

Reader seriously peruse that Chapterr ) 33 , before determining

the purpose of the words, Fell argued t h a t S t . Paul was

talking about the confusion that took place in a church when a

difficult passage or lesson was being taught, and that men, as

well as women, are implicated. Explaining the bewilderment

that took place when something was misunderstood, when a lot

of people would be talking at once, Fell reasoned: Where it

doth plainly , that the Women, as well as some others that

were among them, were in Confu~ion."~~ She counselled that

people 'not be Children in understanding', but to read the

whole Bible, taking that as the framework for the intended

message of a single verse.

Everyday L i f e in the F e l l Household

A woman who might have become a member of the Quaker

Movement in Margaret Fell's time came from a variety of

stations in English life. The seventeenth century innovator

in demography, Geoffrey King, calculated in 1688 that the

population of England was about five and a half million. Half

33 Fell, op- cit., p- 337-

34 Ibid, p. 338.

of this amount were thought to be labourers, servants,

cottagers, and soldiers with the poor and criminals making up

the rest. Another million and a quarter were estimated to be

freeholders and farmers, while 250,000 were artisans,

tradespeople and shopkeepers. The remaining 200,000 made up

the small numbers of professionals (lawyers and clergymen), as

well as the merchant class and the aristocracy. Most social

groups in seventeenth century England, a pre-industrial

society, were households, or 'networkCs] of small family

businessesr35 , rarely containing more than a dozen or so

members- The activities of a household might be centred

around a particular skill or craft, but people were not

restricted to a single kind of work and their endeavours might

reach as far as trading with other communities and into civic

and religious work. Fell's class in English society is

characterized as 'farmers of the lower-middling gentry

statusr, although because of her relation to the radical

Quaker religion, she differed from other members of the

English gentry, 36

The expectations that existed for an English housewife in

the seventeenth century were very rigorous indeed, and women's

labour and women themselves were thought to be the property of

their male next-of-kin: fathers, brothers and husbands,37 For

35 Shaman, Cecil W. "George Fox and His Family 1". Quaker History, 74, 2, 1019. P. 2,

cit . , 37 Chaytor, Miranda. 1995. "Husband (ry) : Narratives of

Rape in the Seventeenth Centurytt . Gender and History, 7 , 3, 378-407. P, 379.

example, Margaret Askew's dowry when she married Thomas Fell

was Marsh-Grange and its estate." I have used two original

sources for obtaining a sense of women's everyday life in the

early 17th century and within the Quaker Movement. The first

is Country Contentments, or the B g Z i s h Huswife, containing

the inward and ou tward vertues which ought to be in a complete

woman, published in 1623 by Gervase ~arkharn-~' This book is

one of a number of ancient recipe books held in the Fawcett

Libraryr s collection in London. The second source is The

Household Account Book of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall4=,

compiled by Norman Penney in 1920 . Gervase Markhamr s C o u n t r y

Contentments is an ancient book of advice and recipes much

like contemporary homemaker magazines, charming in its

39 Markham, Gervase . 1623. Country Contentments, or the English Huswife , containing the inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a complete woman. As her skill in Physicke, Surgerie, -traction of Oyles, Banqueting-s tuffe, Ordering of G r e a t Feasts, Preserving of all sorts of Wines, Concei ted Secrets, Distillations, Perfumes, ordering of Wooll, Hempe, Flax, making Cloth, Dying, the Knowledge of D a y r i e s , office of Malting, Oats, their excellent uses in a Family, Brewing, Baking and all other things belonging to a household. A Scarce Edition- Only three copies recorded in S-T.C. Printed at London by I. B. for R. Jackson and are to be sold at his shop neere Fleet Street Conduit, The volume that I worked with was a scarce edition, one of three that survive. The copy I used was housed in the Fawcett Library at London Guildhall University in London, England.

This book is one of a number of the Fawcett Library's 'treasuresr which document household labour in the seventeenth century and written for women who were not in the servant class. It was dedicated to the 'Right Honorable and most excellent of all Ladies, Frances, Countess Dowager of Exeter.' It was intended for women who were members of large households, similar to that of Margaret FeLl.

The copy of this book that 1 worked from was the Swarthmoor Hall Library in Ulverston, Cumbria.

housed in

prescriptive character, Sarah Fell's account book, w h i c h

covers only five years, from September 1673 - August 1678, is the only remaining record of daily life at Swarthmoor Hall,

Using the above mentioned primary sources as well as secondary

ones, a reasonably good profile of daily life for the female

members of Margaret Fell's household can be reconstructed-

Genrase Markham's Count ry Contentments began by

cautioning that women must be 'above all things to be of an

upright and sincere religi~n'.~ In all probability this did

not mean the Quaker religion, as this was a radical sect and

was outlawed in England until The Toleration Act of 1689.~~

An ordinary woman in a seventeenth century household was

expected to realise a high degree of spiritual virtue and:

next unto this sanctity and holinesse of life it is meete that our English Huswife be a woman of great modesty and temperance as well inwardly as outwardly; inwardly as in her behaviour and cariage towards her husband, wherein she shall shunne all violence oC rage, passion and humour,44

A seventeenth century English housewife was encouraged to wear

ordinary clothes that were durable and well-made, 'altogether

without toyish garnishesr, and were told to avoid 'the vanity

of new and fantastique fashions. '45 Besides modesty in their

outward dress, women were expected to acquire a large body of

42 Markham, op . cit . , p - 2. 43 Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in

Seven teenth Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press. P. 266,

Markham, 1623, op. cit. , p . 3 .

45 Ibid.

knowledge, including the skills of how to grow flax, to order,

oil, spin and dye wool (mixing colours) for new clothing, and

to grow hempe." Moreover, a housewife was required to keep

clothes clean, 'kept from filth of sweat or verminer ,47

Weaving was usually performed by a male artisan in the

seventeenth century, consequently the housewife's task was to

deliver it to the weaver, after the yarns were set lengthwise

on a loom, or, wnen the cloth was warped. H e r responsibility

was to oversee the weaver and other craftsmen to make sure

that they were performing their jobs properly:

that is to say the Weaver weave it close, strong and true, that the Walker or Fuller, mill it carefully, and looking well to his scowering-earth, for feare of beating holes into the cloth; and that the Clothworker, or Shereman burle, and dresse it sufficiently, neither cutting the wool1 to unreasonably high, whereby the cloth may weare rough, nor too low, lest it appeare thread bare ere it come out of the hands of the tailor.48

Clothing held a special status for seventeenth century women,

even more so than household articles, Women often included

ordinary items of their wardrobe in death bed bequests. even

such small items as aprons. stockings or petticoats, which

were given to their daughters, sisters and servants. There

was quite often an emotional attachment that was connected to

specific pieces of ~lothing.'~ This convention was practised

46 Ibid, p. 154.

" Markham, op. c i t . , p, 154. Ibid, p. 161.

49 Chayter, op. cit., p. 406.

144

by Quaker women, for example, Old Jane Woodell, who was a

member of the Swarthmore Women's Meeting, was given money for

a petticoat, and when she died a year later, the petticoat

went to Jane Fisher, another member.s0

A housewife was counted upon to be a good cook, but

cooking included many other skills, such as a knowledge of

brewing wine and beer (malting), 'the excellence of Oatesr,

making cheese and butter, as well as the competence needed for

ordinary day-to -day baking- Country Contentments contains

recipes for various dishes that probably made up an assortment

of ordinary meals that women in a household put together for

their families. One of these was a recipe 'to make the best

March-Panef , probably a precursor of Marzipan, which Dorothy

Smith used to make in her mother's kitchen at Sowber ~ate'l at

Christmas time as a young

To make the best March-Pane, take the best Iordan almonds and blanch them i n warm water, then put them in a stone mortor, and with a fine wooden pestell beate them to pappe, then take the finest refined sugar well searst, and water as will mingle the flower into a stiff paste, and a good season of Salt, and to knead it, and role out the cake-thin and bake t h e m on papers. 53

Chicken was also a commonplace meal for women to cook in the

Ross. op. cit . p. 292.

51 Sowber Gate was the country estate and farm located about four miles outside of Northallerton, North Yorkshire, where Dorothy Smith lived in her youth. It was purchased from a Mr. Rider in 1928, and w h e n the Place family moved in. they renovated the old buildings considerably.

52 Unstructured interview by the author during lunch with Dorothy E. Smith in the OISE/UT cafeteria, August 21. 1997.

53 Markham, 1623, op. cit., p. 118.

seventeenth century, as it is today. Despite the present

interminable cautions to adhere to fat free diets lest we clog

our arteries, this ancient recipe seems far more appealing:

To bake a chicken pie, after you have trust your chickens, broken their legges and breast bones, and raysed your crust of the best paste, you shall lay them in the coffin close together with their bodies full of butter: Then lay upon them, and underneath them, currants, great raysins, pruens , cinamon, sager, whole mace and salt: then cover all with a great store of butter, and so bake it; after poure into it the same liquor you did in your manow bone Pie with the yelkes of two or three egges amongst it, and so serve it fortheS4

Besides the skills of cooking and making clothing, women

in Margaret Fell's time were relied upon to heal the sick, to

have 'skill in Physicke Candl Surgerier and had to know how to

cure ordinary sicknesses such as fevers and hangovers, as w e l l

as more serious ailments such as consumption, Here is a

seventeenth century remedy for the common cold:

First then for the quotidian fever (whose fits alwaies last about twelve hours) you shall take a new laid egge and opening up the crown you shall put out the white, then fill up the shell with very good Aquavite [brandy or whisky], and stirre it and the yoke very well together, and then as soon as you feel your cold fit to come upon you, suppe up the egge and either labour till you sweat, or else laying great store of clothes upon you, put yourself in a sweat in your bed; and thus doe whilst your fits continue, and for your drinke let it be only coole posset ale.=*

Taking up the themes of 1) the provision of sturdy clothing

for their families; 2) a multitude of culinary skills; and

Ibid, p, 98.

55 Ibid, p- 5.

3) caring for the sick, that were the principles set forth in

Country Contentments necessary to achieve the status of a good

English housewife, we can further apply these standards to the

evidence in the household account book of Sarah Fell.

Margaret Fell did not advocate women's wearing of plain

Quaker grey, a practice which was taken up by succeeding

generations of Quaker women. Sarah Fell's meticulous accounts

indicate that clothing, though not considered an extravagance,

was given a lot of attention by her mother and sisters and was

consistent with their social class, She recorded the purchase

of shoes, ribbons, calico aprons, garters, gloves, shoes,

petticoats, and handkerchiefs . These articles were purchased,

but wool cloth was produced from sheep kept on the Swarthmore

estate, Finer materials were brought in from merchants in

London and larger cities. One incident that is almost always

related in accounts of Margaret Fell and her attention to

clothing is a gift of f3 sent to her second husband, George

Fox during his travels. Instead of spending the money on

himself, he used it to buy her a gift of 'spanesh black cloth'

which she subsequently had made into a gown.56

Entries which referred to the purchase of 'spinells or

whorles' (spindles or whorls) meant that servants performed

the task of spinning flax.57 There is a record of a payment

of 3d. to Agnes 'for washing rinshing, and hekleing some

56 K u n z e , op. cit,, p. 69.

57 ROSS, op. cit. , p. 260-261.

147

hempet over a period of four days Although they were

probably capable, it is unlikely that Margaret Fell and her

daughters did all their own spinning and weaving, but these

humbler tasks were assigned to servants employed by the

household. Matthew Fell was the tailor for the family, making

both men8 s and womenr s clothing-59 It was estimated that the

Fell estate had a staff of twelve servants, six women and six

men, and others were hired on a day-to-day basis as needed?'

The vegetables prepared in the Swarthmore kitchen were

exclusively grown on the farm lands belonging to the estate,

as was a large part of the poultry, beef and mutton, Special

foods were sometimes purchased from other cities, such as

salmon, or Irish beef? Sarah's accounts recorded paying

Gawin Stevenson one shilling for bringing in a box of oranges

f r o m Lancaster and a 'Sage cheeser; and paying two shillings

for some brown sugar that came from on don.^^ A staple food

that was prepared on a daily basis was made from oates that

grew on the Fell farm, an oatcake called clap-bread:

This clap-bread is flattened by clapping the hand on it on a girdle or griddle and cooked over the open fire. It has been eaten from time immemorial till the present day.63

The account book also mentioned many payments for vegetable

58 P e m e y , op - ci t , , p, 455.

59 Ross, op. cit., p. 261.

Kunze, op. cit., p- 72.

62 Penney, op- cit., p - 25; p. 261.

63 ROSS, op. cit., p , 258.

148

seeds - carrots, parsnips, onions, turnips, radishes and various herbs. Margaret Fell regularly sold her produce to

markets in Ulverston, and there were notations for papents

received for cabbages, butter, eggs, peas, 'oatesr and

potatoes. For example, there is an insertion for 'pease of

Mothers sold at rnarkettf for eleven shillings and four

pence. 64 Margaret Fell and her daughters delegated the

humbler tasks of weeding and gardening to servants, S a r a h r s

accounts note that Margery Dodgson was paid six: shillings and

6d. for ten weeks of outside work - 'weeding come, washing,

rinshing, weeding ye garden, workeing hay, and other worker . 65

Cooking pots were mended by a tinker, who was paid one

shilling and nine pence for this task on October 6, 1673.66

For the ordinary sicknesses that occurred in the Fell

Household Sarah's entries for medicinal herbs are one way of

determining how the family treated various illnesses. There

are two notations, for example, for 'oyle of almondsr 67 for

Brother and Sister Lower (Mary Fell and her husband), brought

from Lancaster for medicinal purposes costing 6d. and 2d?

A composite of ale and saffron was used as a remedy for

64 Penney, op. cit., p. 160.

65 Ibid, p. 284.

'" Ibid. 67 Oil of almond is abundant in protein and is good for

all skin types. It is used for relief of itching, soreness, dryness and inflammation. In: Worwood, Valerie Ann, 1990. The Fragrant Pharmacy: A Complete Guide to Aromatherapy and Essential Oils. Toronto : Bantam Books, P . 18 .

68 Ibid, p. 1; p- 261.

jaundice, Other herbal and medicinal items that were listed

by Sarah include:

'Eelets and fennigreeke seeds for Pegg Gowthrs kneer, 'Burgandy pitch an& frensh flyes for Edmond Adlington when he was here not wellr , 'diascordum , liquorice and meseeds for little Margery Lower, Bro, Lowerrs Acct.'. '40 leeches to blood with for sister Rachelr, 'mithridate [a confection believed to contain an antidote to every poison] for Willy Yeamans "when he had a coldr. white wine 'for physicke', brandy, and 'ale for sisters Susannah and Rachel for a diet drinkr , 69

Besides the care of the sick, Margaret Fell and her daughters

often cared for the children who were left behind when a

Quaker husband and wife travelled in order to carry the

message of the society. This was the case for the children of

John Stubbs, a Quaker from Carlisle. when he travelled to

perform missionary work with his wife in London?

This recovery of everyday life as it might have been

experienced by Margaret Fell. her daughters and ordinary women

that lived and worked on the Swarthmore estate has considered

the common human needs regarding the production of clothing.

food and caring for the sick, Tasks associated with these

things were women's responsibility arid their performance gave

meaning, dignity and honour to womenrs lives. The everyday

execution of these simple tasks and the skills needed to

perform them were a productive force in the competence and

strength necessary for the work that Quaker women eventually

69 ROSS, op. cit.. p - 278-279.

70 Ibid, p, 61.

accomplished in the public sphere- Here, 1 initiate the

argument that it was the commonplace skills that Margaret

Fell, her daughters, and other Quaker women acquired in the

home, and the esteem they attached to their daily

accomplishment, that was a source of the self-assurance that

women needed in order to enter into business life, preaching,

church government, civil disobedience and political work on

behalf of women, This argument is interpretive, as well as

speculative, as there is no way of determining, from the

religious writings of Margaret Fell, for example, that her

self-confidence was strengthened in this manner. Some

evidence of the meticulous care that went into the Swarthmore

household by its female members is contained in the account

book of Sarah Fell. More likely, Margaret Fell would have

asserted that she received her strength from God to work on

behalf of women.

Most seventeenth centuq women would have acquired these

skills as a matter of course in their development as women as

part of a household and not all of them became activists to

the extent that Margaxet Fell and her daughters did, The Fell

family's participation was likely further encouraged by their

class position and the fact that they were literate, as well

as being skilled managers of a household. It was this kind of

mastery and resourcefulness connected to domestic labour

required for the management of a farming household of the

'middling-gentry' that was reproduced by the teaching imparted

from mothers to daughters and bequeathed to succeeding

generations of women in Dorothy Smith's family. It was a

151

productive force through which a process of intergenerational

teaching, example and influence ultimately matured as the

concept of 'feminism' and a belief in the equality of women

when connected to women's work in the militant Suffragette

Movement, In the women's movement in the early 1970s in

Vancouver, this inventiveness which had its origin in the

household labour of previous generations of women became a

force in the political activism of Dorothy Smith, Through

historical evidence which is realized in a materialist theory

involving the reproduction of the skills involved in household

labour, the social origins of the SOK method can be linked to

the preceding everyday domestic practices of the exceptional

women in Dorothy Smith's family history. A concept such as

women's equality did not arrive in the world spontaneously

but would logically have its origin in the practices of real

women, such as Margaret Fell and her daughters, and through

their practice of this value and belief, it was reproduced and

then taken up by Dorothy Smith in her sociological work.

The Quaker: Roots of Dorothy E. smith

Dorothy Smith's mother was brought up in a non-conformist

and eclectic family whose members embraced a variety of

religious influences and beliefs, but had no particular

allegiance to any one sect. In her immediate family, however,

Dorothy and her brother's were brought up as Anglicans,

although they did not attend church on a regular basis. Her

father, Tom Place, as a child, had been befriended a local

152

vicar in the Church of England 'a good man named M k - B~nd~.~'

For this reason, given that he came from a poor working class

background and had to leave school at the age of 14, he

obtained a much wider education, including religious

instruction, than would have normally been available to him.

Subsequently, as a young man, he read and became interested in

Theosophy (forms of religious thought w h e r e a claim is made to

mystical insight) and the works of Annie Besant. As an adult,

Tom Place took no further interest in religious matters,

except where it might have affected his business interests.72

Dorothy Smith's mother sent the children to Church of England

boarding schools, which was likely prompted by social reasons

rather than religious ones. She refused to have the children

baptised at the 'properf age. She delayed Dorothy's baptism

until after the parliamentary revision of the 1662 Book of

Common Prayer, not ratified until 1928, because of a statement

in the service which deemed that anyone who died without the

Sacrament of Baptism would inevitably go to hell. Dorothy

Smith was eventually baptised by an Anglican priest who agreed

71 This information comes from two sources : 1) An unpublished paper written by Ullin T. P l a c e called: llFrom Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness: A Pilgrimrs Progress?" presented at a Conference on Mystical Experience at the Institute for Psychiatry in London on November 2, 1996; and 2) the Diary of Thomas Place, Dorothy Smithr s father, which he began to keep at the age of sixteen in 1888, at Langton-On-Swale, Northallerton, North Yorkshire, England. Mr. Bond, the vicar mentioned in his diary, lived only a few houses away from his family home.

'' E-Mail communication with Ullin T. Place, September 29, 1998.

property, The home had been out of the possession of the Fell

family since 1759 (sold because of pressing financial matters

by John Abraham) and had, through deterioration and neglect

become half of its original size* Emma Clarke Abraham was not

allowed to make any important structural changes to the estate

without consulting the Quakers of the London Yearly Meeting,

and was to provide access to visiting Quakers who were

interested in viewing the all.^^

The purchase of Swarthmour Hal1 was complicated and

required some detailed and 'protracted negotiationsr between

t h e London Society of Friends and Emma Clarke Abraham, as she

had 'entertained views guita different from those who

contributed to t he purchase fund in the interest of

friends' . 76 The Hall and property were purchased f o r a sum

of f5,250, half of which was given to Emma A b r a h a m by Friends.

The option to buy the property obtained by the London Society

of Friends could only be realized after the death of Emma

Clarke Abraham and her nephew, E. Mitf ord A b r a h a m . Several

legal restrictions and conditions regarding the ownership of

t h e property were put in place by the Quakers:

[That] the property is not to be used for any other purpose than as a private dwelling house, farm or like agricultural use, and that no t rade or business is to be carried on thereon, and the sale of intoxicating liquors is not to be allowed on the property, but the owner or occupying tenant may receive lodgers, boarders or paying guests of a

75 Quaker H i s t o r y , Bul le t in of the Friendsr HistoricaZ Society of Philadelphia, 4 , 1, 1912, 147-9. P. 148,

76 Quaker H i s t o r y , B u l l e t i n of the Friendsr ~ i s t o r i c a l Society of Philadelphia, 5 , 1, 1913, 20-21- P. 2 0 .

respectable class; that reasonable facilities, free of charge, are to be given for the Friends and the public, to go over and view the property for its historical interest. 77

A certain amount of resentment and tension between the two

parties is implicated in the account of the sale of the Hall,

as it was noted that 'there will be almost universal regret

that at present only a deferred ownership for Friends is

practicabler? The blame for the difficulties in arbitrating

the purchase seemed to have been conferred on Emma Clarke

Abraham by the Society of Friends, as they end the description

of the transaction by stating 'one can but wish that she had

been willing to allow them [Friends] to fulfil their unselfish

desire8 .79

Emma C . Abraham, a talented wood-carver, carefully restored the Hall, carving the wood panelling in the Great

Hall herself. She also removed two posts from a huge four-

poster bed belonging to Judge Fell, the only piece of original

furniture remaining in the Hall, and re-incorporated them in

the carving of a fireplace in the parlour, She used this wood

to carve two extraordinary PhoeniciseO which, despite their

status as a mythical symbol, are still prominently displayed

- - -

77 Ibid, p . 21.

Ibid,

79 Ibid,

The plural of phoenix, the bird fabled to live for five or six hundred years in the Arabian wilderness, capable of burning itself on a funeral pyre and rising from the ashes in a youthful state. It is often used as an symbol of irnmortality.

in the Great Hall- Swarthmour Hall ownership reverted to the

London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in 1954, after

the death of E. Mitford Abraham of Vancouver, Emma Abraham's

nephew. sL

In the summer of 1933, at the age of seven, Dorothy Smith

visited Swarthmour Hall with her mother and brothers. There

is a family photograph which depicts Dorothy and her brothers,

Ullin, David and Milner standing in front of the Hall with

Emma C l a r k e Abraham. The picture of Dorothy and her brothers

was published in the Quaker publication The Friend, on ~ u & s t

24, 1934, a year after their visit, and on the occasion of the

death of Emma Clarke Abraham, with the caption "Ernma C.

Abraham with great nephews and a great niece at the door of

Swarthmour Hall, a snapshot taken last summer.I1

Dorothy's mother was not brought up in the Quaker faith,

as one of her ancestors (unidentified) had been excluded from

the Society of Friends for marrying outside of the sect.

However, the younger Dorothy was aware of her Quaker

background at a young age, Her active interest in Quakerism

as a religion began as a young teenager and was largely

influenced by her brother's interest in theology. Ullin

Thomas Place, Dorothy's older brother by only a year,

discovered mysticism at the age of 15. Quite by accident at

school, he was introduced to a book called Mysticism (1911) by

Evelyn Underhill, which intrigued him by its presentation of

From a pamphlet written by Elfida Vipont Foulds called Swarthmoor Hall, first published in 1979 by the Quaker Home Senice, Friends House, Euston Road, London.

157

religion as a mode of transforming, psychologically, the human

personality and a way of finding 'the inner strength needed to

withstand all the pain and suffering that my father had led me

to expect in the worldr ?2 He further read a treatise on the

subject by Dean W- R. Inge called Protestantism (1927) , which

contained a chapter on Quaker mysticism- Inge argued that

this sect practised a completely unsullied form of Protestant

mysticism. It was this text that led Ullin to read George

Foxrs JournaZ. As a consequence, Ullin adopted a position of

non-violence, which was a part of the Quaker doctrine- He

later registered with the British military as a conscientious

objector, working with the Friendsr Ambulance Unit as an

orderly and porter in hospitals in England, as well as driving

milk lorries around the Hertfordshire countryside during World

War I1 .e3

On summer vacations, Ullin and Dorothy stayed at Woodhall

in Wensleydale in North Yorkshire where their mother had owned

and worked a farm, and where the family rented half of a large

farmhouse It was here that Dorothy began reading George

Fox's Journal and attended Quaker meetings with her brother

Ullin. In his Journal, George Fox related his first visit to

Wensleydale:

In my way up to Wensleydale I came to a great house, where was a schoolmaster; and they got

Place, cit ,

83 E-Mail communication with Ullin T. Place, September 29, 1998.

me into the house. I asked them questions about their religion and worship; and afterwards I declared the truth to them, They had me in a parlour, and locked me in, pretending that I: was a young man that was distracted, and had run away from my relations: and they would keep me till they could send to them, But I soon convinced them of their mistake, and they let me forth, and would have had me to stay; but 1 was not to stay there. Then having exhorted them to repentance, and directed them to the light of Christ Jesus, that through it they might come unto Him and be saved, I passed from them, and came in the night to a little ale-house on a common, where-there was a company of rude fellows drinking. Because I would not drink with them, they got up their clubs and were striking at me in a rage; but I reproved them, and brought them to be somewhat cooler; and then I walked out of the house upon the common in the night. After some time one of these drunken fellows came out, and would have come up close to me, pretending to whisper to me; but I perceived he had a knife, and therefore 1 kept off him, and bid him repent, and fear God. So the Lord by His power preserved me from this wicked man; and he went into the house again- The next morning I went on through other Dales warning and exhorting people everywhere as I passed, to repent and turn to the Lord: and several were convinced.

This and other portions of Fox's Journal read much like an

adventure story, and it is small wonder that it captured

Dorothy and Ullinfs interest so completely, They went

together to meetings in both Carperby and Bainbridge in the

Wensleydale district, George Fox, through his Journal, is

known to have visited Bainbridge on June 3, 1652, a few weeks

before Margaret Fell experienced her con~ersion.~~ Richard

Pemey, Norman, ed. 1924. The Journal of George Fox. London: J. M. D e n t , PI 60-61.

86 Hall, David S - 1989. Richard Robinson of Countersett, 1623 -1693 and the Quakers of Wensleydale. York, England: William Sessions, P, xiv-

Robinson became the first person to be converted to Quakerism

in Wensleydale, and travelled widely in the West Yorkshire

Riding to bring the gospel of the 'Inner Lightf to as many of

his neighbours who would listen, Richard Robinson had

previously bought the Manor of Bainbridge in 1628, the largest

land holding in the area.87 The Bainbridge Meeting House that

Dorothy and Ullin attended was built beside the Burial Ground

at Holme Bray in 1836 when the Quakers at the time were

prosperous enough to consider a new building, their old one

having become inadequate- It was thought to be a great

improvement on the former structure, as it had 'a flight of

wide stone steps, with a beautifully turned baluster, is

tiered to give its occupants a good view of the Meeting/*

The fact that it was George Fox's Journal that Dorothy

Smith read first is significant, as it is Fox's influence and

encouragement that inspired Margaret Fell and her daughters to

adopt the principle of women's equality and to work actively

towards the improvement of women's status in the Quaker sect.

George Fox is known, through his Journal, to have pronounced

his belief in the equality of women as early as 1648. This

took place in Leicester, at a meeting with Presbyterians,

Independents and Baptists in attendance:

At last one woman asked a question out of Peter what that birth was, viz., a being "born again of incorruptible seed, by the word of God, that liveth and abideth forever. " And the priest said to her, Ir I will permit not a woman to speak in the

Ibfd, p , 4 -

Ibid, p , 60-61.

churchw; though he had before given liberty f o r any to speak. Whereupon I was wrapped up, as in a rapture, in the Lord's power; and I stepped up in a place and asked the priest, "Dost thou call this place a church?" For the woman asking a question. he ought to have answered it. having given liberty fo r any to speak. But, instead of answering me, he asked me what a church was? I told him the Church was the pillar and the ground of Truth, made up of living stones, living members, a spiritual household, which Christ was the head of: but was he not the head of a mixed multitude, or of an old house made up of lime, stones and wood, This set them all on fire- The priest came down out of his pulpit and others out of their pews, and the dispute there was marred, 89

Fox's Journal is full of references to Swarthmore Hall and to

his relationship with M a r g a r e t Fell and her daughters. His

first meeting with her is well documented. About two weeks

after he met Margaret at Swarthmore in 1652. he went to Walney

Island where he was cruelly attacked by the citizens of the

town- Margaret Fell sent a horse to fetch him "but so sore

was I with bruises, I was not able bear the shaking of the

horse without much painr, and her husband, Judge Fell, saw to

it that he was not arrested by the Walney villagers. Dorothy

Smith would have clearly acquired some secondary knowledge of

Fell's life and work through George Fox' Journal. Likely this

awareness was accompanied by a less than complete

understanding of the implications of Fell's example, given her

young age.

Another episode in Dorothy Smith's life involving the

presence of Quakerism takes place in Birmingham, from the age

P e ~ e y , Norman, ed. 1924. The Journal of George F o x . London: J, M. Dent* P. 14-15.

of seventeen to the age of nineteen, after she left boarding

school, She enrolled in Woodbrooke College, a Quaker College

in Birmingham, taking a two year Social Studies Diploma.go At

Woodbrooke, Dorothy was in residence with a fellow student by

the name of Anne Clarksonsl and they became good friends while

in residence there,92 Dorothy and Anne took courses in

'Social Studiesr at the Ufiversity of Birmingham and did not

take the courses offered in Quaker doctrine at Woodbrooke,

The Society of Friends had a long history of concern for the

underprivileged in society, and since the number of students

from abroad studying Quakerism was much reduced during the

War, the College took in a number of University of Birmingham

Social Studies Diploma Students who could reside at the

college for a reasonable fee, Dorothy's brother, Ullin Place,

already mentioned above, had been granted exemption from

active military service on the grounds of conscience, a

practice usually taken up by members of the Quaker faith, For

the last three months of 1944, while awaiting transfer to do

relief work in the recently liberated areas of Northwest

Europe, he was stationed in Birmingham in premises just around

Itsocial Studiestt in North America would be understood as Social Work" .

This is a reference to Anne Canham, whose maiden name was Clarkson, As this was a period when she went under the name of 'Clarksonr, I will refer to her by using her maiden name,

92 I am grateful to Anne Canham, Carlisle, England, Dorothy Smithf s friend, for providing me with a profile of Woodbrooke College and the content of the Social Studies Diploma. A detailed account of Dorothy Smith's life at Woodbrooke can be found in Chapter Six, ItDorothy E. Smithrs Formative Years, 1926 - 1955,

the comer from Woodbkrooke- U11h and a group from the

Friends ' Ambulance Unit, 'knocked around' with Dorothy and

Anne for the duration of their brief stay near the Woodbrooke

residence , 93

Woodbrooke is one of a number of colleges dispersed

around the Selly Oak area of B i d n g h a m and is owned and run

by the Society of Friends, the Quakers- It is recognised

internationally as a seat of Quaker learning, and courses of

different lengths are given there on all aspects of Quakerism-

Woodbrooke had established permanent courses on Bible Study,

as well as Church and Quaker History during the First World

It also offered fellowships to Friends who wanted to

write a book or study some aspect of Quakerism in depth. The

Quakers also have a tradition of historical scholarship and

much of their this kind of work is accomplished at Woodbrooke,

The College was founded in 1903 by Quaker entrepreneurs such

as J- Wilhelm Rowntree and his wife Isabella, who were the

first wardens; George and Elizabeth Cadbury , who provided the

grounds; and Rufus Jones, a professor who had trained at

Harvard and lectured at the first summer school.95 The

presence of Quakerism through her mother's ancestry was likely

one that for Dorothy was taken for granted, given her youth,

93 E-Mail cormunication with Ullin T. Place, September 29, 1998.

94 Elkington, Anna Griscom. 1954. "A Review of Woodbrooke, 1903 -1953, edited by Robert Davis" . Quaker History, 43, 1, p - 49.

95 Allott, Stephen. 1994. John W i l h e l m Rowntree, 1868- 1905, and the Beginnings of Modern Quakerism. York, England: Sessions Book Trust. P. 78-85.

and during her attendance at Woodbrooke, she most likely took

little notice of the proximity of the Quaker religion.

Dorothy Smith continues to respect the Quaker way of life

to the present day, honouring what she terms their 'honestyr

in their way of dealing with religious and life matters.

During recent years she has attended Quaker Meetings on an

intermittent basis at Amherst, Massachusetts, in Toronto and

Vancouver, She admires the simplicity of their Meetings and

finds the idea of 'friendship' to be one that is admirable as

well as comforting during times of her life that have been

difficult and stressfuLg6 The Quaker influence in her life

has been positive and an influential one for the Social

Organization of Knowledge, chiefly with respect to the value

Dorothy Smith places in the belief of women's equality which

is also contained in the origins of the Quaker doctrine.

The objective of this chapter was to create a starting

point for some of the possible and deductive social origins of

the Social Organization of mowledge and to connect Dorothy

Smith t o the influence of women's equality as it was

incorporated in her direct ancestry and in the Quaker

doctrine. In introducing Margaret Fell and the early Quaker

Movement, I have focused on the everyday concerns of women in

the seventeenth century, arguing that it was the honour and

self esteem gained by the execution of these ordinary and

unassuming tasks in the domestic sphere that became a

productive force in the reproduction of women's equality and

96 Personal communication with Dorothy E. Smith during lunch, December 8, 1997.

gave women the strength and the organizational skill to engage

in radical political activism for women's equality that was

eventually accomplished in the public domain. The skills

which women developed in a seventeenth century household are

argued to be the inchoate productive forces in the creation of

the Social Organization of Knowledge, skills which were richly

described in Gervase Markham' s Country Contentments . This

argument is consistent with the idea that, the SOK can begin in

direct experience and the examination of the real activities

of human beings and local settings in the world- Although not

named at this time as 'feminismr, the 'honourr that

seventeenth century Quaker women associated with their labour

was almost certainly passed down to their daughters, as

evidenced by the remarkable example of Margaret Fell,

mWONT TO SPEAK PLAIN AND TO PURPOSE'^: LUCY ELtISON AND DOROTHY POSTER ABRAHAM

Thus far the "few laced genestt studied here have been

Dorothy Smith's remote ancestors, Margaret Fell and her

daughters. Moving forward now some two hundred and fifty

years, this chapter changes to an historical analysis of a

different form of women's activism, the militant suffrage work

of Dorothyr s maternal grandmother, Lucy Ellison Abraham (Mrs.

Alfred Clay Abraham, n5e Golding) and her mother, Dorothy

Foster Place (nde Abraham). It was noted in the previous

chapter that during the early Quaker Movement women attached a

sense of honour to the skills required for the work they

accomplished within a household, and their labour was

characterized as a productive force in the reproduction of a

belief in women's equality. Women's self respect at the turn

of the twentieth century was still intimately connected to

domestic work, and diverged along class lines. The Diaries of

Hannah C u l l w i c k : Victorian Maidservant (1984), edited by Liz

Stanley, records Cullwick's obsession with housework and her

pride gained through long hours of drudgery and work as a

domestic servant from the 1850s to the 1870s.~ Conversely,

From a line in Shakespeare's play, @lMuch Ado About Nothingtt, Act 2, Scene 3 - This phrase was used to describe Lucy Ellison Abraham (Mrs. Alfred Clay Abraham, nee Golding) in an article about her in the Birkenhead News called "A Woman Pioneer. l1

Stanley, Liz, ed. 1984. The Diaries of H a n n a h C u l l w i c k : Victorian Maidservant. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, P. 47.

middle-class women increasingly relied on the hiring of

working-class women such as Hannah C u l l w i c k to do their

household chores, and liked to think 'that their housekeeping

takes them perhaps an hour, perhaps half an hour, in the

morning, and no more' -' Lucy Ellison Abraham was middle-class,

and the wife of a Liverpool Chemist, whose husband's

prosperity allowed her the means to afford dances in her own

home, tennis parties, summer holidays, as well as governesses

and a boarding school education for her children. Dorothy

Foster Abraham does not fit into either of the above

categories and in her own way rebelled against the middle-

class norms valued by her mother. She abandoned a career in

Analytical Chemistry that her parents badly wanted for her,

and studied horticulture instead, eventually managing her own

farm in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, remaining independent

and unmarried until her late thirties/

My focus in this chapter will be on the contradictions

that abound in the militant enterprise of the Women's Social

and Political Union (WSPU). On the one hand, the Suffragettes

were women who in part of their lives carried on in ways that

were considered genteel and refined, holding meetings in their

parlours called At Homes, where they senred refreshments and

talked-up suffrage politics to their guests. Similarly, their

fund-raising initiatives frequently meant that they drew on

Rosen, Andrew. 1974. Rise Up, Women! The M i l i t a n t Campaign of the Women's Social and Political Union, 1903-1914. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, P, 2,

From the Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished.

their domestic skills as women, cooking for events like candy

and bake sales, and sewing for 'stalls' at suffrage fairs. On

the other hand, they secretively burned and blew up buildings,

including large estates and churches, destroyed valuable art

works, ruined golfing greens and vandalised mail boxes, Their

guerilla-like practices were accompanied by a strict principle

of destroying only unoccupied public and private buildings and

contrasted sharply with the lengths that they would go to in

order to preserve all forms of life:

Four doves - three grown ones and a baby were housed in a little wired-in enclosure attached to the South side of the house, Before setting fire to the building the Suffragettes cut the wiring so that the birds could escape ,'

In this chapter, I highlight how the proficiency required in

the execution of domestic skills was employed politically to

advance the subversive aspects of the cause. Domestic skills,

when applied to the Suffragette agenda served to legitimate a

militant ideology that was often on 'thin icer in most sectors

of British society.

My objective in this chapter is to provide an historical

analysis of the productive forces that were involved in the

reproduction of one prototype of feminist consciousness, which

provided Dorothy Smith with a further example in her past from

which to choose her own identity as a feminist sociologist.

It will focus on a material analysis of domestic labour, the

WSPU propaganda machinery, and the economic organisation of

The Suffragette, March 28, 1913- P. 385. The incident that this quotation refers to is the burning of a mansion in Egham, Surrey. Damage was estimated at E4,000.

168

the Union. The structure of this chapter will be comprised of

three layers, as the Abrahams were involved in the WSPU at

three separate but interdependent levels : I) in London,

England; 2) in Liverpool; and 3) the s m a l l community of

Birkenhead, I begin with the London Chapter of the WSPU and

look at the ways in which these members mobilised available

resources, including domestic labour- Next, I produce an

account of WSPU activism as it evolved in the Liverpool and

Birkenhead area, the hub of the political work of Lucy and

Dorothy Abraham. Lastly, I examine the specific suffrage work

of the Abrahams, their individual activities in Birkenhead,

Liverpool as well as in London.

The Women's Social and P o l i t i c a l Union, 1903-1915

What ' s this I hear? That you, Princess, Have joined the W. S. P. U.? I can't believe you'd thus transgress, I have too much respect for

The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was the

most dissident example of an excess of fifty women's suffrage

societies7 in Great Britain at the turn of the twentieth

century, most of which sought to attain the vote for women

through constitutional and non-violent means. The WSPU was

the exception, and ultimately initiated a comprehensive arson

" The refrain from a poem called "The Ballad of True Womanhoodtf by Kenneth Richmond, In: Votes for Women, September 23, 1910. P. 829.

7 Cowman, eista, n-d. "Crossing the Great Divide: Interorganizational Suffrage Relationships on the Merseyside, 1895-1914.Ir Unpublished. University of York, England.

campaign throughout England at the end of January in 1913

Manchester, because of its textile factories that in the late

nineteenth century employed some 289,000 women, has been

characterized by Eva Gore Booth as 'the natural home of the

women's movementr - 9 In Manchester at the time, Emmeline

Pankhurst was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP)

and her daughter Cristabel had gained political experience

working for the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage

(NESWS) . On October 10, 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst invited a

group of women who supported the working-class ILP to her home

at 62 Nelson Street, Manchester, and they organised the

Women's Social and Political Union," By March 1, 1906, the

organisation had moved to London and formed the London Central

Committee, and in September of the same year, had rented

office space on the lower Eloor of Clement's ~nn.~'

Militant exploits were only a part of a multi-faceted

culture which grew up around the organisation. The moderate

aspects of the membersr suffrage work included fairs,

pageantry, fashion, and plays based on the fight for the vote.

These cultural venues served a tri-pronged purpose in that

they created spaces for women to socialize, to fund-raise, and

were the sites used to reproduce WSPU propaganda,

fashion was one of a number of strategies employed

The use of

by the WSPU

R o s ~ ~ , 1974, op. cit., p. 189.

Ibid, p . 25.

Ibid, p- 25-30.

Ibid, p. 71.

and the Paakhurst family who encouraged members to adhere to a

feminine ideal which would give legitimacy to their militant

policies, Militancy as a political tactic threatened an image

of femininity, and the WSPU needed drama and panoply to hold

the m e d i a and the public's attention. Women who sold the

newspapers (both the Abraham women sold the newspaper, Votes

for Women) were encouraged to wear their best attire and to

spend sometimes more than they could afford on clothing. In

addition, fashion advertisements were a vital source of

revenue for both Votes for Women and The Suffragette?

Women's intimate fashion advertisements, a clear emblem of

femininity, were plentiful in both newspapers, An example of

these stylish undergarments was the W-B, Eesiklip CorsetL3,

sold at The Regal Corset Parlour, 137 Kensington High Street,

and there were many ads like the one for Torset Weekw,

featured at the Peter Robin's Department Store, Regent Street,

commencing February 17, 1913 . Mobilisation of available resources meant the careful

management of the WSPU newspapers, Votes for Women and The

Suffragette were prime money-makers and the ordinary rank and

file members were constantly encouraged in local reports to

Votes for Women and The Suffragette were the two official newspapers of the W.S.P.U. Votes for Women was the first, edited by Mr. and Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence. After the split occurred in the society in October, 1912, Cristabel Padchurst took over the job of editor. The name of the paper then changed to The Suffragette. The first issue was published on October 18, 1912.

l3 Ibid, November 17, 1911. P, 106

I4 The Suffragette, February 14, 1913. P. 282.

contribute to the cause by selling the papers, Both papers

w e r e full of blurbs for household cleaning products such as

Flako Soap, Fels-Naptha, Chivers Carpet Soap and Zog Silver

Cleaner, one way that the WSPU leaders capitalised on the

routine household work of subscribers to support their

militant pro j ects , The Suffragette, which became the official

WSPU journal after the split with the P e t h i c k - L a n c e s on the

issue of militancy, experienced serious problems from the

beginning. Lincoln's Inn, the new WSPU headquarters, was

raided by the police on April 30, 1913 and the women began to

print the paper themselves, as the regular printer had 'lost

his nervef . l5 By July, 1914 the British Government made

serious efforts to shut down The Suffragette and it became 'a

ghost of its former self, carrying perhaps one-third of the

advertising lineage it had carried a year earlierf?

One of a series of increasingly grandiose fund-raising

campaigns organized by the WSPU was the f20,000 Fund which had

gathered the sum of f 16,650 by September of 1908 .I7 This was

soon followed by the f50,000 Fund in 1909 and by the end of

August o£ that year donations had reached f45,868, Gifts w e r e

of ten made up of anonymous donations from groups like "The

Goudhurst ~aloonatics~,~~ In 1914, near the end of the

militant campaign, the WSPU began work on the f250,000 Fund,

Rosen, 1974, p. 193-194.

l6 Ibid, p. 241.

l7 Votes f o r Women, September 3, 1908. P. 431.

Ibid, August

its most pretentious project- The Suffragette reported in its

May 8, 1914 edition that they had accumulated El68,053,

despite the fact that the police had seized the contributions

from March 26 - April 29, 1914." In July of the same year,

the Union started The Great Protest Fund, where they

proclaimed 'new and generous giftsr, including one of 'f500

from a ~ouse' 20 This fund was inaugurated to protest prison

torture, and two weeks after it was announced, the

organization had collected €15.350. a fact which they

broadcasted in The Suffragette as a clear message to the

Liberal government that they could not be ~topped.~'

Women in the Union routinely exploited their membersr

domestic skills to raise money for the militant cause. Often

the London organisers would produce a huge centralised event,

organised months in advance that the district committees were

persuaded to support. One such happening was a Christmas Fair

and Fste that was held in London from December 4 - 9, 1911.

Local WSPU Committees were responsible for organising various

'stallsr, which sold a wide assortment of merchandise,

frequently hand-made by the women who contributed. The

Christmas Fair and Fete was held at the Portman Rooms, Baker

Street and hundreds of women volunteers participated from all

l9 The Suffragette, May 8, 1914. P. 92.

20 The Suffragette, July 3, 1914. P. 197. A reference to any WSPU prisoner who was forced to return to prison once she had recovered sufficiently from the effects of hunger- striking. a law nick-named the 'Cat and Mouse Actr. passed by the Liberal government in May, 1914.

21 Ibid, July 24, 1914. P. 262.

over England, The fair organisers even received two hats to

sell from Messrs- Swan and Edgar, who had had their windows

broken two weeks previously, saying they 'bore the WSPU no

i l l - ~ i l l ~ * ~ Another event, but one held in the summer, was

the Suffragette Flower Fair and Festival on June 3 - 13, 1913 in the Empress Rooms, Kensington. The instructions for the

fair decorations set out by the Festival Secretary underscored

the attention to detail and fashion consciousness:

T h e appearance of the Empress rooms during the Summer Fair and Festival must not fall below the high standard of artistic beauty set by the WSPU in the past. The decorations will be entirely of flowers; these must be ready in great profusion, and the names of volunteers for making them are therefore wanted immediately. The uniform of the stall-holders and helpers will consist of flowered muslin dresses and picture-hats, and the waitresses will wear, instead of hats, white mob caps and flowers. For this part of the work, too, and amty of volunteers is needed. 23

The WSPU leadership lost no opportunity to make money for the

cause, and they were experts in fund-raising, financial

planning and the summoning of available resources, which

included reliance upon the ordinary domestic talents of

thousands of unpaid women.

As well as proficiency in money matters, the WSPU also

created a huge propaganda machine with its own ideology. One

of the direct ways that the WSPU communicated this message to

potential members was through the use of theatre - plays which

not only contained a militant suffrage credo, but were able,

22 Ibid, December 1, 1911- P, 139,

23 The Suffragette, April 25, 1913. P. 473.

174

through their performance, to raise money for the society.

The constitution of the Actressesr Franchise League (AFL),

wholly supported the idea of a suffrage propaganda:

(1) To convince members of the theatrical profession of the necessity of extending the Franchise to women,

(2) To work for womenr s enfranchisement by educational methods,

1. Propaganda meetings. 2. Sale of Literature, 3 , Propaganda plays, 4, Lectures - 24

The formation of the AFL was encouraged by several performers

who had ties to the WSPU, among them the actresses Sime Seruya

and Winifred Mayo. Since the AFL adopted a policy of

'neutralityr it gave the members a wide selection when it came

to offering their services as performers, a choice which often

included the radical WSPU.'' Cecily Hamilton, a suffrage

playwright who wrote "The Pageant of Great WomenN and "How We

Won the V o t e t 1 , was one of the initial members of the WSPU.

Both of her plays were performed on several occasions in

Liverpool.

Militant suffrage 'newspeakr developed by the WSPU went

through several distinct phases during the course of their

activism from 1905 - 1915. At first, founding members

espoused a loyalty to working-class values. Even after the

move to London, Annie Kenney began by forming associations

with poor women from the East End. Nonetheless, at the first

24 Quoted in: Stowell, Sheila. 1992. A Stage of T h e i r Own: F e m i n i s t Playwights of the Suffrage Era. Ann Arbor: U n i v e r s i t y of Michigan Press. P. 41-42.

** Ibid, p* 131.

rally held at Caxton Hall in the East End of London, all

social classes were represented and it was likely at this

meeting that the WSPU hierarchy made their initial contacts

with affluent women-2h Gradually the WSPU leadership eschewed

its working class roots and formed connections to the

wealthier classes in London society. This began during the

fund-raising project called the f20,000 Fund in 1908 mentioned

above, when Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence 'openly courted the richr."

At the height of its influence, the Union fostered its

ideology through extraordinary pageantry and ceremony. The

Great Procession, which took place in London on June 17, 1911,

included suffrage supporters from all over the world. As

activists, the WSPU wished to emphasise Britain's imperial

status2', as well as women's solidarity, so they invited women

from a number of Britain's colonies. A map of the procession

published in Votes for Women depicts both an Empire Pageant

and the Imperial Contingent. The Imperial Contingent was

organised by Miss Dennatt at the WSPU's headquarters at

Clement's Inn and delegates from South Africa, India, the East

and West African colonies marched together in the procession.

Mrs. Pankhurst spoke on each occasion of the organisational

meetings for this contingent, indicating the willingness of

26 Rosen, 1974, op. cit. p. 60.

27 Ibid, p - 86.

Burton, Antoinette. 1991. "The Feminist Quest for Identity: British Imperial Suf f ragism and l@Global Siste~hood'~, 1900-1915. Journal of Women's H i s t o r y . 3.2. 46- 81. P, 66,

the WSPU leaders to support imperialist-feminist beliefs-29

The split that occurred between the Pethick-Lawrences and

Cristabel and Emmeline Pankhurst in October, 1912 was a

celebrated example of the dictatorial. ideological principles

upon which the organisation was managed. M r . and Mrs.

Pethick-Lawrence arrived back in England from a trip to Canada

to find that the offices at Clement's Inn had been 're-

possessed by the l a n d l ~ r d ~ . ~ ~ The Pethick-Lawrences had

objected to Cristabelrs increasingly militant ideology. After

their departure, the policy of the WSPU consisted of an

escalated aggressiveness enacted by an extensive arson

campaign which was controlled by Cristabel, who had been

forced to flee the country and was living in Paris. Following

the breach in the society, the strategy was one of all-out war

against the British government, which continued all through

1913 to the beginning of the World War I in August, 1914.

At the outbreak of war the internal policy of the Union

took an absurd turn, when the Pankhursts adopted a stance of

extreme patriotism. The Suffragette published a preposterous

patriotic speech given by Mrs. Pankhurst at the Sun Hall in

Liverpool in April, 1915, an example of one of the many sudden

changes in policy in the Union's history.31 Given that the

militant strategy on the part of the WSPU authority would have

been inappropriate in wartime, they executed a complete about

29 Votes for Women, June 9, 1911. P. 597.

30 Rosen, 1974, op. cit., p. 173.

31 The Suffragette, April 23, 1915. P. 25.

177

face. Instead, they organised a War Service Meeting at the

London Palladium for June 3, 1915 advertising The Suffragette

as 'the best patriotic war paperr .32 As a gesture of

reconciliation to the Liberal government, the Union arranged a

War Service Procession which took place on July 17 of the same

year. A deputation of women, proclaiming the right to work

for the war effort, was received by M r , Lloyd ~eorge .33

Diminished in financial resources and the support of the

political will, the WSPU was forced to vacate its luxurious

quarters at Lincoln's Inn House, and in September, 1915, it

was announced they were 'removing to the West Endr * 3 4 WSPU

leaders began to devote their energies to recruiting women for

the war munitions industry and in October. 1915, they renamed

The Suffragette. calling it Britannia.3s

Number Eleven Renahaw street3': The WSPU in Liverpool

In the above introduction to the WSPU organization, I

have focussed on two of its aspects: I) The economic

resources which allowed the production of WSPU activism, in

the exploitation of the ordinary domestic skills of women as

they were mobilized by the WSPU in the course of their fund-

32 Ibid. June 4, 1915. P. 128.

33 Ibid, July 9, 1915. P. 197.

34 Ibid, September 17. 1915. P. 331.

36 The WSPU headquarters in Liverpool, April 14, 1911 - January 11, 1913.

raising, membership, and propaganda initiatives and 2 ) the

several phases of the WSPU propaganda machine, and their use

of various ideologies to legitimate their militant tactics*

The following local history of Suffragette activism in the

Liverpool and Birkenhead area will continue this type of

analysis. As the historical account of militant suffrage

activism converges on the local setting of Liverpool and the

small community of Birkenhead, the relevance of this kind of

focus becomes clear, in that the London WSPU membership

depended on the local chapters to support the more sensational

aspects of the cause, Smaller communities did not have

immediate access to the machinery of government as did the

WSPU in London, so their backing for the cause often meant the

humbler tasks of selling newspapers, managing the local

office, organising jumble sales, At Homes, as well as the

popular open air meetings. All local WSPU members eventually

became involved in the militant campaign, however, so the

notion that activism in a subordinate district meant complete

consignment to the lacklustre aspects of suffrage work was far

from the case.

Two contemporary feminist historians have concentrated on

Suffragette activism in the Liverpool area. One is Marij Von

Helmond who has written Votes for Women: E v e n t s on the

Merseyside, 1870-1928 (1992) . Her account refers to the

prison letters of Dr. Alice Ker, who was a local resident of

Birkenhead, and a constitutional suffragist who converted to

the WSPU in 1909. As Dr. Ker was an intimate friend of Lucy

and Dorothy Abraham, Dorothy Smithr s mother

17 9

and grandmother,

her letters contain references to them- However, Von

Helmondrs record contains an inaccuracy in regard to Dorothy

Foster Abrahamr s arrest and imprisonment, 37 Another

representation of Liverpool S u f f r a g e history which 1 have

drawn from is the work of Krista Cowman, a feminist historian

at the University of York, whose writing in this area

includes, "The Stone-Throwing has Been Forced Upon Us: The

Function of Militancy within the Liverpool W,S.P.U., 1906-

1914 - If (19 95) . The secondary sources for women' s Suffrage history in Liverpool and Birkenhead are limited, and I: have

relied heavily on primary sources, the two WSPU papers, Votes

for Women and The Suffragette, Votes for Women, which

commenced publication in October of 1907, contained a regular

weekly feature called "The Campaign Throughout the Countryv

near the end of the paper, which made the study of local WSPU

offices in Liverpool and Birkenhead a straightforward task.

The WSPU was formed in Liverpool in 1905 by Alice

~orrisey." A member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP),

she had openly criticized the electoral policy of the

Liverpool Womenr s Suffrage Society (LWSS) . 3S Alice Morrisey

37 Von Helmond states that Dorothy Foster Abraham 'took part in a window smashing raid in London in March, 1912. Refusing to pay a fine, she was sentenced to a month's imprisonment in Hollowayr (Von Helmond, 1992, 105) . This is incorrect. Dorothy Foster Abraham spent 17 days in Holloway on a remand. When she went to trial, it was found that there was no evidence against her and she was released-

38 Cowman, Krista. Letter. January, 1998.

39 Cowman, Krista. 'The Stone-throwing Has Been Forced Upon Usr: The Function of Militancy Within the Liverpool W.S.P.U, 190644.' Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. Volume 145. P. 176,

was also upset with the exclusion of working-class women from

the organisation, The WSPU in Liverpool was one of the

earliest branches to form after Manchester and pre-dated the

London division,40 At first, the WSPU used tactics for

gaining membership which targeted working-class women:

The Union began its local campaign with a series of street-corner and factory-gate meetings which mirrored the tactics of the local socialist movement. Many of the venues selected. such as Wellington Column and Islington Square, were already well used for socialist meetings. Factory-gate meetings were also initiated, concentrating on factories with a large female workforce such as Copes ' tobacco and Crawford' s biscuits. *l

The first act of disruption of a meeting by the Liverpool

Branch took place in January 9, 1906. in the Sun Hall. where

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the then Prime Minister, was

speaking to five thousand Liberal supporters. The Liverpool

WSPU message and question to the leaders was class-oriented,

saying, WILL THg LIBERAL GOVERNMENT GIVE WORKING WOMEN THE

VOTE?I1 None of the women were detained by the police.

although one of the demonstrators cuffed the man who tried to

take away her banner." This event received an unfavourable

account in the ~iverpool Daily Post, but by 1908 the Union was

beginning to receive more favourable press editorials. at

least the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury reported that 'no

one can say that the Suffragettes have not been wise in their

40 Cowman, Krista. E-Mail Message, February 2, 1998.

41 Cowman, 1995. op. cit., p. 177.

Ibid, p. 178.

generationr - * Organisers and office headquarters for the WSPU in

Liverpool changed several times from 1906 to the beginning of

the First World War, indicating the practical difficulties

experienced in the course of suffrage work- In May, 1909, the

first paid organiser who arrived from London was Mary

Phillips. 44 She had been incarcerated in Holloway prison,

likely part of a large arrest of 25 women that took place in

London on June, 1908. 45 M a l y Phillips was released from

Holloway on Friday, September 18, 1908 She had visited

Liverpool previously with Ada Flatman, in December of 1908 to

organise the demonstration at the Sun Hall, where Mr. Lloyd

George was speaking. At this particular meeting, Lloyd George

had become so terrified of Suffragette protest that he refused

to speak unless women were not allowed. Hundreds of tickets

had already been issued to women, consequently, even the wives

of Liberal stewards had to have their money refunded." M a r y

Phillips attained notoriety through an adventurous protest

which the Liverpool Echo called "Daring Suffragist Interviewed

- Miss Phillips 'Recitalr Under an Organ - A Weird

Experience1'. She hid under the hall organ from about 8

o'clock the previous evening. The keynote speakers were Mr.

43 Votes for Women, May 28, 1908. Table of Contents.

" Cowman, 1995, op. cit., p. 179.

45 Rosen, 1974, op. cit., p. 107.

46 Ibid, September 3, 1908. P. 431.

47 Ibid, December 24, 1908. P. 214,

182

Birrell and Lord Crewe, who were to receive honorary degrees

from Liverpool University- As Mr. Birrell rose to accept,

Mary Phillips conducted an 'a loud and @te long discourse on

votes for womenr . 48

Mary Phillips was succeeded a few months later by Miss

Ada Flatman, and the WSPU established their first office, shop

and meeting place at 28 Berry Street Liverpool in September,

1909.~' Here is a characteristic report from Liverpool and

Cheshire District in 1910:

November 4, 1910 Miss Flatman again thanks "Two Sistersff for their generous donation of five pounds and hopes they will send in their present address- They will be glad to know that these gifts always come when funds are especially low and money urgently needed, Will others not follow this example and send donations for the Blouse stall?"

When Miss Flatman was the paid organiser in 1910, sewing

meetings were held in the office on Tuesday and Friday

evenings.'' In February, 1911, the organiser changed briefly

to Mrs. Alice Morrisey who took on the position pro tem, and

the third organiser, Miss Alice Davies, was welcomed a few

weeks later by an At Home at the shop on Friday March 3-'* A

few weeks later the office moved to I1 Renshaw Street, which

48 Pankhurst , Dame Cristabel . 1959 - Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, Edited by Lord Pethick- Lawrence. London: Hutchinson. P. 127.

Ibid, November 4, 1910. P. 77.

Ibid, October 21, 1910. P. 45.

52 Votes for Women, March 3, 1911, P, 362.

w a s celebrated by another A t Home at which Lucy Ellison

Abraham was the speaker .53 Mrs. Abraham and Miss Martin took

over the position of organiser for the Liverpool and District

Branch for several months in starting in May, 1912, while Miss

Davies was in prison. She was sentenced with Dr- Alice Ker to

three months imprisonment on a charge of breaking windows to

the value of €42, in the huge glass-breaking campaign that was

organised by the WSPU in London in March, 1912,'~

The Union organiser changed once again in September of

1912, when Miss Helen ~ollie~' took over for Miss Davies- She

instituted a legal defense fund for Liverpool members who were

arrested. Helen Jollie was credited with breathing new life

into the flagging spirits of WSPU members and instigating a

renewed interest in militant activism in LiverpooLS6 In

January of 1913 the WSPU office and shop relocated again to

Canning-Chambers, 2, South John Street. This was celebrated

with an American Tea, and the new offices, as well as being a

meeting place, became a tearoom, opening daily from 12 pm to

6pm. A final shift in office space took place in September

of 1913 to 8A, Lord Street where it likely remained to the

onset of the Great War in 1914.58

53 Ibid, April 14, 1911. P. 466.

54 Ibid, April 5 , 1912. P. 432.

55 Ibid, September 27, 1912. P- 838,

C~~l~lil~l~ 1995, OP. cit., P. 186.

57 The Suffragette, January 12, 1913. Pp, 194-5.

Ibid, September 19, 1913. P. 855 .

184

The earliest series of arrests in Liverpool took place on

August 20, 1909 when Mr. Haldane, a Liberal Cabinet Minister,

spoke at the Sun Hall- The WSPU rented a building that

adjoined the Hall, and during the course of his address hurled

'bricks and stones through the window of the Sun Hall with a

dexterity which was nothing short of marvellous8:

The police made a rush down Romer Road to the first entrance leading up to the hall, Here they found window panes falling before the unerring shots of the attack. They were unable to discover whence the shots came, but having detected the women's hiding place, they commandeered a passing window cleaner to fetch them down. His ladder, however, was too short, and the acting-sergeant sent for the fire escape?

Seven women were arrested and driven away in a Black Maria to

t he central w ride well". They broke the windows of the Black

Maria during the ride and also the windows of their cells at

t h e Bridewell. While waiting for trial, they hunger-struck,

and were released after six days?

The next incident occurred in December, 1909, when two

working-class women, Leslie Hall and Selina Martin threw a

stone ginger beer bottle at Sir Archibald William's car, from

which Mr. Asquith had just alighted, during his election

campaign visit to LiverpooLG2 No harm came to M r . Asquith

but the two women were arrested for disorderly conduct.

59 Votes f o r W o m e n , August 27, 1909. P. 1110.

A house of correction for the confinement of vagrants and disorderly persons, named after a former prison in London at St. Bride's Well.

6L Votes for Women, September 3, 1909. P. 1128.

During the interim in Walton Gaol for remand, when they were

supposed to be presumed innocent, the two prisoners were so

badly treated that it caused an uproar in the British press.

A leaflet with an account of their prison experiences was

circulated during the election campaign, costing the Liberal

government i~umerable votes.=

Leslie Hall was released from prison two days early on

January 24, 1 9 1 0 ~ ~ and Selina Martin was not released until

February 3, after being forcibly fed twice a day for a period

of 3 7 days. Here is an excerpt from her account of her prison

experience at Walton published in Votes for Women:

[Several] wardesses entered my cell and commanded me to go with them to the doctor's room, I refused, and I was dragged to the foot of the stairs with my hands handcuffed behind- Then I was carried face downwards by the arms and legs to the doctor's room, Mter a violent struggle, I was forced into a chair, the handcuffs removed, and my arms held by women whilst the doctor forcibly fed me by that obnoxious instrument - the stomach tube, Much unnecessary force was used by the junior assistant medical officer in applying the gag. The operation finished I walked from the room handcuffed to the top of the stairs, but refused to return to the punishment cell. Two wardesses caught me by the shoulders and dragged me down the steps, another kicking me from behind. As I reached the bottom step the wardesses relaxed their hold, and I fell on my head. I was picked up and carried to the cell- Utterly worn out, I threw myself on the cell floor, Subsequently I was put into bed, 6S

The maltreatment of Leslie Hall and Selina Martin inspired a

63 Votes for Women, February 11, 1910. P. 309.

Ibid, January 28, 1910. P. 283.

65 Ibid, February 11, 1910. P. 309.

186

poster created by a Liverpool supporter for the national

election campaign which was used by the WSPU, It portrayed a

woman lying hand-cuf fed on the stone floor of Walton Gaol, and

the wardess walking away, with the caption, "This is the Way

that Political Prisoners are Treated by a Liberal

Government" .66 Miss Flatman and the WSPU members in Liverpool

organised a protest in support of the prisoners on January 14,

where more arrests took place outside the prison,

It was noted above that the militant campaign escalated

sharply from October of 1912 onwards and by December the WSPU

had instigated a nation-wide war on the government, with

tactics ranging from attacks on pillar-boxes to false fire

alarms being sent in to local of fire stations all over

England.67 At the beginning of 1913, these strategies

advanced to open guerilla warfare. One of the first acts of

sabotage on Merseyside was committed by Margaret Kerr, a young

student at the University of Liverpool, in November, 1912.

Originally from Birkenhead, she held a scholarship of E30.00

from the town. Miss Kerr set fire to the contents of a

pillar-box and was sentenced to three months imprisonment.

Reflecting the grave persecution suffered by the militant

Suffragettes, the account of her arrest recorded that she

received the same sentence as a man who had recently killed

his lover by shooting her three timesW6' Militancy in

66 Ibid, January 10, 1910. P, 265-

6 7 ~ h e Suffragette, December 20, 1912. P. 148.

68 Ibid, November 29, 1912. P. 95,

187

Liverpool intensified by the end of July, 1913, when the local

organiser, Miss Helen Jollie, refused to make an agreement

with the police to refrain from protest during a Royal visit

to Liverpool- As the WSPU headquarters was located on the

parade route of the King, the police boarded up the windows of

the office- Denouncing what she called an illegal action,

Miss Jollie smashed the two windows nearest the WSPU office

with a poker. When she refused to pay f4 19s. in recompense,

she was sentenced to 14 days in prison.69

During the fall of 1913, Liverpool residents began to

experience the firestorm of Suffragette militancy that was

being felt by the rest of England, On August 29, an attempt

to set fire to the Greenbank Lane public school was

interrupted by the caretaker, and he discovered afterwards

that a staircase had been doused with paraffin oiL7' There

was a failed attempt to fire the Allerton Priory, an

unoccupied residence located between Garston and Woolton- The

WSPU protesters, who often left a 'calling-cardr at this kind

of event, left a prisonerr s temporary discharge paper for ill-

health, with a note saying "Repeal the Cat-and-Mouse

More sabotage of pillar-boxes followed and at the end of the

month the Suffragettes did considerable damage to one of the

greens of the Bowling Club Golf Links near Liverp~ol.'~

69 Ibid, July 25, 1913. P. 705.

70 Ibid, September 5, 1913 . P . 8 17,

Ibid, September 26, 1913. P. 868.

72 Ibid, October 31, 1913. Pp. 50, 58.

188

By the end of the year, Liverpool WSPU resistance reached

staggering proportions, A bomb, about 12 inches by 6 inches

was found at the Palm House, Sefton Park with a partially

burnt fuse and the f12,000 building was seriously endangered.

At the same time the Priory at Sandown Park, an unoccupied,

old-fashioned house in Liverpool was set ablaze.73 Further,

the Liverpool Exhibition building on Edge Lane which had been

closed down for several months was totally destroyed by fire,

and serious damage was done to St. Anne's, Aigburth, one of

Liverpool's most important churches.74 WSPU terrorism on the

Merseyside during 1913 often seemed to be thwarted or

interrupted. but the arson campaign in Liverpool was carried

out without an arrest, an indication of the skill of members

in the practice of sabotage-75

A study of the accounts of the ruin of private property

that took place and were attributed to the work of the

militant Suffragettes reveals the use of ordinary materials

found in the household. These materials, often found at the

sites of sabotage, would be a part of the everyday life of

women in the period and therefore easily accessible as tools

of destruction. Burlap sacks saturated in paraffin oil,

firewood, newspapers, straw, shavings, fire-lighters, matches,

match boxes, candles, bottles containing turpentine, and

cotton and wool pads saturated with alcohol were common items

73 Ibid. November 21, 1913. Pp. 128-9.

74 Ibid, December 12, 1913, pp. 206-7; and December 19, 1913, p. 222.

75 Cowman, 1995, op. tit., p. 190.

recovered from the scenes of attack- Explosions were often

executed by lighting gallon containers of paraffin, although

in a few cases canisters containing gun-powder were recovered,

The hatchet and the butcher's cleaver became common

instruments of protest, as in the incident regarding the

Rokeby Venus by Valasquez that was hacked seven times with a

small axe by Mary Richardson in the National Gallery in March,

1914.'~ Most of the material means of militant protest in the

WSPU arson campaign came from the domestic sphere and involved

the use of simple substances or items which could be bought in

any dry goods store, evidence that the women who torched

houses and blew up empty buildings did not rely on the

expertise of experienced terrorists, but on their own cunning

and the familiar elements of their own environment,

Antithetical to these breathtaking exploits of the

Liverpool Suffragettes were the ordinary, routine activities

of members who assisted in the management of local WSPU

headquarters. These donations of time and labour on the part

of Liverpool members were more characteristic of ordinary

church work than what would be expected in a radical political

organisation- Both artistic, organisational and domestic

talents of the members were regularly called into use for the

benefit of the suffrage cause, Often, these common tasks were

performed by working-class women who were a more visible

presence in the Liverpool membership than in London,

Evidence provided by the above mentioned example of

'' Ibid, March 13, 1914 - P. 491.

190

Selina Martin and Leslie Hall, both working-class women, was

evidence that the 'WSPU on Merseyside was a cross-class

organisation8 ,17 Early recruiting on the part of the

Liverpool Udon included efforts to attract impoverished

women, as this report of an early protest meeting in December,

1909 attests :

Another successful meeting was held at Nelson Hall, Mill Street, one of the poorest parts of Liverpool, The admission charged was one penny, and the hall was filled with poor women, many with babies in their arms, and working men, All listened eagerly and asked for another meeting?

Both working-class and middle-class women had constraints

which made their participation in public activism difficult.

Liddington and Norris document how the housework that was a

part of the daily life of Lancashire working-class women was

overwhelming, so that participation in suffrage politics meant

a remarkable struggle on their part? The restrictions to

activism in the public sphere for middle-class women was

different, however, centring more on what was perceived as

socially acceptable behaviour, W e n though there was likely

more time fox middle-class women to take up the pursuits

involved in work for the WSPU, 'any public activity could be

viewed as militant' . *O

77 Ibid, p. 178.

'' Votes for Women, December 10, 1909. P. 172,

79 Liddington, Jill and Jill Norris, 1978. One Hand Tied Behind Us: T h e Rise of the WOmenrs Suffrage Movement - London: Virago, P. 30.

Cowman, 1995, op. ci t . , p . 178 -

Routine activities of the Liverpool Suffragettes centred

around the local WSPU clubroom. The office was the centre for

WSPU non-militant industry, and eventually became a tearoom

and a rehearsal space for various pageants. It was also a

shop kept by volunteers where newspapers and WSPU supplies,

such as pamphlets, Christmas cards, and novelties such as

china ornaments and badges of either tin or enamel were

sold.8L Under the auspices of Miss Helen Jollie, the office

developed into a site for private speaking lessons and she

started a Debating Club at the beginning of October, 1912,

which met the first Tuesday of every month.82 She also

started a library in the office which opened in February, 1913

and she held a weekly sewing meeting there which met on

Wednesday evenings from 6-9 p.m. The WSPU clubroom was the

starting place for a weekly poster-parade which left the

office at 12:30 every Saturday afternoon, which advertised

protests , events, meetings and the newspaper, The Suffragette . On special occasions lantern poster-parades were held in the

evening. 83

A large part of WSPU Suffragette activism in the district

offices like Liverpool consisted of fund-raising. The women

who sold newspapers, in particular, earned the bread-and-

butter income of the local office- The weekly reports from

Liverpool and District are full of encouragement to women to

Ibid, p. 180.

82 Ibid, October 4, 1912. P, 855,

83 The Suffragette, February 14, 1913, P. 282.

192

take up various 'pitchesr, and t o chalk the sidewalks in order

t o advertise the various pol i t ica l issues exantined by the

paper, The paid organisers took it upon themselves to invite

members t o sell door-to-door, to sell the paper i n the

streets, i n theatres, at meetings, at the railway s ta t ion , to

increase sales, praising members when the sales of the paper

were good and giving admonishment when sales w e r e poor. H e r e

is one such remark regarding the sa le of Votes for Women:

January 6& 1911. A recruit to paper sel l ing declares she only wishes she had taken the plunge and begun long ago, as she finds it such interesting work, A number of copies were sold on New Y e a r ' s Eve to the crowds of people waiting for the Pantomimes t o openOe4

Paper sales seemed t o increase steadily, and Votes for Women

noted that i n December, 1910 , about 40 copies w e r e sold at the

Birkenhead electiona5, whereas by November 1912, M i s s J o l l i e

was asking that more paper se l l e r s w e r e needed to raise the

weekly number t o 400? She seemed concerned that sa les were

waning, however, by September of 1913, when she appealed for

sales to be increased, and expressed regret tha t one of the

best paper-sellers, M r s - Hall, was moving t o New York, New

paper-sellers w e r e now being welcomed by name, which implied

that sales of the paper were beginning t o slacken.a7

The organisers i n Liverpool took up the smallest

Votes for Wome~l , January 6, 1911. P. 233.

85 Ibid, December 16, 1910, P. 189.

a6 The Suffragette, November 1, 1912. P. 42.

87 Ibid, September 19, 1913, P. 855.

19 3

occasions to make money for the local club room^ Collections

were taken at meetings, entrance fees were charged for

lectures and pageants, and members were required to sell

tickets for many of their organised events. On the occasion

of Mrs. Pankhurstfs visit to Liverpool in February 1912, the

members performed "The Pageant of Great Womenw written by Miss

Cecily Hamilton, at the Philharmonic Hall, and the push was on

for members to sell tickets ." Further, tickets for 'rHow the

Vote was Wonvr, also a play written by Cecily Hamilton, was

performed in Liverpool on M a y 4, 1912, cost Is * and reserved

seats could be had for 2sOa9 When the Debating Society was

started, an entrance fee of 2s. 6d. was charged and private

speaking lessons were given for the cost of ls." M e m b e r s had

to pay a membership fee of 6d. for the off ice fund, which was

due at the beginning of every month, or could be paid

quarterly. The organiserrs reports often contained reminders

for women to pay their m o n t h l y feesO9'

Support for the cause could be a simple as Mrs. Elsie

Drinkwater's contribution of a case of apples to be sold at

the office for funds for the Northern Exhibition in 1910.92

Further, WSPU m e m b e r s in Liverpool were encouraged to give

individual donations for travelling expenses of women who

Votes f o r Women, January 26, 1912. P. 270.

Ibid, April 19, 1912. P. 463.

Ibid, October 4, 1912. P, 855,

The Suffragette, November 12, 1912, P. 42.

92 Votes for Women, October 21, 1910, P, 45.

194

wished to go t o London f o r demonstrations, as in the large

glass-smashing campaign on March 1, 1912,~~ Artistic ability

was also exploited - a ladies choir was organised by Miss Wizzell for the Sun H a l l demonstration in October, 191L9'

Miss Palethorpe offered her talents as an art i s t t o the cause

from time to time, and in January of 1913 she advertised that

lightning sketches could be purchased at the Office for 3s,,

6d- each or 5s. for a coloured portrait,'' Towards the end of

WSPU presence in Liverpoo1 however, money-raising efforts had

reached the stage where they could be interpreted as verging

on stinginess, a further indication that WSPU influence as an

organisation was beginning to decline. Calls for volunteers

to do street-collecting in February, 1913, and the institution

of a charge for use of the off ice telephone in March could

have been evidence of this trend-g6

Much of the fund-raising techniques of the WSPU required

the exploitation of the household skills of women members who

often willingly contributed their talents in this area to

further the cause. T h i s was certainly true in the Liverpool

and District organisation, who depended a considerably on this

type of unpaid support. The informal meetings called At Homes

required a great deal of preparation on the part of the women

93 Ibid, F e b ~ a ~ 16, 1912, p. 314; February 23, 1912, p. 330,

94 Ibid, December 8, 1911, P, 165.

9s The Suffragette, January 10, 1913. Pp. 194-5.

'' Ibid, February 14, 1913, p. 282; March 21, 1913, p. 374.

who organised them, as well as their resources, for it was

expected that tea and refreshments be served at these

gatherings, Miss Hoyrs At Home in December of 1910 was held

up as a model for others to follow:

On December 3 Miss Hoy, H i g h b u r y , Torrington Road, Liscard, gave an evening At Home at which she had on sale all the goods made by herself and friends for the Northern Exhibition- Five pounds worth of goods were sold. She still has nearly f 2 0 worth to hand over for the exhibition. Will others in her district who have not already contributed goods send them in to her at the above address? It would be encouraging if other members would follow her energetic example, 97

Sometimes admission was charged to the At Homes, such as the

occasion when Miss Davies was welcomed as the new organiser,

w h e n the entrance fee was 6d." Social functions called an

'American Tear became popular occasions, especially in the

later stages of WSPU activity in Liverpool. At the American

Tea held by Mrs. Martin in January of 1913, for example, f3

was made. Guests were often encouraged to bring edibles or

flowers to these events-99

The Liverpool Office frequently held meetings in the

Office aimed at fund-raising, which required women's talents

acquired from work in the home. Donations for candy and cake

sales, chrysanthemums sold at the Office by Miss craigLoo,

Mrs. Lyonrs home-made marmalade, Miss C, Greeves doll which

97 Votes for Woman, December 16, 1910. P. 189.

Ibid, March 3, 1911. P. 362,

99 The Suffragette, January 10, 1913. Pp. 194-5.

loo Ibid, October 10, 1913, P. 9 1 5 .

19 6

was raffled off are all small ilhstrations of domestic skills

that were put to use for the cause,'OX Liverpool and

Cheshire District organised a stall for the London Christmas

Fair and Fgte held in December. 1911 and gifts were requested

from the Liverpool members.lo2 The ordinary as well as the

unusual talents of every women member of the WSPU was drawn

upon to sustain a militant crusade aimed at advancing the

social and political status of women through the right to

vote, If the WSPU had depended solely the few women with

organisational and leadership ~xperience, like the Pankhurst

family, they would not have been as effective was they were.

A Mother and Daughter in the W-'s W a r

This section is an analysis of the political activism of

Lucy Ellison Abraham (Mrs. Alfred Clay Abraham) and Dorothy

Foster Place (nee Abraham), Dorothy Smith's grandmother and

mother, respectively, It chronicles their work of behalf of

WSPU militant policies, which I reason became a productive

force in the later creation of Dorothy Smith's feminist

intellectual work and the Social Organization of Knowledge. I

demonstrate how Dorothy Smith's pride in her mother's militant

past103 was likely realised as the adoption of a set of

beliefs in women's equality which she took up with mature

Ibid, March 21, 1913, P- 374.

lo2 Votes far Women, October 6, 1911, P o 14.

lo' Interview by Wakewich' s off ice at

the author with Dorothy E- Smith in Pam Lakehead University, October 18, 19%.

conviction at the time of the Vancouver Women's Movement, from

1968-1977, I have organisedthis segment in a similar manner

as those above, dealing with both: I) the militant activities

of Dorothy Foster Abraham in London; and 2) the Abrahamsr

everyday work as members of the Birkenhead and Liverpool WSPU,

Lucy Ellison Abrahamlo4 lived, as a young married women,

on Lancaster Avenue in Liverpool, but when Dorothy Foster

Abraham was two years of age they moved to a house in New

Brighton called Stanley Rock Mrs, Abraham began her activism

as a member of the British Women's Temperance Association

(BWTA). At New Brighton, a replica of the Eiffel Tower had

been built, and the BWTA ran a coffee Kiosk on the grounds for

men, Lucy Ellison Abraham was of the belief that her

daughters should have the same chance at an education as her

sons so t h a t when the children were very young, they had a

succession of governesses to give them primary instruction,

and all the children were given a boarding school education.

Her sons went to Giggleswick and t h e daughters to Skipton.

Before joining the WSPU, Mrs. Abraham had supported

constitutional means to achieve women's suffrage, but after

attending a meeting in Liverpool where she says that Sylvia

Pankhurst was severely thrown about, she at once converted to

militancy,

The first record of Lucy Ellison Abrahamf s active

membership in the WSPU appears in Votes for Women, October 7,

The biographical details recorded here are from The Autobiographical N o t e s of D o r o t h y Foster Abraham, 18864976, Unpublished.

1910- There was the mention of a visit by Mts, Pankhurst to

New Brighton, and Mrs. Abraham and Miss Flatman held a meeting

at Grange Road, irke en head?^ The following week, Mrs.

Abraham chaired a meeting at the Birkenhead Y-M,C.A, Hall,

where Miss Flatman and M r s . Pankhurst spoke, In this report

she is commended for her work:

Mrs. Abraham, with her usual thoroughness is making good headway with the advertisements for the programme and making the exhibition [likely the Northern Exhibition] well known among the business houses in ~iverpool.'~~

Lucy Ellison Abraham's active participation in the Birkenhead

and Liverpool WSPU is limited to local organising, office

work, and other non-militant undertakings, but she did not

hesitate to support militant activism as a benefactress and

the support of the younger, unmarried women who usually went

to prison- She often offered her home as a site for drawing

room meetings and At Homes. At the end of October, 1910, she

held a drawing room meeting with 40 women attending, where

Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst was the guest speaker. Women promised

to hold other WSPU meetings in their homes ,Io7

At the beginning of February, 1911, Mrs. Abraham agreed

to become the Secretary for the Birkenhead Branch of the WSPU,

which had its office in her home at 2, Kingsmead R o a d , South,

Birkenhead. She immediately began to write reports for the

Birkenhead Chapter of the WSPU in Votes for Women which were

lo5 Votes for Women, October 7, 1910. P. 12,

Ibid, October 14, 1910. P. 49.

"' Ibid, October 28, 1910. Pp. 60-61.

199

separate from the Liverpool and Cheshire ~ranch-'O' At one

of the first meetings at Kingsmead Road, at the end of March,

1911, Mrs. Mahood spoke on "The Moral Effect of the Struggle

for the Votetr During the summer months, however, Mrs.

Abraham often reports on the open-air meetings in Birkenhead,

which were very well-received,

~n important early protest for women working for suffrage

in Liverpool and the rest of England was the avoidance of the

Census, As women were not \personsr under the law, it was

felt that if women universally avoided the Census, they would

make their presence known, During the first week of April,

1911, the home of Dr- Alice K e r at 6, James Street was engaged

for the purpose of the Census Protest, Called "Lady DodgersM

by the Birkenhead News, fifty-seven women gathered on Sunday

evening of April 2, 1911 and stayed for 24 hours while the

Census was being taken, writing across the Census form that

there were no 'personsr living in the house, just some women.

Dr. Ker's diary records that Dorothy Foster Abraham had a meal

with her friends about 3:00 p.m. on Monday, April 3, and left

for home about 5 : 30. 'lo ~ r s , Abraham, in her position as

Honorary Secretary, encouraged the Census Protest in her

reports. She spoke at the Liverpool Meeting at 11, Renshaw

Street the following week, where WSPU members relished the

lo8 Ibid, February 3, 1911, PI 297,

log Ibid, March 24, 1911- P, 412,

Von Helmond, Marfj- 1992- Votes for Women: Events on the Merseyside, Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, P. 44-45.

telling of their droll experiences on Census night."'

Lucy Ellison Abraham was also quick to give sharp

encouragement to the paper-sellers and the women who did the

chalking for the advertisement of meetings. Her reputation as

a 'plain-speaker' most likely came partly from reports that

she wrote like this one:

The 'rVotes't Secretary draws the attention of members to the fact that owing to their slackness the sale of the paper has not increased, Paper sellers are badly needed for the s i x pitches, and members are either take a pitch or get new subscribers privately - I*

Mrs. Abraham sold the papers herself. standing in the gutter

in Church Street, Birkenhead, to do the work, as the law

required that no one was allowed to stand on the sidewalks or

the city pavements to sell anything. Dorothy Foster Abraham

sold Votes for Women as well, usually working at the Pier Head

in Liverpool on Saturday mornings, 113

As well as taking part in the ordinary work for the WSPU

Office in Birkenhead, Mrs. Abraham was an astute and energetic

political organiser. Women at the time were allowed to vote

in municipal elections, so she encouraged WSPU members to

canvass municipal voters to see that they voted for municipal

candidates who were friendly to the cause of women's suffrage.

She organised a meeting on this issue Friday, October 27, 1911

at the hall of the Oxton Conservative Club. inviting Miss Vida

'I2 Ibid. July 7, 1911. P. 666-

'I3 The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy F o s t e r Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished, P. 14.

Goldstein, Professor Benjamin Moore, and Miss Alice Davies to

speak. H e r reports for October stress the importance of this

meeting and the urgent need for members to take part in the

municipal The content and purpose of her

meetings were almost always political and related directly to

the 'causer - she held a Protest Meeting in ea r ly November,

1911 with regard to Mrs. Hall's tax resistance in

Waterloo,

The Birkenhead Branch maintained close relations with the

Liverpool Office of the WSPU, as it was located directly

across the channel from Liverpool and could be reached by

ferry. Mrs. Abraham participated enthusiastically in the

ceremonies of both branches of the organisation, When Miss

Woodlock returned from a three week prison term in Holloway in

December, 1911. she attended the meeting of welcome in

Liverpool and presented her with a gold bracelet and the

prison brooch. "6 This was a badge of honour given by the

WSPU to women who had gone to prison for the cause. Designed

by SyLiva Pankhurst, it had silver bars and chains and a broad

arrow (Holloway prison clothes were covered in large arrows

pointing downwards) in the WSPU colours, purple, white and

green . In addition, when Cecily Hamiltonr s play, "The

Pageant of Great Women" was organised for performance in the

'I4 Votes for Women, October 13, 1911, p. 29; October 20, 1911, p- 46; October 27, 1911, p. 62.

Ibid, November 3, 1911. P. 78.

L16 Ibid, December 29, 1911. P. 215.

11' Pankhurst, 1959, op. cit., p. 124.

Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool, Mrs. Abraham encouraged the

Birkenhead members to participate. 'Is

At the beginning of March, 1912, Lucy Ellison and Dorothy

Foster Abraham entered into the militant activities of the

WSPU in earnest, The WSPU leaders in London had organised a

huge protest which was publicly announced to be taking place

on March 4, 1912, but was, in actuality, planned in secret to

occur on March 1, On this day, Mrs. Pankhurst and several

other members drove in a taxi to No. 10 Downing Street and

hurled four stones through the windows of the Prime Ministerrs

house- Of course, they were immediately arrested. This is

Mrs , PankhurstJs account of the March 1, 1912 protest:

At intervals of fifteen minutes relays of women who had volunteered for the demonstration did their work, The first smashing of glass occurred in the Haymarket and Picadilly, and greatly startled both pedestrians and the police, A large number of women w e r e arrested, and everybody thought that this had ended the affair, But before the excited populace and the frustrated shop ownersr first exclamation had died down, before the police had reached the station with their prisoners, the ominous crashing and splintering of plate glass began again, this time along both sides of Regent Street and the Strand. A furious rush of police and people t o w a r d the second scene of action ensued. While their attention was being taken up with occurrences in this quarter, the third relay of women began breaking windows in Oxford Circus and Bond Street.L1s

The Liverpool WSPU widely advertised that the protest was to

take place on March 4, and as several Liverpool and area

'I8 Ibid, January 12, 1912. P. 241.

lL9 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 119141 . 1985. My Own Story. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, P. 216-217.

members were travelling to London to participate in the

'counterfeitf protest, Lucy Abraham remained behind to manage

the WSPU Office in Liverpool. When the Liverpool Organiser.

Miss Davies. was arrested in the glass-smashing protest in

London, Mrs. Abraham continued to work in the Liverpool Office

until she returned from prison, 120

Well over two hundred Suffragettes were arrested during

the course of this demonstration, among them Dorothy Foster

Abraham and several of her fellow members from the Liverpool

and Birkenhead Branches of the WSPU,"' Miss Abraham had

been a participant in the third wave of glass-breaking

mentioned above in Mrs. Pankhurstrs sketch. The following

excerpt from her autobiographical notes is her description of

the Thespian events leading up to and during that day:

Due to my studying in the university, I had not been able to do any militant action, but then it was hoped that if we had a very large 'smashingf campaign in London, that we would so fill the prisons that the government wouldn't be able to cope with things for this reason. I joined a party of 13 who went up to London from Liverpool for this purpose. We arrived in London on a Sunday evening and had to travel more or less separately to some house and my friend Mrs. Frimston and myself went there together. There we got our instructions, We were told that we from Liverpool had to do what we could between Harrods and Hanrey Nichols. We had to take our position very early in the morning and just about opening time we had to watch when the crowd appeared to run towards Harrods. Our head from Liverpool, Miss Davies, was to start, and the moment we saw the crowd running, we were to join in, We were also warned that plate glass was very hard to

120 Ibid, March 1, 1912, P. 346.

IZf Ibid, March 8, 1912. P. 363.

204

smash and therefore we must provide ourselves with suitable instruments, My friend M r s , Frimston [hadl been staying with me- and my sister Agnes down in Purley, She borrowed my sister's coal hammer but I had nothdng suitable so we stopped in a shop in Purley and there I bought a Boy Scout's hatchet, We were reasonably nicely dressed and we carried our instruments in our bags and took up our position halfway between Karrods and Harvey Nichols, The moment we saw the crowds rushing at Harrods my friend struck at a window and I then struck at an adjoining window and thinking that it seemed silly just standing there I struck yet again, A third friend from Liverpool who had had some accident and [whosel arm [was] in a sling, but really wanted to be in on the job had thrown a stone at the same time but had achieved nothing. IAl man cleaning windows at an ABC next door quickly got down and seized my hatchet and actually threatened me with it, [We] were all three arrested and taken together t o a nearby Police Station, [There] we were put on a charge of conspiracy, but as my friend Mrs. Frimston struck f i r s t nobody really saw her and so she was discharged and Miss Palethorpe and myself were left in this conspiracy charge and the amount being over f 5.0 0, we then had to go to the quarter session and this meant our spending a very sad and miserable day in our cells in this police ~tati0a.l~~

A comprehensive roll of those arrested in the course of the

demonstration was published in Votes for Women and Dorothy

Foster Abraham heads up an alphabetical list of some 229 women

put in prison for their participation in this protest. The

names of women arrested were recorded with the caveat that

'this list is as full as possible, but owimg t o the number of

arrests and the difficulty of obtaining accurate information

we cannot guarantee its correctness ' . u3 Dorothy Abraham is

I** The Autobiographical N o t e s of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished, P p . 14-15,

Votes for Women, March 8, 1912, P. 363.

categorized as having been remanded before being committed for

trial, which is an accurate account.

On the late afternoon of Monday, March 4, 1912, the

prisoners from the Liverpool and District were brought before

Mr. Francis at Westminster charged with breaking windows in

Knightsbridge and Brompton Road. Miss Mary Cox Palethorpe,

Ethel Martin, and Dorothy Foster Abraham were accused of

breaking windows at premises of the Aerated Bread Company and

Charles Stuart. on Brompton Road. The account of the court

proceedings in Votes for Women related that a m a n (most likely

the window cleaner mentioned in her autobiographical account)

grabbed Dorothy Abraham, wrenched the Boy Scout's hatchet from

her hand and gave it to a policeman. She threatened to charge

him with assault if he did not release her [laughter was heard

in the court], and he accused her of threatening him with the

instrument, a fact which Miss Abraham denied, Mrs. Martin was

discharged and Miss Palethorpe and Dorothy Abraham were

remanded for eight days, 12' At Westminster Court on March

12, Miss Mary Palethorpe, Miss Abraham, Dr. Alice Ker and Miss

Alice Davies (the Liverpool WSPU Organher) were all committed

for trial, 125

At this point, a Black Maria arrived at the prison where

they were staying and took the group to Holloway to await

trial. Dorothy Abraham's stay in Holloway seems to have been

more comfortable than some of the prison experiences of

124 Ibid, March 8, 1912. P, 362.

Ibid, March 15, 1912. P. 382,

206

Suffragettes, and she seems to have made the most of her

so j ourn there, Votes for Women made the announcement that

a motor car from the WSPU would be sent to Holloway every

morning at 10 :30 sharp and anyone wishing to send parcels or

hampers to the prisoners could make arrangements through

Clement ' s Inn. lZ7 Dorothy Abraham mentions the kindness

extended to the prisoners by Mr. Pethick-Lawrence:

M r , Pethick-Lawrence kindly came and gave us advice and helped in other ways - 1 think he brought us sandwiches. By that time and possibly due to the numbers we were not put into prison clothes, but simply taka more or less straightaway to our cells. I didn't suffer much from this, The only thing that I can remember very decidedly was that the pillow was very hard and that I suffered from, but otherwise I was reasonably comfortable- 1 had been warned to say that I was a vegetarian, but the food 1 got did not upset me at all- As things settled down and we went out for exercises in the prison yard we were able to talk to other friends, Mrs. Pankhurst was there and Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence and many others of course- My sister Agnes came to see me and 1 greatly appreciated her coming. They brought me things to sew, I actually made myself a dress while 1 was in prison, After a time the authorities wanted us to attend chapel and it was frightfully amusing the first time this happened because some of the more enterprising Suffragettes dressed themselves up in Eastern garb with Yashmaks [the veil worn by Muslim women] and the prison authorities decided this was disturbing to the other prisoners and that we should have a separate chapel for the Suffragettes. I myself did not attend, and the wardesses were very kind to me and let me wander about outside my cell during chapel time. One of them actually called me Miss

12' The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished. Pp. 15-16,

12' Votes for Women, March 8, 1912. PI 363,

Dolly, so I felt quite at home,f2B

After three more weeks in Holloway Prison, Miss Palethorpe and

Miss Abraham's cases were heard at the Newington Sessions on

March 27, 1912. They were both charged with damage to the

extent of E65-00- M r s . Abraham, in the meantime, had engaged

a lawyer for Dorothy and had travelled to London to visit her

in prison, As there was no evidence forthcoming to convict

Miss Abraham, she was acquitted, and she was then called as a

witness for Miss Palethorpe- Mary Palethorpe was the

Liverpool member who participated in the glass smashing

protest in spite of a broken arm, and had rather ineffectively

flung a stone at a plate glass window, She was accused in the

court room of being in possession of a hammer, but when called

as a witness Miss Palethorpe recounted:

that she never had a hammer, Her hand had been injured and she had never touched the window in question nor had she broken any window, The Chairman pointed out to the jury that whatever the fault of the defendants might be, they had not been in the habit of saying what was untrue, and that possibly there might be a mistake on the part of witnesses. Mrs. [sic] Palethorpe was then discharged. 129

When acting as a witness for Miss Palethorpe, Dorothy Abraham

had already been acquitted and had related the truth on the

witness stand about her window-breaking episode with the Boy

Scoutsr hatchet- She knew that the hammer in question had

come out of her sister's coal cellar and had in reality been

las The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886-1976- Unpublished. Pp, 15-16.

129 Votes for Women, A p r i l 5, 1912. P, 432,

used by Mrs. Frimston. The fact that she was actually

acquitted left her dumb-founded, because there had been an

eye-witness to the event, the window cleaner who was working

at the time, Dorothy Abraham speculated that it was because

of her last name, which the window-cleaner had mistakenly

taken as being of Jewish origin- She postulated that the

window-cleaner was most likely Jewish himself, and refused to

be a witness against a 'fellow religioni~t~.~~ Returning to

Liverpool, the prisoners were welcomed with a special meeting

at 11, Renshaw Street on April 16, 1912.UL

Mrs. Lucy Abraham had taken the temporary position of

Honourable Secretary for the Liverpool Office in the absence

of Miss Davies. She occupied herself with the organisation of

various events, like the American Tea held on June 8, where

Dr. K e r and Dorothy Foster Abraham were to be speakers. 132

Mrs. Abraham arranged an open-air Suffrage Demonstration and

Protest Meeting to be held on the Plateau in front of St,

George's Hall, Liverpool the following week, Even at this

later stage of WSPU work, Mrs. Abraham seems to have made an

effort to maintain the connection to the Independent Labour

Party, as this particular meeting was supported by the ILP. A

resolution for a Government measure on women's suffrage on the

same terms as men, and that Suffragettes be treated as

13' The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy F o s t e r Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished, P. 16,

13' Votes for Women, April 12, 1912. P. 447.

13' Ibid, June 7 , 1912. P. 591.

political prisoners, was passed, with six opposed.u3 An

indefatigable worker, she organised a garden party to welcome

Miss Davies and her fellow prisoners in Holloway (including

her daughter Dorothy) to be held at Rice House, Newball Lane,

Clubmoor, on June 22 . After Dorothy Abrahamr s return from prison, mention of

the Abraham in The Suffragette subsided until July, 1913.

Mrs. Abraham is no longer listed as the WSPU organiser, as The

Suffragette was not as rigorous as it had once been in its

recording of local events- Dorothy Abraham is noted to have

contributed the generous donation of f1.00 to the Liverpool

Office in ~ecember.'~~ Mrs, Abraham gave Is. to the €250,000

Fund in London as late as May, 1914, which is the final

recorded evidence of her involvement in the Birkenhead Branch

of the WSPU.136

Dorothy Foster Abraham's episode in prison had a lasting

effect on her life, and had a serious impact on her scholarly

experience :

While I was in Holloway I should have been taking my Institute of Chemistry Exam, but my father had to write and say that I would be unable to take it and would hope to take it later - which I did, but regret to say I failed. I don't like to suggest that-they failed me on account of my militancy, but I must honestly say I thinkthis was the case. The exam was a purely practical one - you had to analyze certain substances given me for

- -

U3 Ibid, June 21, 1912, P. 627.

r34 Ibid, June 14, 1912. P- 607.

13' Ibid, December 12, 1913. P. 213.

136 Ibid, May 8, 1914. P. 9 2 ,

2 10

the exam and I compared notes afterwards with my friends who were taking the exams at the same time and we all had the same result, 1 also had a viva voce exam on the question of doses of drugs which I also know that 1 answered correctly- The Institute of Chemistry was a comparatively small body and one of my Professors at Kingsr was on the examining body and 1 found out later he was violently opposed to [women's] suffrage. 1 happened a few years later to meet him in the Strand and spoke to him and he immediately said very angrily, "but you were a militant Suffragettem, so I thought my suspicions were probably well-founded?'

Fortunately, Analytical Chemistry was not the career that she

wanted to pursue, and she went on to study in horticultural

college and manage her own farm, an occupation which she

genuinely loved. After the rebelliousness of her Suffragette

experience, Dorothy Foster Abraham continued her independent

inclination when she came across a brochure for Studley

Agricultural at a friend's house and without

discussing it with her parents, applied and was accepted. She

even went so far as to pay her tuition fees without telling

them, as she knew they would be very upset about this

decision.

When Dorothy finally told her parents, they offered to

pay her fees so that she wouldn't have to go, but she insisted

that she was going to try it for at least one term. She found

' 37 The Autobiographical N o t e s of D o r o t h y Foster Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished. P- 17,

13' Studley Agricultural College is the name referred to in Dorothy Foster Abraham's autobiographical notes. It was and still is an horticultural college- Agriculture at the time was considered an exclusively male preserve, so no agricultural college would accept her. An horticultural college was the next best thing (&Mail communication with Ullin T. Place, September 18, 1998).

she loved farming work. Her first position was obtained in

West Witton in Wensleydale with her brother Fenwick, who had a

farm under Lord Bolton called Low Wanless, Here she worked

very hard, seeing to milking and feeding the cows and the

birth of calves. Among the skills which Dorothy Abraham came

to master was the art of making Wensleydale cheese, which

after six months of aging fre~ently becomes blue and was/is

considered one of Yorkshirefs most prized dairy products.

When Fenwick married, she took over the supervision of a

farm owned by Mrs. Ashton-Cross, which until then had been

poorly nzn by an incompetent cowman and coachman, who were

both ' furious at the job being taken over by a worttan' . *' These men failed in their efforts to obstruct the progress of

her work:

[Nlone of the cows had been served, but when they came in season, I had to lead them along a roadto the Guiness' herd where they had a pedigree bull. It was two miles and you can just imagine m y leading a cow this distance- I was quite certain that while the cows had been constantly been going to be served under the cowman who had left, [and] 1 imagine the reason they weren't being calved was that he and the man in charge of the Guiness herd shared the fee, so I was determined to see that this cow was served- Well you can imagine in those days it wasn't considered very proper for a girl to be in on such things, but I was determined so I stood and watched it, to their great horror - never mind - it had to be done and I did it."'

The labour that Dorothy Abraham did on various farms where she

13' The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham. 1888 - 1976. Unpublished, P. 21.

Ibid, p. 24.

served her apprenticeship often meant performing tasks that

were considered the domain of men, such as the mucking out of

barns and loading hay- Eventually, she persuaded her father

to buy her a small farm in Wensleydale called Woodhall,

Starting with nothing, she first renovated the farmhouse with

old furniture which she restored, and ultimately bought cows

for the farm and a pig with a litter. She especially enjoyed

looking after the pigs.

Lucy and Dorothy Abraham seem to have avoided the Union

after the bizarre patriotic turn taken by the Pankhurst

leadership in London, and doubtlessly their participation in

WSPU affairs waned at the onset of the Great War. When a

restricted access to the franchise was granted to women in

1918, Lucy Ellison Abraham devoted her time to organizing the

newly organized Birkenhead and District Women's Citizen's

Association, which replaced the Birkenhead Women's Local

Government Association. She held this office until 1927, when

'she felt it was time the work was in other handsf .141

Conclusion

This chapter was an analysis of how the hope of women's

equality was materially reproduced as an intergenerational

social value through the women in Dorothy Smith's family,

assisted by the productive force of their varying experiences

of domestic labour. Chapter Five has related further evidence

141 IrA Woman Pioneer. l1 Birkenhead News, Saturday, October 8, 1927, p, 7.

of the work of Dorothy Smith's feminist foremothers which 1

argue provided some of the logic for Dorothy E. Smith's

eventual adoption of feminist beliefs in the Vancouver Women's

Movement from 1968 - 1977, Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy

Foster Abraham abandoned the pacifist example of Quaker women

of Margaret Fell's time and took up a militant activism- Lucy

adopted this political stance after witnessing the abuse of

Sylvia Pankhurst, and Dorothy Foster Abraham voluntarily

followed her mother's leadership. The militant Suffragette

activism of Lucy Ellison and Dorothy Foster Abraham, and their

participation in WSPU endeavours in Birkenhead, Liverpool and

London assisted in the development of the organizational

practices which expedited the reproduction of feminism for a

future generation of women- Their work for women's suffrage

provided another example in Dorothy Smith's past to support

her choice of an identity as a feminist sociologist, work from

a previous generation of women which contributed to the

historical development of the Social Organization of

mowledge.

CHAPTER SIX

DOROTHY SMITH'S FORMATIVE YEARS, 1926 - 1955

Introduction

This chapter will document logical possibilities for the

origins of Dorothy E- Smith's social consciousness; the

influences, material conditions and productive forces that made

up the substance of the unformed Social Organization of

Knowledge, These elements are to be found in three separate

intervals of her formative years in England: 1) her childhood

and education to age sixteen; 2) her residence at Woodbrooke, the

Quaker college in Selly Oak, from 1944 - 1946; and 3) her

introduction to sociology at the London School of Economics from

1952 - 1955- Dorothy Smith's conception of the 'botanizingr

ingredient of the SOK method described in Chapter Three, can be

found in the kind of primary and boarding school education she

received as a young student in England. Her encounter with

'social studiesr (social work, as it is known in North America)

at Woodbrooke College, although it was a profession that she

never considered a commitment to, gave her experience with social

life which she had not previously encountered. Her developmental

years in England culminated in three years of study at the London

School of Economics, where she was introduced to sociology,

social anthropology and a uniquely Popperian interpretation of

Karl Marxrs work. Through an examination of these three stages

of her progress it is possible to trace the historical

development of the thinking that went into the creation of the

Social Organization of mowledge at its most rudimentary level.

Further, by pursuing an analysis of the material

conditions of English women's lives after they achieved the vote,

forces which circumscribed the evolution of Dorothy Smith's

elementary education, her residence at Woodbrooke and at LSE, it

is possible to track the gradual erosion of feminist principles

in British social life, so that they became undeniably quiescent

by the time she began to attend the London School of Economics.

Feminist activism did not cease completely in England after the

attainment of the vote, but changed to encompass more specific

issues meant to ameliorate the status of British women. At the

onset of the Second World W a r , women's labour, both domestic and

in the public sector is transformed again. This chapter will be

accompanied by an historical sociology of the political work of

British women and its relation to domestic labour as it matured

during these three chapters of Dorothy Smith's life.

The chapter is organized as follows: 1) an introduction

to Dorothy Smith's family life and the geographical environment

of her childhood; 2 ) her experience at Harrogate College and her

transfer to the Birklands School where she remained from 1937 -

1943; 3) the years 1944 - 1946, at Woodbrooke College; and 4) her

university life at LSE. As a final section, I include an

analysis of the temporally relevant material conditions of

women's lives and the developing state of feminist consciousness

in England.

Tha Place Family L i f e in the North R i d i n g of Yorkshircr

"Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel All England, nay all Europe for strong ale-'

T h e Yorkshire Ridings were usually characterized in terms

of an ideology of regional stereotypes which separated it from

the South of England, notions which were set in place in the

nineteenth century by novels like Elizabeth Cleghom Gaskellrs

classic North and South (1855) . This book was a narrative

concerning the heroine's chauvinist attitudes to the South.

The N o r t h of England was presented as an industrial wasteland,

where smoke, machinery and pollution were the norm:

I only know it is impossible to keep the muslin blinds clean here above a week altogether; and at Helstone we have them up for a month or more and they have not looked dirty at the end of that timeO2

In contrast, a credo of regional pride is contained in much of

Yorkshirers literary tradition and depicts its people as

'hearty, shrewd, vigorous, manly, practical, matter-of-fact,

unimaginative, progressive, and perhaps above all,

inde~endent'.~ Moreover, Yorkshire people are reputed to have

a highly refined wit. As one story goes, when a little

A quotation from "Poem in Praise of Yorkshire Alef1 written by Giles Morrington, a local Northallerton poet in 1697 found in His tory, Topography and Directory of North Yorkshire (1890) . Preston: T. Bulmer. P. 525.

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. 1855. North and South. London: Chapman and Hall. P. 123,

Dellheim, C. 1986. It Imagining England: Victorian Views of the Northm. Northern History, 22, 216-230. P. 220.

Yorkshire girl was asked: T f 1 knitted twelve stitches in a

minute, how many stitches would I have on my needle at the end

of five m i n ~ t c s ? ~ ~ , she replied "Ya wadnrt a'e neean, coz ya

desanrt knit stitches; yarre nut gahin ti catch me i' that

waay . Dorothy Edith Smith (nee Place) was born in substantial

two storey detached house named Ullingswick in Grammar School

Lane, Northallerton, on July 6, 1926, Northallerton is

located in a rich agricultural district on the East Coast main

line of what was then the London and North Eastern ~ailwaf,

and at the formation of county councils in 1888, it became the

administrative centre of the North Riding of ~orkshire-6 The

Place children, during the war years, stayed at a farmhouse

owned by the Rawsr family. They rented half of the farmhouse,

and the four children stayed there on their own. The Rawsr

farm was in Wensleydale, which is surrounded by the mountains

called the P e n n i n e Chain, divided into Eastern and Western

ranges whose geological formations morphologically and

geologically remarkably uniform in their length. They are

affectionately nick-named 'the Backbone of Englandr, and are a

group of hills and dales that are considered 'the wildest and

Fairfax-Bhkeborough, J. [I8981 1973. W i t , Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Y o r k s h i r e . East Yardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire: EP Publishing. P* 16.

History, Topography and Directory of N o r t h Yorkshire (1890). P, 525,

6 Hey, David, 1986. Yorkshire from AD 1000. London: Longman. P. 245.

most romantic scenery' in the whole country:

These Western hills are composed chiefly of hard millstone grit and Yortedale rocks, though which breaks, in Wensleydale and other places, the carboniferous limestone, forming bold and picturesque scars, This latter supports a sweet herbage, short it may be i n the higher parts of the hills, but affording a marked contrast to the brown heath of the gritstone moors,-, The scenery in these western moors is often wild and weird, but the deep narrow valleys of the Tees, Swale and Ure, with their numerous rills and waterfalls, present scenes full of picturesque and varied beauty scarcely surpassed by any i n the North of

This mountain chain was an important setting in Dorothy

Smith's youth, in that she spent many happy hours with her

brothers exploring old mines and limestone caves in the hills

around Wensleydale, and their beauty and mystery was subject

matter in many of the books which comprised her childhood

reading material.

The Pennines close to Wensleydale form the backdrop to

Charles Kingsleyf s The W a t e r - B a b i e s (1863 ) , a childrenr s book

that was in the Place library, a Victorian fairy tale about a

chimney sweep named Tom who was exploited by his cruel master

Grimes, stolen by fa i r ies and transformed into a Water-Baby.

During his escape to the woods he passed through a place

w h e r e :

the bottom of the valley was just one field broad, and on the other side ran the stream; and above it, gray crag, gray

' History, Topography and Directory of N o r t h ~orkshire (1890). P. 83,

down, gray stair, gray moor walled up to heaven, A quiet, silent, rich, happy place; a narrow crack cut deep into the earth; so deep, and so out of the way, that the bad bogies can hardly find it out, The name of the place is Vendale; and if you want to see it for yourself, you must go up into the high Craven, and search from Bolland Forest north by Ingleborough, to Nine Standards and Cross Fell,

J. R . Tolkienr s The H o b b i t, or There and Back Again was also a

favourite, and Dorothy introduced copies of it to her brothers

at the farm in Wensleydale when it was first published in

1937, long before it became popularized in the 1970s . The

source of its imaginative description is unmistakable :

But Bard and some of the nimblest men and elves climbed to the height of the Eastern shoulder to gain a view to the North. Soon they could see the lands before the Mountain's feet black with a hurrying multitude, Ere long the vanguard swirled around the spur's end and came rushing into Dale, These were the swiftest wolf- riders, and already their cries and howls rent the air afar. As Gandalf had hoped, the goblin army had gathered behind the resisted vanguard, and poured now in a rage into the valley, driving wildly up between the arms of the Mountain, seeking f o r the foe,1°

The hillsides of this area are scattered

geological formations known as limestone

Kingsley, Charles. El8631 1976, New York: Garland. P. 55-56.

Cafe

Back

with greyish

pavements, which are

The Wa ter-babies .

Interview by the author with Milner Place in Abraham's Bar, Huddersf ield, September 27, 1997,

lo Tolkien, J- R- El9371 1966. The H o b b i t , or There and Again. London: George Allen and Unwin. P. 294,

slippery, dangerous places whose surface of dint blocks are

uneven, and are separated by deep channels known as grykes*

The dint blocks are covered with smaller channels called

runnels which have been formed by the continuous running of

acidic rainwater as it flows towards the grykes. The deep

grykes, or channels between the dint blocks, make walking on

the pavements hazardous-LL Empty mines shafts, caves, and

water falls like 'Catr s Leapf in Wensleydale, made for

adventurous childhood outings for Dorothy and her brothers,

and they were given the freedom to roam these romantic places

at will by their parents,

It was at Woodhall in Wensleydale that Dorothy Foster

Abraham met. Tom Place, her future husband and Dorothy Smith's

father, Dorothy Abraham's father had contacted Tom Place in

regard to some trees that needed cutting at Woodhall and after

that Tom would come f r o m time to time and ask if he could fish

on her land, when he stayed with friends at a hotel called the

Wheatsheaf in nearby Carperby, Tom Place was a remarkable

man. Milner described his father's quietness, strength and a

gentleness that earned him the nickname of 'gentleman Tomr . lZ

Born the January 16, 1872 at Langton-on-Swale near

'I From a student's assignment called a "Limestone Pavement S t u d y r r which I found discarded and dripping wet while walking with Ullin Place in the hills around Wensleydale. There were a group of school children in the hills just outside of Bainbridge who were there studying limestone pavements while on a field trip.

IZ Interview by the author with Milner Place in Abraham' s Cafe Bar, Huddersfield, September 27, 1997.

~orthallerton,~ he was the son of a timber merchant, a trade

which he eventually learned himself, He had four brothers and

two sisters, and one sister, Emma, who died a year after he

was born, His strong working-class roots meant that he could

speak the Yorkshire dialectx4, referred to in the example of

North Riding wit above. His diary, which he began to keep at

the age of sixteen, is a chronicle of felling trees with his

father, his early interest in fly fishing which became a life-

long passion, and his church activities" encouraged by a

friendship with the local vicar, M r , Bond. With his father,

he did varying kinds of carpentry work, making barrows, shafts

for a new cart, board standings for a cow byre. and putting

down new joists in the schoolhouse parlour floor. One entry

in his diary records the trips he and his father made to

Northallerton to pick up the coffin tires (a steel band which

holds together the slats of a coffin) to build the coffins for

an elderly couple, Christopher and Hannah Pattison, who died

with in a few days of each other:

l3 The biographical details regarding Tom Placers early life come from his three small diaries, kindly loaned to me by Milner Place, Dorothy Smith's youngest brother.

I4 Interview with Dorothy E. Smith in the cafeteria at OISE/UT. January 9, 1997. Tom Place had a gifted ear for languages, and as a consequence of his wide travels in England and Scotland, learned to recognize local dialects with exceptional accuracy.

" His entries for church work include mention of painting a money box, memorizing a part for a dialogue called "Gold and Tinseltr, and buying a hymn book for presentation to the choir leader Mr. Dawson.

February 4, 1888, Went with father to Northallerton in trap for coffin tire for Hannah Pattison coffin came back with the tire, Father and Earnest [his brother Ernest] went on with the trap to T h i m i l b y [Thimbleby] and bought a lot of larches, February 5 , 1888. Old Christopher Pattison died this morning at 2 o'clock aged 83 years, February 6, 1888. Went to Northallerton with father for coffin tire for Christopher Pattison's coffin, Father went to Darlington, got back at 2 orclock helped T. Tare finish coffin, February 7, 1888. Morning cleaning benches and straightening shop afternoon at the funeral of Christopher and Hannah Pattison, Christopher aged 83 years, Hannah aged 87 years,

His first entry in the diaries reads 'The River Swale runs a

bit off the village where there is some good fishingr.

indicating the priority he placed on this activity. The

Swale, a river whose source is high in the Pennines in Upper

Swaledale and covers a distance of seventy miles to the Vale

of York, was a few moments walk f r o m his family home. l6

Eventually he acquired the reputation of knowing the local

reaches of the Swale better than anyone in the Northallerton

district, l7

During their twenties, Tom Place and his brothers worked

in separate areas of their father's timber business, Tom

looked after the work of valuing and negotiating the purchase

of standing timber, Ernest was responsible for felling the

l6 Morris, David. 1994. The Swale: mstoxy of the Holy River of St, Paulinus, York, Eng. : William Sessions, P . 4,

The Darlington and Stockton Times. July 3 , 1948.

wood and Herbert sold the finished product. In 'the works', a

the part of the enterprise located on High Street in

Northallerton, called T- Place and Sons, John Place saw to the

carcassing, milling and joinery in the yard? The timber

yard had an engine house with a steam engine which drove the

saws located all over the yard and there was a boiler house as

well as a blacksmith shop, which was a favoured visiting spot

for the Place children? Through his contacts in buying

standing timber for the lumber business, Tom Place became a

land speculator in the 1920s, and he began to purchase and

resell large estates all over England and Scotland. Stately

family properties became widely available on the real estate

market due to the legislation introduced by Lloyd George in

1911, which required the payment of death duties, and after

the First World War, many families in the British nobility

found it impossible to maintain the expense of huge manor

houses. 20

Dorothy Foster Abraham and Thomas Place married in 1923

at Bidston in Cheshire, and lived initially with Tom's

parents, then in the first Ullingswick in Racehorse Lane,

lB E-Mail comunication with Ullin T. Place, September 18, 1998.

Interview by the author with Milner Place in Abraham's Cafe Bar, Huddersf ield, September 27, 1997.

'O Place, Ullin T. 1996. "From Mystical Experience to Biological Consciousness: A Pilgrim's Progress?lW Unpublished paper read at a conference on Mystical Experience at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, November 2, 1996. P, 6,

moved next to the house (also Ullingswick) in Grammar School

Lane, and in 1930 purchased a country house four miles outside

of Northallerton called Sowber Gate, The gates to the house

were bought by Tom Place from the Stanwick Park estate in

Alborough St. John in 1921, which was broken up to pay death

dutiesO2' These gates are thick, two-sided and beautifully

crafted wrought iron work, about five feet high. The home was

large enough to require the senrices of a number of servants,

including a nanny, a governess and a nursery-maid to care for

the four Place children, Ullin, Dorothy, David and MilnerOz2

Tom Place conducted his business from the country home, so a

secretary and an accountant worked there as well, At the edge

of the property, there was a Chauffeur's house, where Harris,

who drove the family's Rolls Royce, lived with a second

chauff e m .

Tom Place8 multifarious business concerns and his love of

fly-fishing meant that he was almost continuously travelling.

Normally he did not take the family with him on business

trips, but fishing trips were a different matter. Either the

whole family went along, or the two youngest children, David

and M i h e r , would stay behind. These were usually trips to

the Swale at Langton by car, to the Tees at Bamard Castle or

to the Ure at Aysgarth. Trips by car, for the young Dorothy,

21 Waterston, Edward and Peter Meadows, 1990. Lost Homes of York and the North Riding. Thornton-Le-Clay, York: Jill Raines, P. 44-46,

'' Place, 1996, op. cit., p. 6.

were an ordeal, as she suffered continually from travel

sickness. On one unique occasion the children were allowed to

visit an estate for a time before it was sold. This occurred

when Tom Place purchased the Ardoss Castle Estate in Scotland

from M r , Dyson Perrins (Lee & Perrins Worcester Sauce) - The

lands had a castle, a 19th century Scottish Baronial structure

imitating the architecture of Balmoral- The sale included all

the estate furnishings and the children w e r e allowed to choose

anything they liked for themselves,23

At home, family life was organized around Tom Placef

business, which was, for the most part, constantly changing:

Father and Mother would get up quite late and get the papers in the morning not coming down until ten-ish and unless my father had a specific engagement. Most of his engagements were with the County Council.24 Either he would go on visits to estates by car or by train, or he had regular [trips] to London where he stayed at Brown's Hotel in the West End. His business activities were fairly irregular, except every morning he would go regularly into the office and dictate letters which then Jack Olfield would then type out and send off -25

23 E-Mail communication with Ullin T. Place, September 18, 1998.

Tom Place was very involved in the Northallerton District community, Among his many public appointments, he was an Alderman in the North Riding County Council, a member of the Tees Fishery Board, a magistrate and a chairman of the Northallerton Bench, and the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Northallerton Grammar School. He also helped to start Kirkby Fleetham and District Angling Club.

25 Interview of the author with Ullin T. Place at Willow Tree Cottage, Boltby, Thirsk, England. September 30, 1997.

On the trips to London, the younger Dorothy sometimes

accompanied him to the station and they had a standing order

for their preferred reading material at the station book

store, She would collect copies of comic books like Beano and

Tom Place would pick up his copy of The ~imes .26

The Place children spent a great deal of time with their

nanny and their governess, These women became significant

people in the children's lives and they often developed strong

attachments to them, and the occasion of their lezving the

household could be very distressing, The younger Dorothy's

governess, Eileen Ward, was responsible for her elementary

education and her introduction to botany- As a subject for

study, botany had long been considered an appropriate area for

young middle-class girls in England, and it was likely that

Eileen Ward had been educated in the same way, and was merely

reproducing what she herself had been taught. Ullin described

the nature of their elementary education and the relative

separateness of the children's lives from the rest of the

household:

Generally speaking we lived fairly separate lives from our parents up in the nursery wing - Most of our meals were in the nursery and of course we w e n t to have our lessons in the schoolroom, We were looked after by and taken for walks by Nanny Thomas and Eileen Ward. One ritual was that we had a rest in the afternoon after lunch and we were allowed to take a

26 Interview of the author with Dorothy E. Smith in the Cafeteria at OISE/UT. January 9, 1997.

book to read and of course DofZ7 very quickly outstripped me in terms of the amount that she read - she read very voraciously- It was a household in which there were an awful lot of books around, There were regular walks with Nanny Thomas down to Newby-Wiske [the nearest. village about a mile away] and Eileen Ward would instruct us in the names of the various plants as the seasons changed, flowers in the spring and berries in the autumn so it was partly used as botanical instruction. 28

Learning botany, originally identified as a fitting exercise

in the education of girls by Rousseau, was strongly associated

with fieldwork or taking trips into natural surroundings. The

practice of going 'forth into the garden or fieldsr was first

advocated by a Cambridge Professor, Thomas Martyn, in the late

eighteenth century. This notion gradually attained wide

popularity in England, lingering for generations in the

ideology of English pedagogy, especially for young women.29

Nanny Thomas was a constructive force in the development

of the children's powers of imagination. The regular walks

that Dorothy and her brothers took were often taken up as

make-believe trips to the railway station to meet an imaginary

couple named Uncle Obadiah and Auntie Martha Anne. A local

27 Dorothy E. Smith's childhood nickname given to her by her brother Ullin who could not pronounce Dorothy, and one that is still used for her by members of her family.

'' Interview of the author with Ullin Place, September 30, 1997.

29 Schiebinger, Londa. 1989, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modem Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, P- 241-244.

farm labourer with huge whiskers, who regularly passed by

their windows, but whose real name they never hew, was named

Jimmy McIlwain, presumably after a bog Irish comical character

from the music halls of Nanny Thomasr youth. The children

were frequently left to play by themselves in a huge garden

surrounded by high hedges:

We used to play in the garden on our own and there was a bell which was rung to tell us to come in to meals, We would get up to all sorts of things in the garden - one of the things was my father used to chain-smoke and the cigarettes came in tin boxes of a hundred. We used to use the tins for coffins to bury birds- Then you would dig them up several months later and say a burial service over them,30

Despite the clear privilege that Dorothy Smith experienced as

a child growing up in the North Yorkshire countryside, she

feels that her elementary education was a makeshift operation,

and like Virginia Woolf, she was not adequately educated. She

never learned the alphabet by rote, for example, as is the

case with most children, in spite of the benefit of Eileen

Ward's hand-crafted alphabet cards. When she was six, she

learned to read very rapidly, reading books beyond her age

level, and for a short time, she went to a local kindergarten

where she learned to do sums. Upon catching her day-dreaming

on one occasion, the teacher evidently remarked dryly, 'Oh

Dorothy, there goes little fairy accuracy flying out of the

30 Interview of Willowtree Cottage, 1997,

the author with Boltby, Thirsk,

Ullin T. Place at England, September 30,

windowr , 3L

These formative years in Dorothy Smithr s childhood could

be identified as an influential phase of intellectual growth

even though her education was apparently a sparse one in the

formal sense, in that there were plentiful reading materials

available in the Place household, and her companions, Nanny

Thomas and Eileen Ward, provided her with a rudimentary

education, as well as permitting the use of make-believe

through the activities of imaginary characters. H e r isolation

from local rural life and Northallerton, her dependence on her

brothers, particularly Ullin, as well as the exclusive

attention provided by her governess, Eileen Ward, produced a

promising environment for the development of her young mind.

Boarding School, 1935 - 1943.

It was a matter of great consequence to Tom Place that

his children receive a boarding school education. Ullin Place

identifies one of his father's primary objectives as sending

his children to public schools.32 At the time when Dorothy

and Ullin were being educated, as well as in the contemporary

British educational system, a public school was a class of

well -established fee-paying secondary schools, to which any

31 Interview of the author with Dorothy E. Smith in the Cafeteria at OISE/UT, January 9, 1997-

Place,

one who could afford to pay the cost was eligible to attend,

and required passing a lrCommon Entrancem py;~mination, They

were not public in the sense that is understood in North

~merica.~~ They were different than grammar schools, which

were run by the state, All three boys in the Place family

went to a boys preparatory school on the outskirts of London

called Elstree, Ullin Place and his youngest brother Milner

were given an elite education, attending Rugby from the age of

eight, one of the group of Clarendon ~chools", a boy's public

school in the Midlands near Coventry and Birmingham. David

went to another public school called Stowe. Similarly, when

Dorothy turned eight years of age she was sent to Oakdale, the

name then given to the preparatory division of Harrogate

College in Harrogate, North Yorkshire- For Dorothy, as well

as her brothers, leaving home for boarding school for the

first time was a traumatic experience.

In her first year away from home, Dorothy did not really

like anything about the boarding school experience, was

extremely unhappy there, and suffered several episodes of

illness which meant that she was put into the school

33 Benthall, Jonathan. 1991. If Invisible Wounds : Corporal Punishment in British Schools as -a Form of Ritualu. Child Abuse and Neglect, 15, 377-388. P. 378.

34 Rubinstein, W- D. 1986. Education and the Social Origin of British Elites, 1880-1970" - Past and Present, 112, 163-207, P. 166. The "Clarendon Schoolsgr are Harrow, Eton, Rugby, Winchester, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylor's, Charterhouse and Shrewsbury. Attendance at one of these schools is usually taken as evidence of a family's high social status and affluence.

sanatorium, In the infirmary she was given two things on a

daily basis which she hated - milk and melons- Not knowing

how to tell the nurses she detested these things, she poured

the milk and the melons into a planter which was just outside

her window. To offset her homesickness, she asked her mother

for a toy dog, and was disgusted when she was sent a dog that

doubled as a pyjama case, because it wasn't 'a real toy dog,

just a pyjama case masquerading as a dog'." The boarding

school had a connection to a riding school, riding being an

activity which Dorothy loved- One stormy-looking afternoon,

when she was scheduled to go riding she knelt down in the long

hallway leading to the stables praying that it wouldn't rain,

and was teased mercilessly about it afterwards by the other

girls- Later on, it was discovered that Dorothy was allergic

to horses as well as to cats? She had difficulty with the

activities required for being a good Brownie at Harrogate, had

a hard time 'keeping her nails Eventually she

became so ill with gastric distress that her mother brought

her home and she remained there for the next year.

35 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in the cafeteria at OISE/UT, January 9, 1997. She used this incident in a speech she gave at the University of Minnesota, On first evening of the conference, there was a roast, where speakers were required to tell funny stories about themselves. She told the story of the toy dog, saying drolly that the incident had a 'deep effect on her epistemological problems in sociologyr.

36 From an interview by the author with Milner Place, Abraham's Cafe Bar, Huddersfield, September 27, 1997-

37 Ibid.

The second time she was sent to the BirHands School,

located at St. =ban's in Hertfordshire near the outskirts of

London. It was a more successful venture, and Dorothy stayed

at this school until the age of seventeen, This was a

smaller, lesser known school, which entailed a five hour trip

to London. She and her mother would spend the night in London

and travel to St. Albanrs in a chauffeur driven car. After

two years at Birklands, the war broke out at the beginning of

September, 193 9, and Tom Place, concerned with the likelihood

of air raids in London, brought Dorothy and her two younger

brothers David and Milner home, as they were also at school in

the London area, All three children w e r e sent to live in what

they called 'the ~ungalow~" at Woodhall in Wensleydale and

they then travelled to Askrigg to attend Yorebridge Grammar

School. As soon as the Birklands School made the decision to

evacuate to the country, Dorothy was allowed to return. At

first it was located in the Mendip Hills in Somerset, and

later settled in the village/market town of Tenbury Wells in

Worchestershire close to the Welsh border.3g There were very

few students at Birklands, about twenty-eight.

Evacuation4" of whole schools from London was a serious

38 This structure was called 'the Bungalowr because it was then the only bungalow in Woodhall.

3 9 E-Mail message from Ullin T. Place, May 6, 1997.

40 Dorothy Foster Place was involved in the World War I1 official evacuation scheme, and responsible for deciding which evacuee children were placed in Newby-Wiske and the surrounding countryside. She arranged for a family of four

disruption of the British educational system, All evacuation

tactics were organized along class lines. First, there was

the official government evacuation scheme of working class

children from large urban areas who were sent to live in rural

areas all over England, Secondly, private arrangements were

made whereby boarding schools senring a middle-class clientele

moved from urban areas to unoccupied country houses in rural

areas." The official scheme was a system which collapsed

within weeks, as the British educational administration failed

to adequately assemble data as to where the children came

from, to what category of school they belonged, the numbers in

which they would arrive. and the places they were assigned."

Most of these experiences were negative, but the evacuation of

senior girls Sacred Heart Convent school from Newcastle-upon-

Tyne to the countryside in the Lake District proved

advantageous, as their ordeal turned out to be like a

traditional boarding school curriculum:

[Any] drawbacks caused by cramped classrooms, movement between sites, and the shift system were counterbalanced by the opportunities presented for field study. The local countryside provided

children, the Murdochs from Gateshead, to be accommodated at Sowber Gate. (E-Mail communication with Ullin T. Place, September 18, 1998) .

Ibid.

42 Preston, A, M, 1989, The evacuation of schoolchildren from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 1939-1942: An Assessment of the Factors which Influenced the Nature of Educational Provision in Newcastle and its Reception Areasm. H i s t T o r y of Education, 18, 3, 231-241, P, 231.

ample material for biology and geography lessons and the two staff responsible for those subjects took parties of girls out after official classroom hours for field studies which were a novelty and, as one former pupil summed up 'education without tears . 43

The practice of field trips came from a customary boarding

school approach to learning, and Dorothy's evacuation to

Tenbury Wells provided great potential for this kind of

exercise. It was during this interval that what Dorothy

eventually called 'botanizingr in the SOK, was experienced as

part of the Birklands School curriculum, then named as

exercises in 'walking geogra~hy"~. The school had an unusual

headmistress, who had gone to Cambridge and had what was

called a 'double first' in Mathematics and Geography.

According to Dorothy, this teacher was in some ways

influential in her life, not as a mathematics teacher, as none

of the girls were studying maths, but as a good geographer.

She could read maps, and the girls learned to read contour

maps of the terrain around the school. A French teacher

arrived when she was about 14 or 15, so she learned French.

Nonetheless the experience of boarding school during the

war was one that Dorothy felt she must endure. She suffered

from the experience of standing on railway platforms sometimes

for several hours in the cold, waiting for trains that were

Ibid,

44 Interview by the author with Dorothy E, Smith in the cafeteria at OISE/UT, January 9, 1997,

frequently late. She felt that at the time you were reduced

to enduring things, that enduring was part of an ethos and you

didn't complain. She eventually got accustomed to being at

boarding school, but never looked forward to going back there

after a vacation. On one occasion, shortly after Christmas

when she was due to go school, she went to the lengths of

washing her hair and going out into the freezing cold. She

reasoned that she w o u l d get sick if she went out with wet hair

and wouldn't have to return, so she ran around the garden with

her hair frozen together in clumps, but the effort failed to

produce the desired illness - 45

The headmistress of Birklands had a feminist approach to

education and felt that physical development for young women

should be a priority. Likely the emphasis placed on games at

Birklands was part of a wider movement in Britain originally

influenced by Isadora Duncan, based on womenrs fitness, that

began in 1930 in London, called The Women's League of Health

and Beauty, a business owned by Mollie Bagot When

the war first started and the school was located temporarily

in Somerset, the gym mistress would make the students run

every morning, a practice which the girls found decidedly

unpleasant. Gymnastics were compulsory three times a week,

45 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in the OISE/UT cafeteria, January 9, 1997.

Mathews, Jill Julius. 1990. "They Had Such a Lot of Fun: The Women's L e a g u e of Health and B e a u t y Between the Wars." History Workshop Journal, 30, 22-54, p. 23.

and in the winter lacrosse was offered. The summer activity

was tennis, played on grass courts. Dorothyr$ peer group at

the Birklands School was at least a year older than she was,

because her mother had persuaded the school authorities to

take her at a younger age, so she sometimes felt inadequate at

sports, although she was a fairly good lacrosse player* There

was nothing 'niminy-pimin~"~ about the way that the girls

were taught physical education, and the school offered a tough

curriculum with an emphasis given to exercise,

The Birklands teachers minimized the religious aspect of

the girlsr education. a quality that was likely welcomed by

Dorothy and her mother, who were both agnostics. The younger

Dorothy refused to take confirmation lessons for this reason.

Her peers looked at her as odd because she excelled at school

work, and consequently her relationships with her teachers

tended to be close. The field of study that she concentrated

on was literature. and towards the end of her secondary school

career, she had read vast numbers of books and written many

assigned essays. Her classes often consisted of her and the

teacher at the end of her stay at Birklands, so she worked

primarily on writing her own papers. Writing essays was a

part of the requirements from the beginning, a very useful

skill, which of course bode well for her future scholarly

career. There was a minimal prefect system which the girls

attained once they reached a certain age, so when she was

Dorothy E. Smith's terminology.

237

older, Dorothy took on some of the policing aspects of the

school as far as the younger girls were concerned. C o n t r a r y

to the reputation held by British boarding schools at the

time, there was no corporal punishment, a practice which her

mother would not have tolerated-

The girls at the Birklands school were all young women of

a similar class to Dorothy who were going through a process of

learning a middle-class mode of articulation, or vocal

expression in an accent whose origin was in the Southern

England. To be upwardly mobile in England, which was largely

the purpose of acquiring a boarding school education, was to

learn a language, way of speaking and the manners of a

national middle class. Growing up in a regional area, local

dialects were assimilated, so when Dorothy went away to school

she had already learned to express herself in both a middle-

class manner as well as in the vernacular that belonged to

N o r t h Yorkshire. It was critical that as a member of a

national middle-class that you not speak with a provincial

dialect. To provoke their mother, Dorothy and her brothers

would use the thick Yorkshire accent in the dining r o o m , but

it was a practice which was strongly discouraged. The girls

at the Birklands school were taught to anticipate nothing more

than the expectation that they would marry and become capable

housewives and mothers, and none of them went to university.48

48 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, in the OISE/UT cafeteria. January 9, 1997.

238

In summarizing this section, the Birklands School, as a

preparation for a rigorous university education at LSE, gave

Dorothy a number of areas of expertise which in all

probability assisted her in later years as an undergraduate

and graduate student. The school was small, where individual

attention was the norm, and she was given every opportunity

for independent study, reading and the sharpening of essay

writing skills, The prewar evacuation of entire schools to

countryside locations meant the creation of unexpected

benefits for boarding school students, in that possibilities

for various kinds of field study presented themselves- This

included the practice of botanizing, taken up originally as

exercises in 'walking geographyr, which became part of the

conceptual repertoire of the SOK, and a principal step in its

procedure.

Woodbrooke College, 1944 - 1946.

Woodbrooke College, one of the Selly Oak Colleges at the

University of Birmingham, was introduced in Chapter Four in

the examination of Dorothy Smith's Quaker ancestry and was

characterized as part of the Quaker surroundings in her life

with its intrinsic value of equality for women. Dorothy

enrolled in the University of Birmingham two year Social

Studies Diploma course in the fall term of 1944 at the age of

eighteen. The spacious grounds of the college and the stately

mansion which eventually became the first of the colleges near

the village of Selly Oak was originally the home of Elizabeth

and George Cadbury, where they lived from 1881 until 1894.~

The Cadburys donated the house and grounds to the college when

it was established in 1903. Concerned about 'the spiritual

torpor that had overcome Quakerismr, George C a d b u r y formed a

Settlement at Woodbrooke in the hope that it would imbue new

life into the dwindling movement. Its program of Summer

Schools, founded by John Wilhelm R o w n t r e e , was 'the seed of

which Woodbrooke was the From the start one of the

college's most important objectives was to provide a place for

the advancement of social science:

The proximity of Birmingham was an important gain from the-point of view of extending knowledge in regard to social service. All the gravest problems of society were at the gates of the settlement and a multitude of experiments in social amelioration could be studied on a large scale,51

It was instituted as a centre for Quaker religious study.

adult education, international affairs, as well as

sociological studies-52 Woodbrooke became an unorthodox

49 Scott, Richenda. 1955. Elizabeth Cadbury. London: George Harrap. P. 74,

Gardiner, A. G. 1923. Life of George Cadbury. London: Cassell. P. 196-198.

Ibid,

52 Stewart, W. A. Campbell. 1953. Quakers and Education: As Seen in their Schools in England. London: Epworth Press. P. 103,

experiment in Quaker education and attracted scholars from all

over the world,

The became a source of interest to the British

government authorities during World War I1 because of its huge

properties and spacious building. Due to the fact that

Quakers were conscientious objectors, pressure was brought to

bear on the Woodbrooke officials to donate the grounds and the

mansion and were encouraged to contribute to the war effort in

any way they could without engaging in direct action. As a

consequence, the lawns became a space for growing hay and

flower beds were changed into vegetable gardens. In the early

blitz of the war, Woodbrooke was bombed, but only minimal

damage was done to the buildings, and the incendiaries landed

mostly in the grounds. The cellars of the building were

renovated to accommodate students and faculty during air raids

and was a place where they retreated and carried on with

normal activities:

Some one would be writing an essay on the Lyrical Ballads in one underground comer, while some one else darned stockings in another- To ensure quiet during study hours a large notice was hung at the entrance to the cellars: Please Do Not Disturb-" One evening a gay "Women's At Homeu took place down below and during another Christofer Naish lectured humorous~y and delightfully on William de Morgan, while distant sounds of enemy

53 The historical details pertaining to Woodbrooke College during the years encompassing World War I1 come from: Davis, Robert, ed. 1953. Woodbrooke, 1903 - 1953 : A Brief History of a Quaker Ekperiment in Religious Education. London: Bannisdale Press. P . 73 -80 .

activity could be heard up above?

During the initial period of the war when the air raids were

particularly severe, Woodbrooke took in 23 residents from

among the poor of Birmingham who had had their homes

destroyed, and they stayed at the school for eight weeks while

they recovered enough to find other accommodation.

Changes also had to be made in the school policy because

foreign students of military age were no longer allowed at the

school, so a number of other categories of students were given

consent to become residents at Woodbrooke- Among them were

the Social Science students at the University of Birmingham.

During Dorothyr s time of study at Woodbrooke there were about

twenty-five Social Science students, many of whom were not of

Quaker origi~. Courses were taken at the other Selly Oak

Collegesr buildings, about ten minutes walk up the hill from

Woodbrooke .

In the fall of 1943, Dorothy met and became friends with

a young woman her own age named Axme Clarkson. At the same

time, Dorothy's elder brother Ullin, a conscientious objector

during World War 11 and a member of the Friend's Ambulance

Unit, was stationed in Birmingham. ~nstructed at Manor Farm,

Northf ield, workers in the Friends ' Ambulance Unit at tended

Woodbrooke on a regular basis during the course of their

training. 55 Anne was struck by Dorothyf s practice of talking

54Davis, 1953, op. tit., p . 7 5 .

Ibid,

in a broad Yorkshire accent, an indulgence in which she and

Ullin amused themselves from time to time. After a f e w days

in the residence, they were being shown around the other

colleges at Selly Oak, and on the way back she and Dorothy

found themselves at the back of the group and began talking.

They discovered that they had a lot in common, in that they

were both Northerners and the two youngest in the course, so

they became close friends.56 Next to the grounds at

Woodbrooke there was a yachting pool where they used to skate

in the winter. At the beginning the city was crowded with

American soldiers, and there w a s an influx of people, and

Woodbrooke was becoming the international college it was

always intended to be.

Dorothy has described the course in Social Science at

Woodbrooke as 'mickey mouser , and was never serious about

it.'' Anne theorized that the problem with the course was

that it was meant to be an introduction to social w o r k

training. Many of the students w e r e going on to be probation

officers, almoners (hospital social workers), personnel

managers or psychiatric social workers and this course was the

basis for further training. It was a course where the

subjects kept changing from t e r m to term, so nothing was dealt

56 Interview by the author with Anne Canham in Carlisle, England, on September 20, 1997.

s7 I n t e ~ i e w by the author with Dorothy E. Smith at OISE/UT. November 11, 1994,

with in any deptheS8 Further, the courses were at about the

'Ar level (senior secondary school) . The course work did not

give anyone any opportunity for intensely pursuing a field,

and there was no choice as to what classes were taken,

Another difficulty with Woodbrooke was the location. Some

classes were at Edgbaston, about a mile away from Selly Oak,

and some were at the University of Birmingham which was about

four miles away, so the students spent a fair amount of time

travelling from one lecture area to another, as well as the

required commute to observational sites and to placements for

practice work. Dorothy had no interest in pursuing social

work as a profession, but she did develop other intellectual

and artistic interests at this interval. She developed a

preoccupatioa with the philosophy of Spinoza, and a love of

poetry and classical music.

The coordination of the practical aspects of the social

work requirement was the responsibility of Miss Doris Newman,

who also gave lectures on "Social Conditions and Tendencies".

Miss Newman arranged the social work placements for the

students who were required to do one full day per week in any

social work organisation. She further planned fortnightly

observational field trips for the students as a group to

children's homes, factories, and schools. To experience what

it was like to be a factory worker, Dorothy and Anne had to

58 Canham, Anne. 1997. "The University of Birmingham Two Year Social Studies Diplomatt. An unpublished description of the programme by Anne Canham.

spend a month working as a factory hand in the holidays under

cover, Placements for students were also set up for practice

work in the summer holidays and they had to spend at least two

weeks in a social w o r k agency. Miss Newman expected a report

from each visit and placement, with a deadline to meet.59

The practicum of working in the factory for the summer

and doing other kinds of social work social work was a

transformative experience for Dorothy, partly because in the

factory she was like any other worker and she earned the same

wages as they did and actually had to live on them, From the

factory men she learned about politics. It was just before

the 1945 election in Britain which overturned the Conservative

majority, and the first Labour government was formed.

Learning what it was like to Live as a member of the working-

class, with people living in such pitiful conditions, was

something that she had not previously experienced, and,

believing that it was a situation that could not be alleviated

within the framework of social work, she decided not to pursue

it as a career. 60

The curriculum at Woodbrooke consisted of psychology,

social psychology, child psychology, social philosophy,

industrial relations, education and public health. Some of

the teachers were highly respected within their disciplines.

s9 Ibid.

Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewichrs office at Lakehead University, October 1 8 , 1994.

Charles Wilfred Valentine, who lectured in Child Psychology

and Education, had published several classic works in Child

Psychology, notably, The Psycholow of Early Childhood: A

Study of Mental Development in the F i r s t Y e a r s of Life (1942).

There was an influx of mature students who had been soldiers

into the Social Science course, and since they had become

accustomed to smoking during the war, Professor Valentine

allowed them to smoke in his classes. As a form of protest

against this, Dorothy and Anne would eat all through his

lectures. Also, Philip Sargant Florence, a flamboyant

professor who taught Industrial Relations, had published The

Logic of Industrial Organization in 1933, Anne and Dorothy

had been taught in psychology that if a crush had developed on

a particular teacher they would be more likely to pay

attention to what he said, and since they found Florencer s

lectures somewhat dull, they tried to develop a crush on him

so that it would improve their attention span. Apparently

their strategy was not too successful. Dr. Auden, the poet's

father, lectured in Public Health. Dorothy and Anne graduated

from the University of Birmingham Social Studies Diploma on

July 5, 1946.

After Dorothy and Anne had left Woodbrooke, David Wills

was instrumental in securing one or two positions for Anne,

one of which was at the Caldecott Community. Dorothy worked

there full time for one term. A man of about forty, Wills was

highly regarded in his field, and had trained originally at

Woodbrooke and then gone to the United States and trained in

psychiatric social work, Wills had written several books and

he had begun to organize experimental schools for maladjusted

children. The Caldecott community was a school for this

category of children with high intelligence, and had a good

reputat ion at the time, Dorothy would visit Anne there on the

weekends, and on two occasions Ullin joined them there as

well. There was a system at the community where the chil&en

were given 'social marks' if they behaved well, and if they

were unruly they had to work in the kitchen to earn back the

marks that they had lost. Dorothy and Anne dreaded working in

the kitchen, as they were always assigned helpers who were the

most badly behaved. They both considered the staff at the

community to be eccentric and the children's behaviour was

sometimes outrageous- One incident of note occurred when the

children broke into the staff's private rooms and stole their

best Sunday hats, and the children then went up to the top of

the building where there was a wheelbarrow, and proceeded to

push each other around the parapet wearing the hats."'

Dorothy's experience at Woodbrooke College introduced her

to social life through the procedures involved in social work,

in work required in factories, and in her placements during

the course. The mandate of Woodbrooke College involved a

commitment to social service work, and the demands of the

Interview by the author with Anne Canham at Carlisle, England, September 20, 1997.

course meant an involvement and direct contact with social

realities that would not have occurred in a more traditional

university setting. She was introduced to psychology, which

became important in her graduate research and her early

feminist critique of psychiatry, and to industrial

organization, which eventually intensified to become an

interest in organizational theory at the University of

California at Berkeley. Although she has minimized this

interval in terms of its signifi~ance~~, I argue that it was

the initial contact, however limited, with some of her future

intellectual interests and most of all, produced the beginning

of a consciousness of social life.

The London School of Economics, 1952 - 1955.

After graduating from Woodbrooke, Dorothy worked for

nearly five years as a secretary for two different publishing

houses in London, England. She was politically active during

this period. working for the Labour Party in the constituency

of Hornchurch, on the eastern fringes of London, to get the MP

Geoffrey Bing elected.63 At the age of 26. she applied and

was accepted, with one other woman who was also a mature

student, to the London School of Economics (LSE), Her

62 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewichrs office, Lakehead University, October 18, 1994.

63 Personal communication with Ullin T. Place. October 1, 1997,

aspirations at the time were confined to the thought of

perhaps becoming a better secretary." She was supported

financially by her parents and she had some savings. H e r e

Dorothy developed an unexpected obsession for sociology. Anne

Clarkson remembers her visiting the North from London one

weekend in late 1954 and raving about her newly-found fixation

with Social Anthropology, as well as a summer holiday spent in

Ireland, where she had come into contact with the everyday

life of Irish women, and was fascinated by the way that they

could cook both soda bread and potatoes in one kind of pot

over an open fire." With certainty, Dorothy had found her

niche in life. Musing about her episode at LSE she said, 'my

discovery of the life of the intellect was an extraordinary

gift; it delighted me8 .'" LSE was formed in 1895 through the perspicacity of

Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw who were all members

of the Fabian Society. Henry Hutchinson had been a wealthy

supporter of the society, and when he committed suicide in

1894, he left the Fabians f10,OOO. The meaning of his will

was vague, creating a debate among members as to how the money

should be used. The Webbs and Bernard Shaw, arbitrarily and

64 Stnithr D. E. 1994. "A Berkeley Education.Ir In: Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. P. 50.

65 Interview by the author with Anne Canham at Carlisle, England, September 20, 1997.

66 Smith, D. E., 1994, op. cit., p. 46.

without the support of the Fabians decided to spend

Hutchinsonrs legacy on a new school of economics in London.

It was through the Fabians t ha t LSE developed its reputation

as a radical socialist institution, which was dubbed by some

students as 'Hutchinson's curser.67 This attribute was an

undeserved one, as the majority of senior staff were

conservative in its beginning and it has remained 'an

essentially conservative institution in every sense of the

termr When Harold Laski was appointed a professor of

Political Science at LSE during the early 19209, his work on

Marxist political theory nourished the image of the school as

radical and socialist. The first chair in sociology at LSE

was taken up by Edward Westermarck, a Finnish anthropologist,

in 1907. The Sociological Society had been formed in London

in 1903, and as a result of its success, J - Martin White had

donated f2,2SO for one lectureship in sociology at LSE, a

temporary position, Martin White is credited, thr~ugh his

many endowments of chairs and lectureships in sociology, with

having established sociology in ~ritain."~ Through a grant

from the Rockefeller Foundation, Edward Malinowski was given a

67 MacKenzie, Robert. My LSE. In: Mack, Joanna. 1978. "The LSE : A Monument to Fabian Socialism. New Society, 44, 819, 588-91. P. 588,

Ibid.

'' Dahrendorf , Ralf . 1995. LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Poli tical Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. P, 102,

permanent chair in anthropology in 1927,'~

Edward Shils brought classical socioLogical theory to LSE

in the late 1940s by way of Talcott Parsons' Structure of

Social Action (1937) and a style of teaching that presumed

that undergraduate students would go into graduate work and

become professional sociologist^^^^ A. H. Halsey provides a

vivid description of LSE in the early 1950s shortly before

Dorothy's arrival in 1952:

Its buildings sprawled in grimy liveliness on the East and West sides of Houghton Street off the Aldwych, Demob suits and battle jackets, incongruously adorned by the college scarf, thronged the street between the two main lecture theatres, The library was heavily used, assailing the nostrils the mustiness of books and the sickliness of human sweat, The studentsr refectory was a clutter of cheap and unappetising snacks, and the Studentsr Union pub, The Three Tuns, normally permitted no more than standing in discomfort - The inconveniences of a human ant heap were of no significance by comparison with the conversation and the visibility and audibility of great scholars. 72

Post-war LSE was an exciting place for the Social Sciences,

and students could listen to lectures by Karl Popper, Harold

Laski, who died in 1950; Lionel Robbins, R- H. Tawney, David

and Ruth Glass, T. H. Marshall, Chair of Sociology from 1954-

Ibid,

71 Halsey, A. H. 1982. "Provincials and Professionals: British Post-War Sociologists . Archives Europe'ennes de Sociologie, 23, 1, 150-175. P, 159.

72 Ibid, P. 155.

56; and Morris Ginsberg, who had retired by the time Dorothy

arrived.

There was considerable anxiety among members of the

British Sociological Association {BSA) in the early 1950s

about employment opportunities for sociology and anthropology

graduates, so a subcommittee of the BSA was formed to study

the 'recruitment, training and employment of sociologistsr -73

The study was completed between 1952 and 1954, with the London

B.A. in Sociology taken as the base of the investigation,

What was striking about this study was the pitiful lack of

openings available for women graduates in sociology. Of the

higher degree graduates, 20 were men and 4 were women, and of

these, three were found to be unemployed.?' In the category

of undergraduate degrees, several of the respondents who were

married women inc?icated that they were encouraged to 'make way

for a single person should one [job] become availabler . '* Of

the total number of respondents, less than 25% said that a

sociology degree was a condition of their employment, and one

or two of the graduates indicated they w e r e going to emigrate

to acquire better prospects for work in sociology el~ewhere.'~

The organization of the sociology curriculum at LSE from

73 Banks, J. A. and 0. L. Banks. 1956. 'lEmployment of Sociology and Anthropology Graduates, 1952 and 1954" . British Journal of Sociology, 7 , 1, 46-51, P. 46.

74 Ibid, p. 47.

Ibid, p . 49.

76 Ibid, p. 49-50.

1952 - 1955 was different from the method of taking prescribed and elective courses that had been developed in North American

universities, Lectures were a casual affair, and it was

possible to 'drop inr on as many lectures as one preferred.

For example, Dorothy never took classes from Tom A. Marshall,

Karl Popper or Donald G. MacRae, but she frequently attended

their lecture^.^' There was not necessarily a direct

correlation between the material presented in lectures and the

final examination^.^^ As she described in the following

interview excerpt, the principal place of fomal instmction

at the London School of Economics was the tutorial:

~t was a school where my major was in Social Anthropology, a sociology degree with a concentration on Social Anthropology- I just found it fascinating- It was organized as a Lecture Series but the central part of learning was your tutorial for the year, and that was with a small group of people who met with one individual. In some ways the man who was our tutor in the first year was very influential. He broke almost all the rules that we would consider good teaching, that is, he attempted to humiliate us. I'll never forget the first class. He would ask questions for which we had no background and no way of answering- He pointed to me and said, "Miss Place, define social structurem. I had never heard of social structure, perhaps I had heard of it but I had no idea what he was talking about, and he just gazed at me contemptuously for

77 Personal communication by the author with Dorothy E. Smith by e-mail message, March 31, 1998.

Helmes -Hayes, Richard. 19 9 0 . w'Hobhouse Twice Removedr : Johxl Porter and the LSE Yearsft- Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 2 7 , 3 , 357-389- P. 364.

what seemed a long time, and then said, W r . Blatch, can you give Miss Place a hand?" Somehow or other, he created a cultural resistance in the classroom, and it was not one that made you want to walk away, it was one that made us determined to beat him, And so we worked incredibly hard for h i m * I remember in the first part of the course we were looking at kinship systems and I was responsible for reporting to the class on the Zulu kinship system. I remember the level of adrenalin I had. 1 memorized the whole of a very complex kinship system in Zulu - there were transliterations from the kinship terms: and I got up at the board and started laying it all out with all the details and started putting in the (obviously it was in English script, I have no idea how Zulu is transliterated) but I had all the Zulu terminology and he was saying 'you really don't have to do this Miss Placer, and 1 was saying '1 KNOW IT, BUT I ' M GOING TO DO IT! ' We had this attitude - we worked harder for him than I think I have ever worked for anyone-79

The anthropologist who Dorothy is referring to in the previous

interview passage is Maurice Freedman, who was a specialist in

Chinese Studies, and had been teaching at LSE for only a year

when she took his tutorial. The 1952/53 calendar for LSE

lists anthropology under the t i t le 'Sociclogical Studiesr and

Professor Freedman had been a student at the school from 1946

- 1948 and on the staff of LSE from 1951 - 1970,~~ Due to

Parsonsr influence, social structure was a key term in

sociological terminology in the early 50s in Britain and

elsewhere. The early pressure exerted by Freedman in his

79 Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewich's office, Lakehead University, October 18, 1994.

Dahrendorf , cit . ,

approach to the acquisition of knowledge was, of course, an

important beginning, but much different from what would be

characterized as the 'feministr influences in Dorothy's

scholarly development. From an objective standpoint, it is

difficult to interpret the weight that could putatively be

assigned to the significance of each in relation to the other.

Dorothy had an interesting group of teachers, most of

whom were in the anthropology department, and many were

scholars with world-wide reputationscal Sir Edmund Leach was

one of her teachers, and he had been a graduate student at the

school from 1945 - 1947, and a pupil of Bronislaw Malinowski,

the famous social anthropol~gist.~~ Leach was respected

enough to be quoted in a paper presented at a meeting of the

Association of Social Anthropologists on January 10, 1954,

written by Talcott Parsons, called "The Incest Taboo in

Rela t ion to Social Structure and the Socialization of the

[F] ollowing Leach, [it can] probably be said that a kinship system cannot be a completely "closedw system in that features of it always have to be analyzed with reference to economic, political and other considerations which are not particular to kinship systems, which do not disappear in social structures which have entirely cast loose from a kinship

The teachers referred to in the following passage were related to me in an e-mail message from Dorothy Smith on March 31, 1998.

Dahrendorf, 1995, op. cit., p. 245.

base, 83

Raymond Firth, another student of Malfnowski who became his

biographer, and Lucy Mair, a distinguished anthropologist at

the school from 1927 - 1968, were both her teachers,B4 Dorothy took demography with David Glass, who Ralf Dahrendorf

identified as 'the key figure to make the department jell* in

sociology at LSE after the war? Ernest Gellner, a

philosopher on the LSE staff from 1949 - 1984, who held the

quaint title of 'Professor of Philosophy with special

reference to ~ o c i o l o g y ~ ~ ~ was another who Dorothy counts as an

important teacher during her student years at LSE, along with

John Barnes,

The most celebrated name at LSE from 1952 to 1955 was

Karl Raimund Popper, who had left Austria before it was

annexed by Nazi Germany in 1937 to teach philosophy at the

University of New Zealand. He came to teach at LSE in 1946,

confronting the dominant system of logical positivism that he

had abandoned in Viema before the war.87 In New Zealand, he

had written The O p e n Society and Its Enemies, a two volume

B3 Parsonsr Talcott. 1954. "The Incest Taboo in Relation to Social Structure and the Socialization of the Child." British Journal of Sociology, 5, 2, 101-117. P. 105.

Dahrendorf, 1995, op. ci t . , p. 248, 353.

Ibid, p.427.

87 Magee, Bryan. 1973. Karl Popper. New York: Viking Press. P. 4-5.

work in English which was eventually published in 1945. It

was this book that brought him the huge reputation which he

gained at LSE, In The Open Societyand Its Enemies (1945) he

took a hard line with respect to Manr s philosophy and

attacked him as a 'false prophetr, but this was only part of

his criticism:

He was a prophet of the course of history, and his prophecies did not come true; but this is not my main accusation. It is much more important that he misled scores of intelligent people into believing that historical prophecy is the scientific way of approaching social problems. Marx is responsible for the devastating influence of the historicist method of thought within the ranks of those who wish to advance the cause of the open society.

Important for the future creation of the SOK, the

interpretation of Marxism which Karl Popper instilled in his

students at LSE was to characterize it as a 'methodr, but he

denounced it as a 'poor methodr, saying that M a n , as a

pragmatist, would have agreed with this. He argued that the

social sciences were incapable of 'scientific fortune-tellingr

and differentiated between two kinds of prognostication: 1)

scientific prediction. supported by physics and astronomy; and

2) large-scale historical prophecy, the forecast of a

society's prospective growth.=' Likely, the legacy of Karl

Popper's teaching which remained with Dorothy Smith is the

Popper, Karl R. [I9451 1950. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. P. 275-

Ibid,

idea of Mancr s thinking as a method.

In her last year at the school Dorothy met her husband

William (Bill) Reed Smith, who was also a sociology student,

an American ex-soldier studying in London on the G . I . B i l l :

I don't remember a particular occasion of meeting him. 1 do remember he seemed different to how he became. I think that someone like myself who had been brought up in a middle class context, rather conventional, not really open, not really able to express feeling ... hero was this man who seemed to have almost as a gift the ability not to attend to conventions and etiquette and who expressed feelings.-.who slopped around in these loafers and wore sort of a sloppy shirt and lots of sloppy sweaters and had his hair all over the place and had managed somehow to go through the U.S. Army without ever having to go through basic training and I thought this was what he was. What I wanted from him in a way was this kind of freedom and he was in his way a good-looking man.

Dorothy married Bill Smith in London, England on Saturday July

2, 1955, with her mother in attendancemg' The marriage was an

unpretentious occasion. Dorothy and her husband planned to

emigrate to the United States immediately afterwards.

Dorothy's undergraduate years at LSE were ones of

profound change, both in her intellectual and personal life.

She graduated from LSE with honours, after proving to herself

interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewichfs office, Lakehead University, October 18, 1994.

When I interviewed Anne Canham in Carlisle, England, on September 30, 1997, she showed me Dorothy's wedding announcement, which Anne had kept, along with all of Dorothy's letters and poetry.

that hard work could produce results, and that she was capable

of mastering a difficult and demanding curriculum- For the

Social Organization of Knowledge, this period has several

important implications- Her interest in political activism

and socialism is established, a precursor to the kind of

involvement which ultimately took place in the Vancouver

Women's Movement- Dorothy was exposed to M a r x at LSE through

the lectures of Karl Popper, It was a peculiarly Popperian

interpretation that characterized the work of M a n as an

historical m e t h o d . Some rudimentary intellectual ingredients

for the Social Organization of Knowledge became available and

were at hand at LSE: M a r x as a m e t h o d and sociology-

The Course o f Faminiam in England, 1926 - 1955,

Trends in feminist activism changed drastically over

this period of time, but did not disappear altogether, as is

commonly understood. During the First World War, women gained

new experiences in paid employment and donned army uniforms

for the first time in the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS)

and the Women's Army Adliary Corps (WAAC) . Shortages of

labour occurred in agriculture, for instance, and women were

encouraged to take up the slack, and through the Munitions of

War Act, women were deemed acceptable for jobs which had

previously been performed by skilled men. Likely the dearth

of male labour during the war was one motivation that prompted

Dorothy Foster Abraham to take up agriculture, She saw the

impact of the war firsthand:

In the first year at Woodhall [Wensleydalel, my father and brother Bob took me to France to go over the battle fields. I donr t remember a great deal about the actual battle fields, except the complete desolation. I remember so well one town which had been [destroyed] and was nothing but a few army huts remaining where we slept, but on Sundays, people poured in from surrounding districts where they were, I suppose, lodging, trying to find their old homes and bits of thingsOg2

One accomplishment of women's work in World War I was to make

post-war feminists aware of the widespread problem of blatant

wage discrimination. Once the War was over, however, women

were expected to return to a cult of domesticity and anti-

'* The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886 - 1976. Unpublished- P. 30,

260

feminism as an ideology developed, as women believed that

separate spheres for men and women would protect them against

menr s biologically determined brutality. 93 The organization

of this segment, devoted to the development of the material

conditions and activism of women as it evolved from 1926 - 1955, will follow the historical periodization which has been

established in the previous three sections: 1) Dorothy's

childhood and boarding school years, 1926 - 1943; 2) her

years at Woodbrooke during World War 11, 1944 - 1946; and 3)

the state of feminism in her years at LSE from 1952 - 1955.

Women had achieved a limited franchise in England through

the ~epresentation of the People Act, 1918. This allowed

women aged 30 who were qualified municipal government electors

or were married to municipal government electors, to vote, and

the new law enfranchised 8,479,156 women, 39,6% of the total

electorate of the British Isles. This act of parliament, on

the surface, seemed as if the government were caving in to the

demands of the suffrage cause which had been so active before

the war, but in fact this was not the case. Large scale

reforms to residence qualifications had to be made for men who

were disenfranchised because of relocation for World War I,

and there was a real possibility of a reduced electorate. The

government was under pressure to deal with women's suffrage

from a continued activism on the part of suffragists during

93 K e n t , Susan Kiagsley. 1988. 'IThe Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism? Journal of British Studies , 27, 232-253. P. 233,

the w a r , and the threat of renewed militancy once the war was

over. Since there was a necessity for a wide range of changes

to the electoral act, women's suffrage was included as well,

in part as a tribute to women's war service, but at the same

time strict stipulations were put in place to prevent women

f rom becoming a majority. All reforms, including womenr s

suffrage, passed through the House of Commons in a vote of 387

to 57 _94 Later in the same year the Parlfament (Qualification

of Women) Act, 1918 m a d e women qualified to become members of

the House of Commons, Ten years later, by the Representation

of tshe People (Equal Franchise) Act, 1928, women were eligible

to vote on the same conditions as menOg5 Ironically, on the

very day that Equal Franchise Bill for women was passed by the

house of Lords, Emmeline Pankhurstrs funeral was taking place

in London. 96

When Dorothy E. Place was born in July, 1926, a backlash

against feminism was beginning to make itself felt in the

British Isles. The crude birth rate i n 1926 in England and

Wales w a s 17-8 births per thousand, the continuation of a

decreasing trend in births which had been taking place over

several decades, excluding a brief post-war increase in 1920

94 Pugh, Martin. 1992 . Women and the Women's M o v e m e n t in B r i t a i n , 1914 - 1959, P. 35-36.

95 Ross, J.F.S. 1953. "Women and Parliamentary Elections ." British Journal of Sociology, 4, 1, 14-24. P. 24 .

96 "The Death Of Ernmeline Pankhurst . I' 1928. The Labour Woman, 16, 6, p , 106.

to 24-0 births. Women were encouraged to start a family at a

young age, and to have at least three children, in order to

encourage a fixed population,97 There was a resumption of the

customary position of women as the overseers of their own

households. New forms of women's organizations began to

attract large memberships, ones which were less political and

less feminist in character, The Women's Institutes, Mother's

Union and the Townswomen's Guilds, for example, had mixed

memberships of feminists and anti-feminists,98

Feminist activism did not grind to a complete halt,

however. Instead women's political consciousness entailed a

process of diversification after the vote on equal terms with

men was achieved in 1928 . Issues such as equal pay with men,

married womenf s right to work, allowances for motherhood, and

birth control were of interest to feminists. Consequently the

women's movement, which for most of the early 20th century had

been focused on one issue, the vote, expanded on the basis of

issues, while at the same time experienced reduced numbers of

supporters. Women became vocal in such areas as housing. In

1928 in Manchester, for instance, women lobbied against

casement windows in a new housing project, requesting 'top

lightsf instead.99 In the Northern mining towns in the late

Ibid, p. 14 , 68.

99 "Labour Women Criticise the New Housing Scheme." 1928. The Labour Woman: A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women, 16, 1, p. 7,

1920s. unemployment and poverty meant that miner's children

went without adequate footwear, and as a result, were often

forced to remain home from school or risk serious injury to

their feet in cold weathec, The Standing Joint Committee of

Industrial Women's Organizations supported a Private Members'

Bill, nick-named the 'Boots for Bairns Billr , to give

municipal authorities the power to provide boots to children

whether or not they were of school age-''"

Other questions to take the forefront of women's activism

in the late 1920s were Nursery School Movement and improvement

of the sweeping problem of the death of women in childbirth,

Arguing that men were more interested in the adolescents than

they were in toddlers, women took on the responsibility for

the health and welfare of children at a very young age.

Diseases like rickets, measles, scabies. ringworm and impetigo

were comonplace. Nursery schools, which provided poor

children with fresh air, sunshine and adequate nutrition were

seen to be the answer to these pr~blerns.'~' The schools were

not meant to be located only in slum areas, and most of them

took youngsters at two years of age, contributing a three-year

loo "Boots for Bairns Bill: New Scheme Initiated by Working Women. 1928. Labour Woman: A Monthly Journal for Working Women, 16, 12, p - 179,

lol "Laying the Foundations of Good Health: What Nursery Schools Can Achieve. Ir The Labour Woman : A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women, March 1, 1928, P. 40.

foundation to a childr s educationclo2

In 1928, it was estimated that 3,000 mothers died in

childbirth every year, and the problem was more severe in the

smaller communities of England and Wales. There was a need

for improved pre-natal care, housing and factory

condition^.'^^ The Maternal Mortality Committee held their

third conference in October, 1928, with the Minister of

Health, Neville Chamberlain, in attendance. Regarded as a

'chillyr spirit by the women delegates, Chamberlain refused to

allow questions about a Bill before the House of Commons,

which abolished percentage grants for maternity and other

health purposes and replaced them with a block grant which

would not be changed for five years. The Bill was a step

backward for women's health:

the long struggle in 1926 had made the needs of mothers greater, not less, and that while during that period they in Glamorgan were able to feed the pregnant mothers from the Women's Fund, now the Local Authorities had no chance of getting enough money from the rates to do it, Already during the last year the infant mortality had risen from 76 to 86 per thousand lo*

The five hundred representatives of organizations concerned

lo' "Greatest Campaign of our Day: Nursery Schools in the Open Air. l1 The Labour Woman : A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women. February 1, 1928. P. 2 4 .

lo3 Toll of Motherhood. " 1928. The Labour Woman: A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women, 16, 11, p. 165.

Io4 llGovernment Treatment of Mothers and Babies, " The Labour Woman: A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women, 16, 12, p . 184-5 .

with the problem of maternal welfare at the conference

unanimously passed a resolution that the projected Bill would

'hamper the extension of maternal and child welf aref , The

most distressing clause in the Bill was seen to be the

imposition of a fee for care at maternity hospitals and homes,

making it even more difficult to improve the mortality rate

among mothers,

The boarding school education that Dorothy E, Place was

exposed from 1926 to 1943 in England was accessible only to

upper and middle class girls, and as such was held up as a

standard to working-class and lower middle-class girls, who

could only aspire to the free secondary state schooling

offered under the Education Act of 1918. Boarding school

culture became the subject matter for a plethora of new

magazines aimed at the market of working-class and lower

middle-class girls, and the schoolgirl story became the basis

of a new form of mass media, the \childrenr s comicr or 'story-

paperr - lo6 Dorothy herself, as mentioned above, had a

standing order at her father's news stand for several of these

papers-

At a frivolous level, the story lines of these papers

were emancipatory, in that the heroines were often portrayed

in non-traditional roles, such as airplane pilots, 'The Flying

Ibid, p . 185.

lob D r o t n e r , Kirsten. 1983 . uSchoolgirls, Madcaps and A i r Aces: English Girls and their Magazine Reading Between the Wars." Feminist Studies, 9, 1, 33-52. P. 34-5.

Sisters, Joan and Kit Fortunec, and detectives like 'Sylvia

Silence - girl detective' in The Schoolgirl, and were represented as rebellious characters who had no need for adult

authority. A. J. Jenkinsonr s pre-World War I1 survey of

children's reading called mat do Boys and Girls Read? found that the ordinary twelve-year-old girl read/bought 2 - 0 school

story magazines per month, which fell to 1-3 per month by age

fourteen,lo8 Dorothy was not alone in feeling that the

boarding school experience was something to be endured. The

'story-papersr functioned as 'mental safety valvesr to their

readers who were disappointed or had contradictory school

experiences, based on the realities of sex and class. The

escalation of career stories in the papers came during the

Great Depression, which narrowed the vocational choices of

middle-class women, and provided little incentive for girls to

persevere in their academic efforts,'0g Some stories based

on close relationships between schoolgirls, such as Elsie

Jeanette Oxenham's The Abbey Girls series in the 1930s

inevitably ended with the 'prize of

heterosexual relationship. 'I0

A working-class version of the

marriage' and a

' s tory-papers ' was an

lo' Ibid, p . 42-44,

Io9 Ibid, p. 47.

'lo Auchmutz, Rosemary. 1987. "Youf re a Dyke, Angela ! The Rise and Fall of the school Girl Story." Trouble and Strife, 10, 23-30. P- 2 7 .

appeal to young women in a special segment in each issue

directed specifically to young working-class girls that was

created in The Labour Woman: A Monthly Journal f o r W o r k i n g

Women, Its solicitation was primarily political and one with

a serious message, In 1928 the journal held a contest for

drawings and essays depicting "The Young Woman Votert1 ,

Kathleen Wilkinson, aged twelve. was commended for her drawing

of a young woman on a street corner, with the caption, "Our

Vote, Our FreedomlL First prize for the contest went to

thirteen-year-old Joan Jahans, whose drawing was in four

sections. The first three sections show 'the office girlr,

'the customer and the shop-girlr and 'the waitressf, with the

fourth section depicting all of them walking together to the

polling booth.'" Younger women in the Labour Party were

encouraged by older members to recruit the 3,000,000 young

women who would be able to vote under the equal franchise Act

in 1928."' A plea in the journal was also written to girls

employed in 'light engineering' to organize into trade unions,

girls numbered in the thousands who made cosmetics, wireless

and photographic materials. A working class paper, this

medium was directed at children and young women who were

already involved in the solemn business of working. and the

"The Young Woman8 s Vote: Children8 s Drawings and Essays. The Labour Woman: A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women. April 1, 1928. P. 53.

Ibid, p, 57.

classroom had been left behind--

In December 1941, legislation was introduced in Britain

to inaugurate the conscription of women, the only nation in

World War 11 to ratify such a tactic, An acute labour

shortage had prompted the government to adopt the National

Service Number 2 Act, so that single women from age 19 to 30

were conscripted* 'I4 During this interval, employment

prospects for women were greatly enlarged, so that 39 women

were employed for every 100 men. Tens of thousands of women

were inducted into the Land Army, the WRENS, the WAAFs and

many women joined the Women's Voluntary Servicem The

principle behind conscription entailed the choice of opting

for work in industry, civil defence or Women's Services, but

in reality this often meant that alternatives were curtailed

in favour of what labour needs actually existed at a

particular time.

Although some 7,250,000 women eventually worked in

industrial positions throughout World War 11, 8,770,000

continued to labour in the household as full-time home-

'13 Loughlin, Anne. 1933. 'IGirls Must Organise." The Labour Woman: A M o n t h l y Journal for Working Women, 21, 5, p . 72.

Summerf ield, Penny. 1989. What Women Learned from the Second World War. l1 History of Education, 18, 3 , 213-229. P. 215.

'I5 Davies, John. 1993. A History of Wales. London: Penguin Press. P. 604-605,

makers,f16 Women's Institutes or W-I.s, established in

England in 1915, became a full-fledged movement by 1919, and

created a variety of campaigns designed to contribute to the

war effort using the domestic skills of women who remained at

home, By 1943, W.1.s had 288,000 members.u7 Dorothy Foster

Place was an active member in several of the Women's

Institutes before and during World War 11, at first as a

county organiser, The membership roster of W I L r s included a

mixture of feminists and anti-feminists, so the ambivalent

nature of W. I. associations could be interpreted as a

softening of Dorothy Placers former militant feminism. While

still living in Northallerton, she was, for a f e w years,

President of the Romanby Women's Institute, and later

President of Otterington, Newby Wiske W. I, after she had

moved to Sowber Gate. Like many W.I. members, she took a

class in bottling and canning fruits and vegetables while the

w a r was on, doing a lot of this work at home.118 Canning was

a significant war project taken on by W,I,s:

The total amount of preserves made in 1940 including jam, bottled and canned fruit, chutney and fruit pulp was approximately 1,631 tons. This was made by amateurs in improvised quarters and not one penny was

'I7 Ibid, p. 227.

'la The Autobiographical Notes of Dorothy Foster Abraham, 1886-1976. Unpublished. P. 40.

paid to axxyone of that valiant company* =='

Women's Institutes were further recruited to distribute a

national questionnaire on the effectiveness of the evacuation

programme, to which some 1,700 institutes responded.

Feminism as a political force in Britain became languid

in the post-war years, and suffered from the same kind of

anti-feminist reaction that followed the termination of World

War I, Women who did not submit to giving up their wartime

jobs to men experienced a barrage of pressure from women's

magazines to remain in the household. Active feminists were

few, but British feminists at this time were women like Viola

Klein, author of The Feminine Character (1946) and Women's Two

Roles (1956); Edith Summerskil, who was politically active in

women's causes in the 1950s and Vera Brittain, whose feminism

changed to pacifism in the post-war era. Women during the

1950s considered that the work of emancipation had already

been accomplished, and that, as Marghanita Laski commented,

'rights for women, as far as my generation is concerned, is a

dead issuer . 120 After her militant suffrage work, Lucy Ellison Abraham

embraced the role of a pioneer in the organization of post-

suffrage women's civic groups in Birkenhead, and had middle-

class expectations for her daughter Dorothy, even though this

McCall , Cicely. 1943 . Woman ' s Institutes. London t W. Collins. P. 32.

120 Pugh, 1992, op. cit . , p. 284-285.

involved the non-traditional vocation of Analytical Chemist~y.

Dorothy Foster Abraham continued the independent and non-

conformist character that she had displayed so openly in 1912

in the WSPU, in that she ignoredher parent's concerns for her

education and took up the study of agriculture, eventually

becoming a capable farm manager- Her unconventional demeanour

was in great part abandoned when she married Tom Place and

became the manager of a large household at Sowber Gate-

Milner argued that she became awed by the 'upper-crust

localsr, neighbours like the Talbots next door who were

'country gentlemenr, and families who had all made their

fortune during the industrial revolution. It was Milnerrs

feeling that Dorothy Place was more inclined to behave like

'gentryr than her husband Tom, who, though politically a

conservative, practised a tolerance of the differences in

social class. Milner felt that it was his father's tolerance

of people that was passed along to the younger D~rothy.'~~

Before emigrating to America, Dorothy Smith accepted that

marriage and the domestic life were the direction she should

take. Faced with a dismal job market for sociologists in

Britain, she opted for a kind of life that was expected of

young women her age'2z, marrying an American and relocating

to the United States to what was most likely a better chance

''I Interview by the author with Milner Place, at Abrahamr s Cafe Bar, Huddersf ield, September 2 7 , 1997.

12+ Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith in Pam Wakewichrs office at Lakehead University, October 18, 1994.

for her to sertously engage a sociological career, This was a

move that brought with it a high cost, a separation from

family and familiar things, the confrontation with a strange

country and the frustrating discovery that the domestic life

was not w h a t she wanted after all.

Conclusion

Chapter Six is a study of Dorothy Smith's years at

boarding school, her residence at Woodbrooke College at Selly

Oak, and her undergraduate career in sociology at LSE. The

boarding school education that she received in England, and

its unique opportunities provided by the private evacuation

scheme of whole schools to the countryside during World War

11, was a clear social origin for the concept of 'botanizing',

or the selection process of sociological artifacts for

investigation. At Woodbrooke College, the Quaker-managed

residence where she and Anne Clarkson lived while studying for

the University of Birmingham Social Studies Diploma, she was

introduced to working-class culture and politics and the more

distressing realities of social life, and to the kind of

poverty with which, until then, she had been unfamiliar. This

was the location of her introduction to sociology as well,

albeit in a limited state- Her first encounter with the

sophisticated world of the intellect was at LSE, in the way of

world-class scholars and the difficulties of social

anthropology, an environment which fired her interest in

sociology, From Karl Popper, I argue that w h a t she took a w a y

was the notion that what M a r x had to offer was a method, and

f o r the Social Organization of Knowledge, this was likely its

most substantive intellectual beginning.

Chapter Seven

Dorothy E. Smfth in California, 1955-65: Studies in Social Osganizat&on

fntroduction

And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. '

In a special issue of Lffe devoted to 'The American

Woman: Her Achievements and Troublesf, published at

Christmas, 1956, the 'croonerr idealized as Mr. Relaxation,

Perry Como, was celebrated as a 20-year-oldr s ideal husband.

Dorothy Smith had been living in California for a little over

a year. The article stated that 'a basic occupation of

virtually every woman is choosing a man to marryr.' American

girls asked to name a public figure who would be considered a

'good catchr identified their first choice as Perry Como.

Women, the article stated, wanted men who would help with the

dishes, were good conversationalists, were well-read, polite,

sports buffs, and above all, a husband was expected to take

his wife dancing-3 Perry Como is photographed in the feature

pretending to step on his partner's toes, as 69% of the young

Friedan, Betty. 119631 1973,1974,1983- The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W, Norton, P. 19,

"20-year-olds' Ideal: Perry Como, Their Choice Enacts Perfect Spouse. l1 1956. Life, Special Issue. "The American Woman: Her Achievements and Troubles. 41, 25, 143 -45. P . 143 .

Ibid, p . 145.

women in the sunrey stated that it was not important that

their husbands be good dancers, only that they try. At

Christmas, 1956, Dorothy Smith was newly married, and caught

in an American ideology of womanhood that insisted she f fnd

fulfilment in domestic life and in raising a family, She was

homesick, in a strange country, and had already faced a

miscarried pregnancy with terrible cornpli~ations.~ Her

husband, unlike the magazine version of Perry Como, was not a

perfect one, and her marriage became very unhappy, culminating

in her husband's abandonment of her one morning, three weeks

after she handed in her doctoral dissertation. She was left

with the responsibility for two small sons, aged five and nine

months of age.' Despondency about the state of her marriage

was a situation that she shared with many women in this era,

and with the exception of her preoccupation with her doctoral

research and the time spent with her children, she found

herself, in many ways, confronting 'the problem that has no

namerD6 This was the time in her life when her loyalties

became 'bifurcated', between the responsibilities connected to

the management of her home, and the sphere of the intellect,

Smith, D. E. 1994. "A Berkeley Education." In: Meadow-Orlans, Kathryn P. and Ruth A. Wallace. Gender and the Academic Experience: Berkeley Women Sociologists. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. P, 46,

Friedan, 1963, op. cit., p. 21.

the world of sociology-7 WomexPs predominant and often

ambivalent relationship to domestic labour and isolation in

the home becomes an clear productive force which begins to

lure white middle-class women toward feminist consciousness.

Dorothy Smith has written an autobiographical account of

her experience at Berkeley in Gender and the Academic

merience: Berkeley Women S o c i o l o g i s t s (1994)- As this

thesis seeks to uncover the historical development of the

Social Organization of mowledge, the following chapter will

concentrate on a selection of conspicuous intellectual

influences which she encountered during her years of graduate

research, at the same time as it analyses an emerging feminism

sparked by middle-class women's unique and ambivalent

relationship to the domestic realm, Frequently a doctoral

student discovers in graduate school the guiding interests

that will shape their future academic career, From 1955 to

1965, Dorothy wrote a doctoral dissertation and published four

articles based on this research, while married and caring for

two infants. She encountered organizational theory, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, which marked a critical change in her

thinkingfa as well as Simone de Beauvoir, and Jessie Bernard,

indicating the beginning of a feminist, scholarly direction.

Smith, D. E. 1987. The Everyday World As P r o b l e m a t i c : A F e m i n i s t Sociology. Toronto : University of Toronto Press , P. 82,

Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith at OISE/UT, November 11, 1994,

Erving Goffman was her supervisor, and committee members were

John A. Clausen and Robert Blauner, Of note here is the point

that she developed a more complete understanding of 'social

organizationr at Berkeley which she put to use later in the

creation of the Social Organization of mowledge- The

structure of this chapter includes: 1) a r e v i e w of her

dissertation, attending to the most noteworthy theories of

formal organization included in it, and the ir individual

notions of 'social organizationr; 2) an exploration of

Smith's earliest feminist influences, Le., Jessie Bernard and

Sirnone de Beauvoir; and 3 ) commentary on forms of A m e r i c a n

women's activism and its relationship to the domestic labour,

from 1955 - 1965, 'an already happening womenrs movement, still hiddenr , g

"Westera S t a t e ~ o s p i t a l ~ ~ ~

In the fall term of 1956, three students in sociology

from the Berkeley campus, one of whom was Dorothy Smith,

approached "Western State Hospitaltt (an anonymous name given

to the hospital where she was a Research Sociologist from

Smith, 1994, op - cit. , p. 48.

I have outlined Dorothy Smith's doctoral research on two previous occasions: 1) in my MA thesis, in Chapter Three, "Miss Place, Define Social Structuren, p- 40-53, where it is analyzed along with the Free Speech Movement; and 2) in Chapter Three of this dissertation, "The Social Organization of Knowledge: An over vie^^^, in the section called IrSocial Organizationw,

1956- 1958'') to begin 18 months of research:

The mental hospital in question is situated in a small city and draws its patient population,.,numbering some 460 0 , , , f r a m both rural and urban counties, It has a medical staff of about 30, 10 social workers, 8 psychologfsts and about 700 attendants- The hospital takes all kinds of mentally ill persons with the exception of sexual psychopaths and mental defectives - l2

Directly after their coming, three male attendants were

discharged at the institution for exercising needless violence

in the control of a patient. The atmosphere was one of

' tension, suspicion and excitementf . l3 "Western State

Hospitalv1 was divided into f if ty-nine wards, 20 for women and

39 for men, with 2,014 beds for women and 2,272 beds for men.

Ratios of attendants to patients ranged from one for every 25-

30 patients, to one attendant from 10 - 15 people, Dorothy's observational work at the hospital was performed on

four wards, all in the women's quarters - 'an admission and treatment ward, a continued treatment ward, a geriatrics ward

and a I1chronic disturbed" unitr .I5

" Smith, D.E. 1965. "The Logic of Custodial Organizati~n.~~ Psychiatry, 28, 4, 311-323. P. 311.

l2 Smith, Dorothy E. 1959. I1Legitimate and Illegitimate Deviance: The Case of the State Mental Hospital," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 5, 1, 15-39. P- 16.

l3 Smith, Dorothy E. Vower and the Frontline: Social Controls in a State Mental H~spital,~~ A Doctoral Dissertation from the University of California at Berkeley. 1963, P. 53.

l4 Ibid, p. 107.

Ibid, p. 55 .

The choice of Smith's thesis topic was decided upon

because it was 'at handf, in that her husband, Bill Smith, was

already conducting research at "Western State Hospitalv1 and it

was then considered an appropriate area of research in

sociology, given that an ethos of psychiatry in American

social life was, at that time, widely prevalent? Her

supervisor, Erving G o f f m a n , was working on Asylums: Essays on

the Social Si tuat ion of M e n t a l Patients and Other m a t e s

(1961). Likely, an additional nudge in the direction of this

subject was the fact that her brother, Ullin Place, a Lecturer

in psychology at the University of Adelaide from 1951-1954,

had published an important and well known article in The

British Journal of Psychology in 1956 called "1s Consciousness

a Brain Proce~s?~~" It was also chosen for career purposes,

in that it would provide her with a better chance of getting a

professional position afterwards . la Her doctoral thesis was

called "Power and the Frontline: Social Controls in a State

Mental Hospitallc, and was completed in 1963. She began by

introducing two qualities of a state mental hospital: a) it

was like a penal institution in that there was a guardianship

16 For example, Ken Keseyfs One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published by Viking Press in New York in 1962, was a microcosmic account of life in the ward of a mental institution.

" Communication by Ullin T. Place with the author by E- Mail message, June 20, 1996.

Lecture by Dorothy E. Smith at Lakehead University, October 17, 1994.

quality to the work involved; and 2) it provided expert

medical and psychiatric therapy for patients.19

The dissertation's principles are based on traditional

sociology, drawing on M a r x , Weber and D m k h e i m to support a

theory of power to explain the social structure of the mental

institution. A Weberian definition of power was extracted

from Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947) :

If it possesses an administrative staff, a corporate group is always, by virtue of this fact, to some degree imperatively co- ordinated. The usual imperatively co- ordinated group is at the same time an administrative organization. The character of the corporate group is determined by a variety of factors: the mode in which the administration is carried out, the character of the personnel, the objects over which it exercises control, and the extent of effective jurisdiction of its authority. The first two factors in particular are dependent in the highest degree on the way in which authority is legitimi~ed.~'

For the frontline type of organization that she was

researching, the centre of professional power did not

correspond with the site of accountability, that is, the power

was argued to reside with ward attendants who looked after the

individual wards, even though the accountability lay with the

physicians and psychiatrists. Smith also used the fundamental

Durkheimian concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity to

l9 Smith, 1963, op. cit - , introduction. 20 Henderson, A. M. and Talcott Parsons, 1947. Max

W e b e r : The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press. P. 153,

describe the hospital organization- In mechanical solidarity,

social coherence would depend on the similarity of wards, and

was a weak form of organization, disintegrating easily, a

characteristic which she applied to "Western State Hospitalcnl

Organic solidarity was used to describe an organization with

cohesion that arose f r o m an interdependent reliance of

separate wards, each one having a distinct purpose, one that

had a stronger unity-21

Marx is given only a cursory reference, Likely a

consequence of Karl Popper's intense critique of Marxism which

she met with in lectures at LSE, the orthodox sociology that

was practised at the University of California at Berkeley, and

political phobias persisting from the McCarthy Era:

Of course it is the exercise of power which draws attention to its presence, It is a potentiality for certain kinds of effects rather than the effects themselves. For this reason it is important to be able to locate it by structural co-ordinates which are independent of its exercise. It is this which gives Marx's translation of social power into the ownership of the means of production its analytic strength- It provides a single dimension by which all bases of power in a society could (it seemed) be translated either directly or by simple rules of transf~rmation,~~

What she was interested in analysing in her thesis, was the

idea that the professional system of social controls in place

at "Western State Hospitaln1, meant to restrict the abuse of

Smith, 1963, op. cit., introduction,

Ibid, Smith,

power at the level of the frontline workers, often fell apart

and was not a functional arrangement? Works like Robert

Presthus The Organizational Society (1962) were beginning to

analyze the dysfunctional aspects of large scale

organizations,

There are some influential forms of 'social organizationr

that Smith adhered to in her doctoral research. She had spent

an entire year reading organizational theory before writing

the dissertation for a second time, having decided that the

first attempt contained two theses in one.25 Two notable

ref esences are Robert Michels Political Parties: A

Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modem

Democracy (1915) ; and Peter M. Blau and W* Richard Scott8 s

Formal Organizations: A Comparative Approach (1962) , It is

important to r e m e m b e r that Dorothy Smith was researching a

large scale, complex institution, and was looking at the

phenomenon of p o w e r , so her selection of theorists at this

time was likely determined in order to be compatible with this

kind of model and as well as to reflect a conventional form of

sociology, given her status as an undergraduate. The impetus

and sanction for any kind of innovative experiment in

" Ibid, Smith, 1963, p . 47.

24 Horowitz, Irving L, , ed. [n. d. I The Anarchists: From Diderot to Camus, from Thoreau to V a n z e t t i , a Ringing Roll-Call of the Great Non-Confonnists and Dissenters. P. 551,

'' Smith, 1994, op. cit., p. 50-51. 283

sociology, especially at Berkeley, was limited, given that the

early work of Erving G o f f m a n (social interaction theory) and

Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology) was only beginning in the

early 1960s- In any case, these theoretfcal constructs were

the basis for her subsequent, more advanced work,

Robert Michels' book, Political Parties (1915) , formed

the cornerstone of most of the organizational theory that was

being developed at the time that Dorothy Smith was writing her

thesis. H i s idea w a s that a successful political party

actually needed an 'oligarchic structure of controlr, where

power is vested in 'political dominant class, the class of a

minorityr, despite any kind of democratic rhetoric that might

exist.26 Dorothy's Smith's observation and argument was that

Michelsr 'iron law of oligarchy' was a theory that went under

the belief that all organizations working for the realization

of explicit objectives engage in parallel types of action. It

was this conjecture that formed the foundation of most of the

then current organizational theory, so a dispute with Michels

would mean a critique of contemporarytheory would be

insinuated. '' Michels ' formulation of 'social organizationr

was to be found on a continuum of restricted and less

restricted forms of oligarchy. The narrowest form was the

26 Michels, Robert. El9151 1949, 1958. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Glencoe. Illinois: Free Press. P. 393.

27 Smith. 1963, op. cit,, p. 244.

284

institution of absolute monarchy, founded upon the

detednation of a single individual, and legitimated by an

appeal to God,28 Wider types of oligarchy could be found in

all parts of social life- Interestingly, Michels found no

incompatibility between the historical materialism of Karl

M a n and the continued existence of oligarchies:

There is no essential contradiction between the doctrine that history is a the record of a continued series of class struggles and the doctrine that class struggles invariably culminate in the creation of new oligarchies which undergo fusion with the old- The existence of a political class does not conflict with the essential content of Marxism, considered not as an economic dogma but as a philosophy of history; for in each particular instance the dominance of a political class arises as the resultant of the relationships between the different social forces competing for supremacy. "'

Social organization, for Michels, was the power that was held

by a few or even one individual, even in the working-class, or

the notion of a 'working-class 6liter, as in the work of

Vilfredo Pareto. 3o It was transmitted historically, and held

in place by a 'cult of venerationf that developed for persons

holding positions of leader~hip.~'

For the purposes of Smith's thesis and the observations

made in the course of her research, Michels8 theory was not

28 Michels, [I9151 1949, 1958, op. cit., p. 3.

29 Ibid, p. 407.

30 Ibid, p. 394.

Ibid,

operative in the organization of the state mental institution,

in that the majority, the 700 ward attendants, were in

practice, the group in power:

The power of the attendant group to determine policy in the hospital can be considered as arising in default of professional leadership. From the perspective of some of the issues raised in this chapter, the weakness of the professional group as a counterpoise to this power can be viewed as a failure to develop structures sustaining professional norms and values. 32

Only 16% of the patients at the mental institution were

voluntary, "Western State HospitalI1 represented the terminus

for mental patients who were difficult to deal with, and the

patients cases which involved complicated issues

supervision could not be evicted. 33

Much of the thesis is an argument presented to show how

the professional staff at the state mental institution are

relatively powerless in comparison with the frontline workers

the ward attendants, disjuncture, the opposite what

one might led expect the structure such formal

organization, For example, psychiatry as a practice was held

to be peripheral to the medical profession as a whole, and

psychiatric credentials did not

authority the practitioner, 34

necessarily give

Furthermore,

32 Smith, 1963, op. tit- p. 261.

33 Ibid, p.79-82,

34 Ibid, p. 261,

prestige

the majority of

the physicians at the hospital had no background in psychiatry

or involvement with the mentally ill before arriving there.

Most of the medical doctors had taken positions at "Western

State Hospitalu later on in their professions and the job

represented ' a dead-end, a place of semi-retirement ' 35 :

State hospital work has low status among physicians, The low skill requirements, coupled with the chronicity (and perhaps low social class position) of much of the patient population reduce the value of the work, Moreover, institutional medicine in a non-medical organization, such as an industrial organization, or on board a ship, tends to create an inference that the physician was or would be unsuccessful in private practice, 36

The work at the hospital was, for the medical practitioners,

unrewarding and held little chance of upward mobility, To

relieve their monotony, the physicians would engage in

'curious elaborations of the simple procedures of electro-

shock therapyr .37 As a new member of the professional staff,

the doctor would be reliant on the ward attendant to teach

him/her the workings of the hospital, as they would be more

conversant than the physician in the field of mental

illness. 38

Peter M. Blau and W - Richard

A Comparative Approach (1962) was

Scott s Formal Organization :

employed in supporting a

35 Ibid, p- 180 *

36 Ibid, p - 172.

37 Ibid, p. 183 ,

3B Ibid, p . 184-

more detailed description and explanation of the explicit

organization of "Western State EospitaPL The state mental

hospital which Smith studied came under the definition of a

' formal ' organization, or one that had been 'purposefully

establishedg, with the mission of accomplishing a number of

specific ends, with definite rules w h i c h supported the

realization these ends, This is a notion in contrast to an

'informalr organization which does not exhibit any proof of

having been planned within the content of its structure.3g

In Dorothy Smith's critique of B l a u and Scott in her

dissertation, she pointed out that the purpose of an

organization functioned at the same time as a standard by

which the success of the organization could be evaluated, a

duality which was not always evident in organizational theory.

Also, the attainment of an organization's goals were not

always a criterion of success, in that the circumvention of

'certain states or eventsr could be further evidence of

achievement. 40

Blau and Scott's definition of 'social organizationr had

to do with patterns of human social behaviour that a

sociologist was in the habit of searching out, which was, of

course, the goal all sociological of theory and method:

"Social Organizationw refers to the ways in which human conduct becomes socially organized, that is, to the observed

39 Ibid, p . 5 -

regularities in the behaviour of people that are due to the social conditions in which they find themselves rather than to their physiological or psychological characteristics as individuals. The manv - 4

social conditions that influence the conduct of people can be divided into two main types, which constitute two basic aspects of social organizations: (I) the structure of social relations in a group or larger collectivity of people, and (2) the shared beliefs and orientations that unite the members of the colle~tivity.~~

Smith's conception of social organization in her doctoral

dissertation was constructed with the formal, custodial

elements of the state mental hospital in mind, with a further

attention to the informal aspects of its organization. For

example, individual wards were characterized as an

'information pocketr. where gossip and information were

informally exchanged, and was an important source of power for

the frontline workers. *' It Western State Hospital If was

organized in the nineteenth century policy of the state of

California in the fashion of a cottage system. Although this

was a answer to the problem of situating and looking after

patients, and minimizing difficulties in patient control, it

was a solution in fact created another problem - the frontline category of organization with its own adjunct problems of

regulation.43 The state mentar hospital was what Blau and

4L B l a u , Peter M. and W. Richard Scott. 1962, Formal Organizations : A comparative Approach. San Francisco, California: Chandler. P. 2.

42 Ibid, p. 130; p. 234.

43 Smith, 1963, op. cit. , p, 62.

Scott would characterize as a 'parallel specialization'. They

separated 'parallel and ' interdependent ' forms of

specialization in an organization, giving the example of a

department store, where different departments had different

sales lines, An 'interdependentr organization would be

something like a car manufacturing works, where each stage of

the labour process was dependent on a previous stage of the

procedure - A parallel type of organization would increase the

detachment between units rather than creating

interdependence - 44

Several journal articles came out of the research

performed at "Western State HospitalM, the first published in

1959, called "Legitimate and Illegitimate Deviance: The Case

of the State Mental Hospitalrr, Smith recognized in the

acknowledgements of this article that many of the ideas

contained in the paper were obtained from discussions with her

husband, William Reed Smith- This was the only journal

article to be published before handing in her PhD dissertation

in 1963, and then three others followed quickly afterwards,

based on the research at the mental institution. Certainly

another large influence would have been the work of her

dissertation supervisor, Erving Goffman, The phenomenology

extant in Goffman's The Presentation of Everyday Life (1959)

44 Blau, Peter M. and W. Richard Scott. 1962- Formal Organizations: A comparative Approach. P. 183- Quoted in: Smith, D . E - 1965. "Front-Line Organization of the State Mental Hospital-" Administrative Science Quarterly, 10, 3 , 381-399- P. 385-

was used in her doctoral thesis as the basis for ethnographic

work, and the 'indefinite characterr of the kind of

interviewing she performed at the hospital ." In her later publications, after she had separated from her husband and was

working as a Lecturer at Berkeley, Smith refers to GoffmanJ s

A s y l u m s : E s s a y s on the Social Situation of Mental Patients

and O t h e r Inmates (1965) as one of the f e w sources of research

that has not neglected the area of 'the structme and logic of

custodial organizationJ . An important conceptualization of social organization to

emerge from Dorothy Smith's experience at the University of

California at ~erkeley~~, and one that she argues comes from

the experience of women, was her notion of a divided thought

process or a 'bifurcation of consciousnessr:

Entering the governing mode of our kind of society lifts the actor out of the immediate place in which she is in the body- She uses what becomes present to her in this place as the means to pass beyond it to a conceptual order. This mode of action creates a bifurcation of consciousness, a bifurcation, of course, which is present for all those participating in this mode of action. It establishes two modes of knowing, experiencing and acting, one located in the body and in the space which it occupies and moves into; the other, passing beyond it. And although 1 have

Smith, 1963, op. cit., p. 62.

" Smith, 1965, op. cit., p. 311.

Smith, D.E. 1987. The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P. 6-7.

used the feminine pronoun in general, it is primarily men who are active in this mode, 48

This form of organization came from many evenings of working

in her office at the Institute of Human Development in the

Sociology Department at Berkeley, She would leave her small

children and the w o r k of running a household and, while Bill

Smith looked after the children, would devote three hours to

her thesis,4g This was the world she lived in as a

sociologist, but w h e n she left th i s space, she returned to the

world of her children and their activities, a location she

felt 'was a refuge, a relief from the abstracted processes of

sociologyr Dorothy Smithr s interval at Berkeley could be

described as a kind of 'sociological purgatoryr, halfway

between heaven and hell. It was at once the trap of an

unhappy m a r r i a g e and an intellectual snare- As an English

immigrant, she was too vulnerable to resolve her marital

difficulties. In sociology at Berkeley, in a male-governed

department which for the most part required adherence to

conventional forms of thinking, she could see the discipliners

constraints and limitations, and as a graduate student was

powerless to re-shape its scripture.

Smith, D.E. 1979. "A Sociology for Womenn. In: Sherman, J., ed, The P r i s m of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Ki?owledge, P. 166-167,

49 Smith, 1994, op. cit., p, 51.

Smith, D. E. 198%. The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, Toronto : University of Toronto Press. P- 7.

Waiting in the Wings: Feminism in Sociology, 1955 - 1965.

Traditionally, the onus has been on the discipline of

philosophy to create a new gp i s t eme or direction of thought

that can be taken up and used by other disciplines. No doubt

this was the case in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, notably,

the publication of the two volumes, Le D e d e m e Sexe: I. L e s

F a i t s et L e s M w e s , 11- LflExp6rience Vgcue in 1949, written

by a woman who did not think of herself as a feminist until a

mature woman well over sixty- In a period when feminism had

almost disappeared, this work materialized, and though

stimulating a furore in the male intellectual circles in

France, it had little impact in the United States, especially

on women, who considered it 'too radical for America in the

fiftiesr5'. The criticism of Beauvoir was usually sarcastic

and heavy at first, and emanated from French men and women,52

In the United States Beauvoir was suspected of having Marxist

tendencies, and since The Second Sex came to America in the

McCarthy Era, this presented an obstacle to its acceptance.

Dorothy Smith read Simone de Beauvoirrs The Second Sex

very shortly after it was translated into English and issued

5L Dijkstra, Sandra. 1980. I1Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omis~ion.~ Feminist Studies , 6, 2 , 290-303, Po 290,

'' Moil Toril. 1990. F e m i n i s t Theory and Simone de Beauvoir, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil BlackwelL P, 2 6 ,

in America in 1953 , 53 Its impact in the 1950s seems to have

been negligible, and even feminist writers were not willing to

admit to its having any influence on them- Even Eleanor

Flexnor, who wrote Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights

M o v e m e n t in the U h i t e d States in 1959, appears not to have

been moved by it.54 Betty Friedan barely mentioned Simone de

Beauvoir in The Feminine Mystique (1963) . a book which is described as a ' translation' of The Second Sex, and w h e n she

did so, it was on the most objectified and cursory terms:

When a French woman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously Irdidnr t know what life was all about," and besides, she was talking about French women. The *rwoman problem*' in America no longer existed. 55

Nevertheless Beauvoirrs book was an immediate financial

success, becoming a best-selling book in France, in that

22,000 copies were sold the first week? For Dorothy Smith,

its revolutionary message remained buried for almost two

decades, which appears to have been a similar experience for

most North American feminists. The liability for this slow

acceptance of Beauvoir's work in American feminism is

53 Interview with Dorothy E. Smith by the author, at an informal lunch, August 21, 1997.

'' Dijkstra, 1980, op. cit., p. 292.

55 Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, P. 19-

56 Parshley, H. M., tr. 1989. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Vintage. P- vii.

attributed to the reluctance with which Betty Friedan

acknowledged her intellectual debt to Simone de Beauvoir,

something that she did not admit to until 1975." Dorothy

Smith argued that the lack of acceptance surrounding

Beauvoir's work was because 'it did not make central the

critique of ideologies at work in our daily

The Second Sex is an eccentric mixture of materialism and

existentialism, abstract, and as such not accessible to the

non-intellectual. As Dorothy Smith became a Marxist feminist

in the early 1970s women's movement in Vancouver, Beauvoir's

chapter in The Second Sex (1949) called '[The Point of View of

Historical Materialismmr was a critical point of reference.

Simone de Beauvoir began, twenty years before. the critique of

Frederick Engelsr The Origin of the Family, Private Property

and the State (1884) which absorbed Marxist feminists for at

least the first ten years of the Second Wave of the women's

movement. She was the first to designate women's domestic

labour as productive, in that her 'pottery, weaving,

gardeningr made her a contributor to economic life.59 If she

was naive in any way about the

equality, it was her statement

realisation of women's

that contemporary women would

Dijkstra, 1980, op. cit., p. 293.

Smith, 1987a, op. cit., p . 50. This critique is also applied to Jessie Bernard's Academic Women (1964) .

59 Beauvoir, Simone de. 119491 1953, 1980, 1989. The Second Sex, Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New Y o r k : Vintage. P. 54-

gain equality with men through the advancement of

technology.60 Beauvoir was further the first feminist writer

to engage with Kegel's analogy of the master and slave, which

she argued was suited to the situation of w o m d , an analysis

which is taken up many years later in the so-called feminist

standpoint epistemologies of Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock,

Hilary Rose and Jane Flax, As an immediate influence,

Beauvoirrs analysis of the subjection of women had no direct

use in Dorothy Smith's doctoral work. For Dorothy to engage

seriously with this work during her graduate years at Berkeley

would have meant almost certain intellectual self-destruction

and most likely would have provoked prompt censure from her

male professors and thesis committee,

True to the pattern of most American women academics in

the era of an 'obscured' women's movement from 1955 - 1965, the feminist sociologist, Jessie Bernard, did not refer to

Simone de Beauvoir and her work in Academic Women (1964) . This book was also one that Dorothy Smith read in graduate

school, 'finding it wonderfully enlightening about my working

life and world' ,62 Academic Women (1964) was a work that

Jessie Bernard did not characterize as a feminist one, and, in

fact, did not become an admitted feminist until what she

60 Ibid, p . 55.

Ibid, p. 64-

62 Smithr 1994, OP 0 tit ., p 48 .

296

refers to as her 'fourth revolutionf in the 1970s? She was,

however, extremely active in the civil rights movement in the

1950s, and helped to establish the Society for the Study of

Social Problems (SSSP) in 1951.~~ With other founding members

of SSSP, she was dismayed with the course of the American

Sociological Society (ASS), and 'its refusal to take a stand

on social issues, its elitism and cronyism, and its increasing

service to business and industry' .65

For Dorothy Smith, the work in Jessie Bernard's Academic

Women (1964) only became of use to her later in her career.

She made use of Bernard's concept called the 'stag effectr,

which was defined as the relative ease with which male

academics initiate and maintain social contacts that assist

them in their careers, networks which are unavailable to

women, and therefore excludes them from participation in a

male system of communication, Greater channels of

communication in the academe meant greater productivity.

Bernard had created this phrase on the basis of comments made

from women P M s in the course of a study done at Radcliffe:

The Radcliffe study compared Radcliffe PhDs in several institutions with women on

63 Deegan, Mary Jo. 1991. Women in Sociology: A B i o - Bibliographical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press. P. 75.

Ibid, p. 73.

Galliher, John F, and James M. Galliher. 1995. Marginali ty and Dissent in Twentieth-Century Sociology: The Case of Elizabeth Briant L e e and Alfred McLung L e e . Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. P. 100.

the faculty of one women's college which places great emphasis on publication. Then, within the faculty of this one college, it compared the productivity of men and women- The first comparison thus ?rteasuredm the influence of institutional environment and encouragement on productivity; the second comparison held this factor constant and lrmeasuredw the influence of sex. 66

The Radcliffe study, of course, corroborated the already

overwhelming evidence that male academics were more productive

than women, which Bernard argued was the direct result of the

'stag effectr. Professional associations that slighted women

members, invitations to men's clubs and stag dinners, the

discomfort with women's attendance at gatherings, all

presented a barrier to womenf professional ad~ancement,~' '

Dorothy Smith employed Bernard's concept of the 'stag effect'

to exemplify women's position within the university, in a

paper to explain the rage behind the massacre of fourteen

women at LfEcole Polytechnique in Montreal, 1989?

66 Bernard, Jessie S. 1964. A c a d d c Women. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. P, 149.

Ibid,

68 Smith, D.E. 1992b. Whistling Women: Reflections on Rage and Rationality." In: Carroll, William K. et al,, eds. Fragile T r u t h s : T w e n t y - f i v e Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada. Ottawa : Carleton University Press. P. 218-20. Even in her later work, Dorothy Smith's citations to these path-breaking works by Simone de Beauvair and Jessie S . Bernard are few. At the time of the publication of The Second Sex and Academic Women, 1953 and 1964, respectively, there was a want of serious attention given to these books by American women academics, who, of course, w e r e in an extreme minority. The few other feminist writers in sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, like Viola Klein and M i r r a Komarovsky, were

Patterns of American W b m a n h o o d , l955-196S. 69

All have worn the Black Costume - sweater, skirts, stockings and sandals - two almost exclusively, Maggie and another girl, an actress, are usually neat; the other four are usually unkempt, All have long hair, two waist-length, They often do not wear make-up; this gives them a slightly ingenue look, despite the slightly rawboned wality they a l l share. Their pads vary more, from the actress's neat three-room apartment to one poetess's barren cubbyhole.

The above quotation is a description of group of six

Bohemian females, part of sociological and psychological study

of the Beat Generation, young women who Rigney and Smith

divided into two categories : 1) the angry young women, and

2) the Beat Madonnas, All were young women who had had

violent andfor unhealthy upbringings, had experimented with

drugs and whose 'CPI and MMPI patterns portray them as

rebellious, unconventional and impulsive'," Beat Madonnas

shared the same cultural portrait, but were characterized as

well-adjusted and more financially successful than the 'angry

young women', as well as being more attractive, better-

also consigned to obscurity until the 1970s Women's Movement ignited a renewed interest in women's work and writing.

69 This subsection focuses on the origins of the women's movement as it originated in Civil Rights activism. As a consequence it will not refer to other social movements extant during this era, such as the activism around the Vietnam War, or the Free Speech Movement,

Rigney, Francis J. and L. Douglas Smith. 1961. The Real Bohemia: A Sociological and ~sychological Study of the "BeatsM. New York: Basic Books. P. 86,

dressed, and from upper middle-class families. Rigney and

Smith's evaluation of these two types of Beat Generation women

seems to be based more on class than on a psychological

profile.

Dorothy Smith came to California in the middle of the

Beat Generation, just a few years before Jack Kerouac

published On the Road and h he Dhanna Bums in 1958, and Allen

Ginsberg published Howl and Other Poems in 1959 with City

Lights Books in San Francisco. Black clothing, drugs, poetly,

were all a part of the paraphernalia of beat culture:

beats clothe themselves in black; live on diets near the level of starvation, and produce well-known voices and visions; avoid feeding the lusts of the flesh by washing, shaving and other vanities; reject the pursuit of filthy lucre (except that which may be gathered in by a principled re j ection) . Even beatnik sexuality has been conquered by ~coolnessn: it is calm, indifferent, principled, the antithesis of sensuality . ''

In 1955 when Dorothy Smith arrived, Goodwin J, Knight was

Governor of California. The same year, C a r y l Chessman, the

!'Red Light Bandit" was smuggling manuscripts out of San

Quentin on the subject of capital punishment- For the next

five years this controversy would affect the entire world on

the subject, and the government of California would initially

pass legislation forbidding prisoners to publish, and then

'' McWilliams, Wilson Carey. 1958. "The Beats". In: Hale, Dennis and Jonathan Eisen. 1968, The California Dream. New York: Macmillan. P. 293.

execute Chessman in 1960, when a bill against capital

punishment was defeated eight votes to seven-73 During the

ten years that Dorothy Smith lived in Berkeley, California,

she would have experienced a zeitgeist comprised of beat

poets, civil rights, McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-

American Activities, the Free Speech Movement, Black Friday,

the begiming of the student movement, and the Watts riots in

1965 in Los Angeles. She and her husband Bil l . would get away

from Berkeley and the pressures of their doctoral work by

travelling across the bay to San Francisco to the North Beach

area where the coffee houses on Grant Avenue held poetry

readings, 74

Smith's political activism increased at Berkeley,

attending 'demonstrations, teach-ins and lectures' with her

husband and son David:

I had picketed to protest the police handling of people demonstrating outside the meetings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco. I'd brought my son along pulling in a little red wagon as we walked. I was astonished when a car stopped and the driver leaned out to ask how I could expose my child to such violence. What violence? The violence there had been yesterday's attack on the demonstrators outside the committee room,75

73 Delmatier, Royce D., Clarence F. McIntosh and Earl G. Waters - 1970. The R u m b l e of C a l i f o d a Politics, 1848-1970. New York: John Wiley. P. 332, 345.

74 Smith, 1994, op. cit., p . 46.

Ibid,

This kind of protest, based on the politics of the New Left,

and the work against racism taken up in the C i v i l Rights

Movement were the political origins of the women's movement of

Dorothy Smithf s involvement in Vancouver from 1968 - 1977 .

These w e r e social movements where women's commitment was

fundamental, but obscured, Instead, women as they have been

historicized in this period, are often depicted as hopelessly

trapped in a cult of domesticity and suburban life, as they

are represented in Betty Friedanrs The Feminine Mystique

(1963)- To some extent, for white middle-class women, this

was certainly true, but to focus exclusively on an historical

impression of American womanhoodrs dissatisfaction with

domestic life obscured the Civil Rights activism of black

women and other forms of activism in which women were engaged

at the time.

The ideology of femininity that is presented in Betty

Friedan' s watershed study of American women, The Feminine

Mystique, was published in 1963, the same year that Dorothy

Smith handed in her doctoral dissertation. Betty Friedan had

studied psychology as a graduate student at the University of

California at Berkeley under Erik ~rikson. '' According to

Friedan's commentary, the career woman had been vilified by

the American public:

76 Moskowitz, Eva. 1996. "Its Good to Blow Your Top: Women's Magazines and a Discourse of Discontent, 1945-19652 Journal of Women's History, 8, 3, 66-98. P. 8 9 ,

In the spectacular Christmas 1956 issue of Life, devoted i n full t o the %ewm American woman, w e see, not as a womanfs magazine villain, but as documentary fact, the typical "career woman - tha t f a t a l error t h a t feminism propagatedn - seeking 'helpw from a psychiatrist, She is bright, well-educated, ambitious, attractive; she makes about the same money as her husband; but she is pictured here as llfrustratedn, so %asculinizedm by her career that her castrated, impotent. passive husband i s indifferent to her sexually- 77

Dorothy Smith was experiencing a' frightening dissipation of

independent identi ty consequent then for women on marriagef?

She was, as contained i n the above description, a 'career

woman - that f a t a l error that feminism had propagatedf , and

according to Friedan, a prime candidate fo r the psychiatrist 's

couch, where, ironically, along with marly other gifted

American women, Dorothy Smith ended up, a classic example of

' the problem that has no The predominant role for

women that w a s prescribed at the time by American women's

magazines and television was that of a wife and mother, and

women who pursued a career were viewed as deviant. Women's

magazines, which Betty Friedan so carefully analyzes,

contained constant images of women 'kissing the i r husbands

goodbye i n front of the picture window, depositing their

cit . , Smith, 1994, op. cit . , p. 46.

79 Dorothy Smith talks about her experience with psychiatrists i n her book The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (1990a) . See: p. 5 .

station wagons full of children at school, and smiling as they

ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor'-80

Dorothy Smith was expected to be a good mother, wife, and if

there was any time left, a graduate student, in that order of

priority. Of course, attempts by American women to live up to

this vacuous ideology had devastating consequences, and many

took refuge in 'the growing armies of marriage and child-

guidance counsellors, psychotherapists, and amtchair

psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as

housewives ' . " The dissatisfied housewife in America is not a complete

version of the history of women in this period, In reality,

Friedan's portrayal of American women counted principally for

white, middle-class, and educated women. More women, working-

class or in the black community, were active, often in radical

politics. Women called as witnesses before the Ohio Un-

American Activities Commission in the mid-1950s, for example,

were members of the Communist Party and engaged in

untraditional activities for women of the time, activism which

did not necessarily depend on their husband's approval. The

questions that they were asked when they witnessed before the

Commission were based on the assumption that these women

Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W - W . Norton. Quoted in: Weigand, Kate. 1992. IrThe Red Menace, the Feminine Mystique, and the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission: Gender and Anti-Communism in O h i o , 1951-54," Journal of Women's History, 3, 3, 70-94. P, 70.

Friedan, 1963, op. cit., p. 21.

adhered to "the feminine mystique" , when in fact, they did

not, Rose Mladjan was asked by the Commission if she baked

cakes, she said "yesw, but to the rest of the questions she

replied, "1 decline to answerw, Many of these women had been

active in radical politics and the Communist Party since the

1930s, and although did not live the "feminine mystiquem, used

it to their own advantage to redeem themselves before the

Commission, They were quick to present themselves as ordinary

women, mothers, whose husbands had served in World War IT, and

exhibited a concern for llwomen's issuesH, like a better public

school system, housing, and more hospitals,B2

The Civil Rights Movement which became a powerful force

in American Society in the 1940s and 1950s was sustained at

its most fundamental level as well as in leadership roles by

the work of black women, although at the time when the apex of

the movement was taking place, male leaders were the most

visible presence. Dorothy Smith had no direct involvement in

this kind of activism, in that it took place primarily in the

South, particularly in the Mississippi Delta, but as the

movement grew it eventually came to San Francisco and Los

Angeles- She would have been aware of the Watts Riots that

took place in Los Angeles in August, 1965. In Watts, prior to

the riots, black women were the political leaders and often

Weigand, Kate. 1992. "The Red Menace, the Feminine Mystique, and the Ohio Un-American Activities Commission: Gender and Anti-Communism in Ohio, 1951-54. Journal of Women's H i s t o r y , 3 , 3 , 70-94- P, 70-94,

carried more influence than church ministers. The success of

black women in California politics was rooted in the

ideological construct of them as the powerful 'black

matriarch', a stereotype that grew out of the negative image

of the 'black mammyr - In California, Vaino Hassan Spencer was

elected a municipal court judge, and in 1966, Yvonne

Braithwaite was elected to the State Assembly, examples of

black women who held powerful positions in California twenty

years before black men were accepted in appointments of the

same statusDa3 This kind of image of the black woman was

supported by the racist and sexist Moynihan Report which was

published in 1965, which advanced the theory that strong black

women who dominated black men were to blame for most of the

social problems of African-Americans, At the time of the

Watts Riots, an arrogant Moynihan announced that the

controversy which exploded on the publication of his Report

impeded the realization of his recommendations, and this was

likely the cause of the uprising.84

The Watts Riots began on August 11, 1965, when an officer

of the California Highway Patrol made an ordinary arrest in

South Central Los Angeles, apprehending Marquette Frye, aged

21, for drunk driving. A crowd gathered, and when the police

13' OrTooler James. 1973. Watts and Woodstock: Ident i ty and Culture i n the United States and South Africa- New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston- P. 84-87,

84 Horne, Gerald. 1995. Fire This Time: The W a t t s Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville, Virginia : University Press of Virginia. P- 230-231-

dragged away a young woman, they became enraged and began

heaving projectiles at the departing police cars - Six days of

rioting followed:

Thirty-four persons were killed and at least 1,032 were injured seriously enough to require treatment. Virtually all were black- In addition 3,952 were arrested, of whom 60 percent were later convicted, Almost 1,000 buildings were damaged, burned, looted, or destroyed; total property damage was estimated at around $40,000,000 ."

Many black women were arrested for burglary during the riots,

along with Chicano women, in particular those Chicanos who

were associated with the Civil Rights Movement. Chicano and

black women were supportive of the looting, as a protest

against the questionable credit practices of the shopkeepers,

and the hated tos Angeles Police Department. One woman was

arrested because she said, "My 11 year old hasn't had a school

book since he was 5 years oldI1 Black male Civil Rights

leaders reacted with conflicting positions regarding the

violence of the Watts Riots, saying that they abhorred the

upheaval on the one hand, but that the riots had helped to

bring the social problems facing black people in Watts into

public focus . 87

Civil Rights leaders in the 1950s disparaged San

Sears, David 0. and John B . McConahay . 1973 . The Pol i t i cs of Violence: T h e New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America. P. 4-5.

86 Home, op. c i t . , p. 207.

Ibid, p. 153.

Francisco's weak commitment to the movement, and due to a

critical housing shortage in the city, they focused their

protests on the high rate of substandard housing in the

Fillmore district (an area like New York's Harlem) and

organizing around the problem of the black vote. The San

Francisco Housing Authority had adopted a racist policy for

selection of its tenants in 1942 which became known as the

lrneighbourhood patternm, and work began to overturn this

policy, when Mattie Banks and her husband applied for tenancy

in a North Beach housing project in 1952- The NAACP hired a

number of lawyers to question the legality of the practice,

and the San Francisco Housing Authority tried to base their

legal argument on a character assassination of Mattie Banks

and her husband. The neighbourhood patternw was eventually

declared illegal on September 1, 1952, a partial victory in

that housing in San Francisco did not improve substantially

for black families as a result ,88 By the 1 9 6 0 ~ ~ however, the

mask of a liberal San Francisco in its policies toward the

black community began to crumble, and little political

progress was made between 1954 and 1965- This became a crisis

in a five day race riot in the city in 1966, when a policeman

killed a black teenager who allegedly stole a car. White-

owned businesses left the Fillmore district afterwards,

88 Broussardr Albert S, 1993. Black San Francisco: The Struggle for R a c i a l E q u a l i t y fn the West, 1900-1954. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas- P- 221-225,

creating a ghetto - a9

The issue of Civil Etights also became visible in San

Francisco outside of the black comrmmity, across the bay from

Berkeley, however, in the North Beach area on Grant Avenue,

the centre of beat culture, The North Beach Citizen's

Committee, lead by Pierre Delattre, and comprised of a number

of Quaker members, was a group formed in February, 1959, to

help Bohemians to become aware of their civil rights, and to

teach them how t o deal with the realities of harassment and

arrest It was common at the time for a white woman, who

was accompanied by a black man, for instance, to be stopped by

the police on Grant Avenue and interrogated with questions

like 'Hey, nigger-lover, let's see your license...What are you

doing with this nigger?, The police would ordinarily threaten

a woman with a black man with arrest for vagrancy, an type of

charge that was usually kept for prostitutes. Jerry

Kamstra, tired of police persecution and characterization of

B o h e m i a n s as drug fiends, bums and Communists, spoke out on

the issue of civil rights in the North Beach area at a protest

rally on police harassment at Washington Square on January 3 0 ,

1960 . 92

This commanding movement became the spark for a womeno s

89 Ibid, p. 242.

R i g n e y and Smith, op. cit,, p . 165.

91 fbid, 1961, p. 164,

92 Ibid.

movement in the late 1960s and early 70s- The most celebrated

incident, and one that is unforgettable in the Civil Rights

Movement 5s the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her

seat on the bus, sparking the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott

in 1955-56,93 Although the quiet spoken activist, Rosa Parks,

was the stimulus for the events that followed organized by

Martin Luther King, her protest was enabled by the work of the

hundreds of black women who worked in Civil Rights before her,

Although men were the forerunners of the movement, women

became the grassroots organizers- There have been many

explanations for this, but one that was apparent, was the idea

that women were more likely than men to attend church and get

involved in religious activity, and many of the women who

organized for Civil Rights came out of organized religion.

The fact that women were more involved in civil rights was

just an extension of the fact that women were more committed,

generally speaking, to activism in their comm~nities,~~

By the early 1960s, women were beginning to become active

on their own behalf, particularly in the area of welfare

rights, which became a national issue in the middle of the

decade- Welfare reform was taken up by a number of

organizations, including students, civil rights workers,

93 Crawford, Vicki L-, Jacqueline Anne Rouse and Barbara Woods, eds, 1990, Women in the C i v i l Rights Movement: T r a i l b l a z e r s and T o r c h b e a r e r s , 1941 - 1965. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, P, 71-84,

94 Ibid, p, 8-9,

church people and persons interested in anti-poverty- At the

neighbourhood level, groups of welfare m o t h e r s organized a

number of protest groups in the larger cities of Minnesota,

In particular, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children

League (AFDC) , formed with the objective of changing the

public's conception of the welfare client. It was established

by a circle of welfare mothers who became active in

legislative politics and lobbied the state for reform to the

welfare laws, The leaders set an example in that they tried

to become upwardly mobile, going back to school, becorning

active in Parent-teacher and voluntary associations, using the

skill they acquired there to get jobs. Their argument to the

state legislature was that welfare women knew more about the

laws than the legislators and could provide better advice, and

they used the strategy of playing by the 'establishment's

rulesr to attain their political goals.95

The rebelliousness of Beat Madonnas in the 1950s, the

example of black women in the Civil Rights Movement, the

resistance of middle-class white women against the

oppressiveness of domestic labour, the activism of working-

class women in the mid-west in Ohio during the hearings of the

Un-American Activities Commission, and the work towards

welfare rights in the early 1960s combined in a gradual growth

over the space of a decade to m a k e the ingredients for a more

95 Hertz, Susan H. 1977. "The Politics of the Welfare Mother's Movement: A Case Study.ll Signs, 2, 3, 600-11. P.603.

powerful, widespread, and diversified women's movement in the

United States which eventually spread to Canada, Here,

Dorothy Smith adopted a set of feminist ideals in the

Vancouver Womenf s Movement which also included Marxism, and

put them to work in the remaking of sociology partly through

the creation of the Social Organization of Knowledge- The

Second Wave of Feminism did not solidify over the space of a

few months in the late 196Os, but was the outgrowth of a

number of forms of womenr s activism, a productive force, that

had been at work since the early to mid-1950s.

Conclusion

The development of her understanding of 'social

organization' and study of organizational theory that Dorothy

Smith discovered as a graduate student at the University of

California at Berkeley comprised some of the coherent origins

in the early history of the Social Organization of Knowledge.

Many of these ideas came from the most conventional sociology,

the theories of the sociological fathers, M a n , Durkheim and

Weber, in that the Berkeley sociology department was largely

made up of an orthodox and conservative faculty. Michels'

'iron law of oligarchy' was presented as being the motif which

was the basis of most organizational theory in the late 1950s

and early 60s, and one that was only beginning to be

challenged, even though it had been around since 1915. Peter

Blau and Richard Scott provfded a contemporary theoretical

source for Smith's doctoral dissertation-

It was noted that feminist scholarship, in the examples

of Jessie Bernard, Simone de Beauvoir and ultimately, Betty

Friedan, although available and widely known, were not

seriously addressed by either men or women in the sociological

community, The influence of these women, particularly Simone

de Beauvoir, remained dormant as an *hence for two decades

to come, Civil rights activism and an ideology of despair on

the part of women toward domestic labour were argued to be the

productive force in a future w o m e n ' s movement which eventually

swept North America and E u r o p e . Both professionally and

personally, this interval was a kind of purgatory for Smith,

as she could see what she wanted to accomplish for sociology

in the years to come, but was powerless, as a graduate

student, to do anything about it, For Dorothy Smith, it was a

time of catastrophe in her personal life, and an ordeal in her

scholarly one, a raw beginning for a productive career,

RED MOON RISIN*:THE BARLY VANCOUVER WOMENrS MOVEMENT WORK OF DOROTHY SMITE, 1968 - 1977.

Introduction

For Dorothy E - Smith, the Vancouver Women's Movement as

she experienced it from 1968 - 1977 was the one of the most

intoxicating episodes of her life, not only in regard to her

scholarly development in sociology and the establishment of

the Social Organization of Knowledge, but to her growth as a

woman and a feminist. The belief system comprised of feminism

and Marxism that was adopted by Smith as a mature woman, was a

reversal of the form of her mother's, who at the same age, had

beg= to adopt middle-class values and to mellow from radical

suffrage activism of her youth. At the age of 42, Smith came

to Vancouver in the fall term of 1968 with her two sons, David

and Steven, to join the Department of Anthropology and

Sociology as an Associate Professor at UBC. She confronted an

academic and secular community replete with serious social

'Red Moon Risingu was the name of a calendar published by Press Gang Publishers, who produced Dorothy Smith's first book, Women Look at Psychiatry (1975) which she edited along with Sara J. David- The calendar included a year long retrospective look at the Women's Movement in Vancouver and the rest of Canada, The illustration on the front of the first calendar depicts an Asian woman holding a machine gun and wearing a red arm band, clearly an allusion to the Vietnamese War. The credit for the illustration reads: "an adaptation by Pat Devitt from a Chinese book on Vietnamese liberation struggles." Price of the calendar was $1.50 and it was published from 1969 - 1975. In: WMAC. Press G a n g - File 144. The choice of the title "Red Moon Risingw is meant to convey the amalgam of a New Left political agenda, which included a protest against the Vietnamese War, and the introduction of womenr s concerns into that political environment, w h i c h marked the beginning of the Women's Liberation Movement in Vancouver.

problems and radical factions were extant within the student

and teacher populations of even the smallest high schools and

community colleges. A rivalry then existed between the

'leftistr Simon Fraser University (SmT) and the more

conservative University of British Columbia (UBC) , Militant

activism on the part of both student bodies made headlines in

the Vancouver sun2 from September - December, 1968. In

Vancouver, a movement of student unrest based on New Left

rhetoric was at its zenith, and the power of the organized

women's movement was just beginning to seethe. It was a

critical time when women's work in the home became a

productive force in the inchoate stage of feminist theorizing,

in the example of the first articles by Margaret Benston and

Peggy Morton theorizing domestic labour,3

This chapter examines the social setting of the Vancouver

Women's Movement as a force that both directly and indirectly

affected the production of Smith's sociological projects at

the time, including the formation of the SOK. It begins by

looking at the historical makeup of the Vancouver academic and

secular communities in the fall and winter terms of 1968/69,

The Vacouver Sun has been used from a critical standpoint in this chapter to historicize the student protest movement, and to give examples of obvious and prevalent sexist attitudes toward women, which were then a part of its publishing practice. The Sun has been used sparingly to historicize two initial acts of protest in the women's movement, which from then on in this chapter has been reproduced almost completely from materials found in the Women's Movement Archive Collection (WMAC),

See: Benston, Margaret. 1969. "The Political Economy of Womenr s Liberation. " Monthly Review, 21, 4, 13-27; and Morton, Peggy. 1970. "A Women's Work is Never Done." Leviathan, 2, 1, 32-7-

and the germinating women's movement of the same time frame.

Next, 1 provide an analysis of Dorothy Smith's collected works

of the period, making linkages from the womenr s movement to

the historical development of the SOK. Finally, I produce 1)

a study of the economic features of the Vancouver Women's

Movement; 2 ) two ' herstories' - a) the womenf s occupation of

the offices of The Georgia Straight; b) the Indo-Chinese

Conference in April, 1971; and 3 ) an analysis of the women's

organizations, both grass roots and university-based, that

were present in Vancouver from 1968 - 1977, which played an

clear role in the creation of Smith's sociological projects.

Setting the Scene: Student Act iv igm, The Georgia Straight and the Status of Women

The women's movement often referred to as the 'Second

Wave of Feminismr that became a world-wide phenomenon in the

late 1960s grew out of the New Left and Civil Rights movements

in the United States. In Vancouver, however, the women's

movement was rooted in, and at the same time a rebellion

against, the New Left political doctrine espoused by members

of the student protest movement. In the fall of 1968,

Vancouver student leaders were Martin Loney, the student

president of SmT and Dave Zirnhelt, the student president of

the UBC. The ideological tone of many student leaders in the

late 60s was profoundly Marxist, and Zirnhelt and Loney were

followers of this kind of thinking. Dr. Kenneth Hare was the

President of UBC, and the acting President of SFU was Kenneth

Strand. Women were more often than not minor players in the

316

student movement, however, Carey Linde was the Alma Mater

Society Vice-president for UBC and a member of the Students

for a Democratf c Society (SDS) at the time,& UBC was

experiencing serious problems of overcrowding, as the

university's resources were adequate for 14,000 students but

the enrolment had skyrocketed to 20,000.~

Dr. Kenneth Hare of UBC, doubtlessly attempting to stave

off the radical student activism which was simultaneously

occurring in the United States and Eiiope, publicly extended

an invitation to negotiations with Dave Zirnhelt, suggesting

that students should have a greater say in university

affair^.^ In defiance of Hare's mollifying gestures and

despite its consenrative reputation, the first acts of

resistance in the Vancouver academic community came from the

UBC student body. It began innocently enough, with two

illegal beer-drinking events called a 'pub-insr held on

September 23 and 26, 1968, protests against the existent

liquor laws preventing the institution of a pub on the

campus.

On October 24, the dissent escalated sharply when about

1,000 students invaded the UBC Faculty Club, a privately owned

facility which was managed autonomously from the university,

The invasion was instigated by the Yippie leader of the Youth

* Vancouver Sun, October 9, 1968, p . 10,

Ibid, October 23, 1968, p. 2.

Ibid, September 6, 1968, p. 23 ; September 7, 1968, p. 10 *

ibid, October 9, 1968, p , 10.

International Party, Jerry Rubin, who had been invited to

speak to 2,000 students at a noon-hour rally outside the

Student Union Building at TJBC, Armed with a 50 pound pig, a

symbol of Yippie protest, they took over the club and about

100 students staged an all-night sit-in, demanding that the

obscenity charges levelled against The Georgia Straight be

dropped. The protest ended peacefully 22 hours later, after

several professors appealed to the students who remained to

leave the building- Police presence at the event was minimal,

and the RCMP was only called in to protect Singapore's Prime

Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who was a guest at the Faculty Club

residence.' Estimated damage involving the theft of

silverware, cigarettes, and liquor was $6,122, which Dave

Zirnhelt later refused to pay?

The incidents at UBC were in the nature of spirited

tomfoolery in comparison with the bitter confrontations

between the administration and students which occurred a short

time later at Simon Fraser University. On November 14, 1968,

a meeting between the SFU administration and students,

organized by the Students for a Democratic University (SDU) ,

ended in chaos when acting President Kenneth Strand

impatiently rejected all of the student demands -lo A week

afterwards, on November 21, 100 students raided the SFU

administrative building and took over four out of five

- - -

October 25, 1968, p - 1-2.

Ibid, October 26, p. 31; February 1, 1969, p. 20.

Ibid, November 15, 1968, p . 28.

floors." Following a three-day occupation, Strand called i n

100 unarmed RCMP off icers who arrested the 114 demonstrators,

According t o a n examination of t he 1 0 9 names and addresses of

those apprehended tha t appeared in the Vancouver Sun. seventy-

three w e r e men and th i r ty - s ix w e r e women.'2 Eventually the

charges against those arres ted w e r e reduced t o a maximum $600

fine o r six months imprisonment? Only one of the students

arrested got a three month prison term and 56 received f ines

of $250.'~ The in tensi ty and seriousness of the conf l ic t a t

SE'U during the 1968/69 school term l e f t fears i n the Vancouver

community and the rest of Canada for the universityr s future.

The underground newspaper, The Georgia Straight , was

another high prof i le example of the New Left beginnings of

feminist activism in the larger Vancouver community. One of

the most celebrated of a number of underground newspapers i n

Canada a t the time, and more an avant-garde, cu l tura l venue

than a po l i t i ca l one, The Georgia Straight's struggles are now

legendary. The f i r s t issue was put together i n a Pr ior Street

Warehouse studio, and released at the beginning of May, 1967,

the price being set a t t en cents." O n September 3, 1968, the

Ibid, November 21, 1968, p. I.

l2 Ibid, November 23, 1968, p. 2; November 25, 1968, p. 10. Names were examined by gender, assuming them t o be either masculine o r feminine, O f the 113 arrested, 109 names were given t o the police and l i s t e d i n the Vancouver Sun.

* Ibid, February 5-6, 1969, front page.

l4 Ibid, March 19 , 1969, p- 1-2.

l5 PaLils. Naomi and Charles Campbell. 1997. The Georgia Straight: What the H e l l Happened? Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. P- 3.

Vancouver City Council passed a by-law prohibiting the sale of

anything on the city streets, a move to impede the sale of the

paper which was rescinded the following week."

Copies of The Georgia Straight w e r e seized on September

18, 1968, when polf ce discovered that the paperr s cartoonist,

Peter Almasy (aka Zipp, creator of the comic strip 'Acidman')

had published an edition with nude drawings of characters

identifiable as Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Twiggy,

Mama Cass, Bob Dylan, Charles de Gaulle. President Lyndon

Johnson and Jesus Christ engaged in a ' love-inr . l7 Peter

Almasy and Dan MacLeod were arrested and charged with

publishing and distributing obscene literature.'' The effort

to ban the sale of the 'hippier paper was condemned by the

B.C. Civil Liberties Association, but their bid to support the

continued publication of The Georgia Straight failed.

Distribution of the paper was banned when the New Westminster

council unanimously voted to revoke their business license,19

Then, the Vancouver City Council rejected the banning of the

paper pending the outcome of a triaL20 It took months to

come to a conclusion, but finally, in September of 1969. Judge

l6 Vancouver Sun, September 4, 1968, p . 13; September 11, 1968, p . 71.

17 Ibid, September 19. 1968, p. 40.

la Ibid, September 21, 1968, p. 3 .

l9 Ibid, September 23, 1968, p. 27; September 1968, p. 29.

'O Ibid, September 25, 1968, front page.

320

Isman dismissed all charges ,21

As the full force of the student campaign and a sweeping

movement involving an urban hippie life-style were developing

in Vancouver, womenrs activism was only beginning to emerge,

The Royal Cormnission on the Status of Women had been formed on

February 16, 1967 - In April of 1968, a few months before

Dorothy Smith arrived to teach at UBC, the seven Commissioners

initiated a succession of public hearings in 14 cities of all

Canadian provinces and territ~ries.'~ The earliest archival

evidence of political activity on the part of women for their

own status in Vancouver came from a document created by the

Vancouver Women's Caucus, which cited an occupation of the

Simon Fraser University Board Room in June, 1968, by a group

of left-wing women students called the Feminine Action League.

In the fall semester of 1968, they reorganised the group to

f o m the Vancouver Womenf s Caucus and began to hold regular

meetings on the SFU campus- These were interrupted when the

SFW administration building was occupied by students in late

November and women's meetings took a subordinate position to

the intensity of the student protest.

When the meetings w e r e restored, they were held in

women's houses in the Vancouver

Women's Caucus rented their own

Labour Temple on West Broadway.

community, and eventually

meeting place downtown in the

They viewed their move off-

21 P a d s , Naomi and Charles Straight,.,. p. 25,

Campbell- 1997. The Georgia

22 Report of the Roya l Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, 1970. Ottawa: Information Canada. P. ix,

carrrpus to be important and one that enhanced their political

accomplishment :

There are several reasons why our off- campus move was successful : I) Women are suffering similar oppression; 2) the weakness of the student left in Vancouver so that there was no competition from campus activity; 3) the presence of several women who were out of the old left tradition, politically experienced and had women's liberation as a priority; 4) the general labour consciousness of Vancouver; 5) the fact that the women in the group had always been action oriented , 23

This relocation set a precedent for the future character of

the Vancouver Women's Movement, in that the ties between the

intellectual community and a grass roots movement springing up

in the downtown core, as well as the smaller municipalities

throughout the province, became firmly linked. Feminist

activism in Vancouver was, for the most part, produced by

women in the greater Vancouver community and was not

restricted solely to female members of the academe.

Furthermore, from the beginning of the women's movement, women

professionals in the academic sphere formed close alliances

with grass roots organizations in Vancouver and smaller

communities throughout British Columbia. One of the earliest

womenr s groups, for example, established in 1968, was

Coquitlam' s tlWomen in Teachingw, founded through a

consciousness-raising group comprised of female members of the

23 WMAC. Vancouver Women's Caucus. File 161. 0080, llWomenrs Caucus: A History and Analy~is.~~ P, 2-3.

British Columbia Teacher' s ~ederation. 24

It was not long before the initial growth of feminist

consciousness in Vancouver was realised in overt acts of

protest on the part of groups of women- At the beginning of

September, 1968, thirteen exasperated mothers joined hands and

blocked traffic at Marine Drive and the Twenty-first

intersection in Westminster so that their children could

safely cross in order to get to school, When the children had

negotiated the busy street, they continued to block traffic,

ignoring the warnings of a policeman in order to protest what

they argued was a dangerous situation as there were no

sidewalks and no street patrol. They kept up the

demonstration for several days until the police agreed to hire

a civilian guard to assist the children in crossing the

street." In another instance, Tania Riopel and Elizabeth

Boppart, members of the Roman Catholic Church in B.C. sparked

a protest when their advertisement petitioning against the

Popef s encyclical on birth control was refused for publication

in the official Roman Catholic newspaper. Catholic women next

published a copy of the petition in the Vancouver Sun and the

Province, urging Canadian bishops to recognize that the Pope's

stand against artificial means of birth control was causing 'a

crisis of consciencer in the B.C. Catholic community. The

collected signatures were sent to the Canadian Catholic

24 WMAC . Vancouver Status of Women. File 158. "Guide to the B.C. Women's Movement."

25 Vancouver Sun, September 3, 1968, p. 3; September 9, 1968, p. II.

Conference of Bishops held in September, 1968, 26

At first few women engaged in protest on behalf of

women's status, and public opinion concerning women and the

women's movement were often overtly hostile, When women did

get attention, it was usually connected to a language of

sexual objectification- Headlines in the Vancouver Sun, for

example, at the beginning of September, 1968, announced 'Hey,

Look What8 o at W C - - A Sexy Anthropology Proff , ref erring to

the ratings that Madeline Bronsden had received in UBCfs

'anti-calendarr, a student publication which rated the

universityr s academic staff . 27 Women who were a part of

hippie counter-culture were often publicly demeaned,

manifested when the Sun carried an article about transforming

a 'hippie girl' into a 'traffic-stopping beautyr:

First scene of the transformation performance took place in the beauty salon of a department store. Lyndafs blonde hair came out from under the tea- cosy beret and was set into a with-it style of fluffy curls,..Swiftly w e brought out underwear, nylons, black patent pumps, white gloves and pearl earrings. Bill for the complete outfit - including hairdo and false eyelashes - was about $70 . 28

Widespread attitudes of women's inferiority provided a fertile

ground for women's activism in Vancouver. At Christmas, 1968,

when five destitute women attended the annual Salvation Army

Dunsmuir House dinner in Vancouver, the public relations

26 Ibid, September 1 7 , 1968, p . 2; September 18, 1968, p.

27 Ibid, September 10, 1968, front page.

Ibid, October 24, 1968, p . 35.

324

officer remarked that they had always thought of it as 'a poor

man's dinnerr and never thought of inviting women before,29

The British Columbia geneticist Dr- James Miller, speaking at

a lecture series at UBC in March of 1969, remarked to his

audience, 'Have you ever watched a bunch of girls trying to

throw a ball? Its pathetic- r 3 0 In the same lecture series,

Dr. Hanna Kassis argued that 'North American women are

regarded more basely and with more disdain than the women of

almost any other society todayf Helen OrShaughnessy, voted

vice-president of the Vancouver United Fisherman and Allied

Workersr Union in February of 1969, noted that as a woman, she

earned $2 -34 as a fish filleter, but 'the company can hire a

man off the street and pay him $2.37 an hour to start at a job

that has taken her years to

In the fall of 1968 when Dorothy S m i t h had just arrived,

formal organizations, such as the Royal Commission on the

Status of Women assigned to deal with the 'woman' problem,

were seen to be highly ineffective. Many prominent Canadian

women did not support it, like the former Mayor of Ottawa,

Charlotte Whitton, who said she 'wouldn't appear before it if

you pointed the noon-day gun at mer, Grace MacInnis, the NDP

member for Vancouver-Kingsway supported the Commission, but

did not send in a brief. Ottawa's Senator Josie Quart said

29 Ibid, December 20, 1968, p. 38.

Ibid, March 7, 1969, p. 26.

Ibid, February 7, 1969, p. 22 - 32 Ibidf February 8, 1969, p. 34.

325

'she had her doubts whether Canadian women rea l ly suffer f r o m

much discrimination' and Judy LaMarsh had l i t t le hope t ha t the

Commission would accomplish anything . 33 Womenr s poverty,

especially, w a s one area w h i c h was seen to have been neglected

by the Royal Commission, i n tha t 300 ,000 Canadian families i n

1968 w e r e headed by women whose choices consisted of e i t h e r

inadequate Social Assistance payments o r a low-paying j ob - 34

Women i n Vancouver, who w e r e fa r removed from O t t a w a both

geographically and pol i t i ca l ly doubtlessly f e l t tha t t h e i r

state of a f f a i r s was not l i ke ly t o be helped i n any concrete

w a y by the Royal Commission.

During Dorothy's first year i n Vancouver a Br i t i sh

Columbia Human Rights B i l l with a Charter f o r women, older

workers and minority groups was introduced into the parliament

and given a f i r s t reading- In February, 1969, women w e r e

given equal r ights in employment, a s w e l l as equal pay, for

the f i r s t time. The wording of the Charter was ambiguous,

however, s ince the bill 'still allow[edl employers t o refuse

t o hire women f o r cer ta in jobs f o r which they are not suited,

so long as they do not refuse t o hire them on the basis of

t h e i r sexf .3s

Although feminist issues w e r e starting t o receive

a t tent ion from women, t he academic community and the larger

Vancouver population, the women's movement was frequently

33 Ibid, October 2 , 1968, p. 57.

34 Ibid, November 7, 1968. p. 38.

35 Ibid, February 28, 1969. front page.

326

obstructed by the framework in which it was represented in the

mass media at the time, namely as a 'bra-burning movementr, an

example of the sexually-oriented, objectifying jargon that was

used to describe women as a sex. A flagrant example of this

disdain was published in the Vancouver Sun in August, 1969:

Local G i r l s Not A b r e a s t of Trend Local lingerie retailers and manuf acturerr s representatives maintain that most Vancouver women are hooked on bras and are not joining the ban-the-bra movement- In fact, they say, sales are increasing here- The trend is more apparent among university students and other young people who follow a philosophy of womenr s liberation. l6

There was

organized

no lack of work to be done by members of the

women's movement to effect a change in negative,

hostile and prejudicial attitudes towards women. Regard given

to women's concerns was often trivialized, not only by men,

but by women themselves- This circumstance was further

exacerbated by the fact that women who did espouse a feminist

and revolutionary consciousness toward the status of their own

sex had no language with which to describe it, further

intensifying their condition of powerlessness.

T h e SOK and the Vancouver Women's Movement: Feminist Principles in the

Collected Works of Dorothy E, Smith, 1968-77.

Dorothy Smith's appointment at UBC was a time of

intellectual change, and a period when her thinking took on a

36 Quoted in: Kloppenborg, Anne et al., eds. 1977. 1985. F i r s t Century: A C i t y Album, 1860-1985. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, P. 161.

radical character. She began writing sociological theory

thinking of herself as an anti-theorist. A n incident at an

annual meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology

Association, where Smith observed students being 'chopped to

bitsr prompted her to write theory to protect her students ,37

She described UBC at the time as repressive, where women

faculty members were often still sessional lecturers well into

their sixties. Her participation in the student movement was

limited, due to her status as a faculty member, but she was

supportive of it.'* Many of her i n m t i o n s in sociology at

this time came about as a consequence of her involvement in

the women's movement, and her writing became devoted to an

analysis of women's perspective with an aim to the advancement

of women's status both in sociology and in the larger society.

Other feminist writers at the time, such as Margaret Benston

and Peggy Morton, were beginning to theorize women's

experience of domestic labour in the but Smith

avoided this debate, which was engaged in primarily by

feminist writers in Toronto.

The site of her conversion to feminism can be located in

37 From my class notes in Dorothy E. Smithr s course in Advanced Sociological Theory, September 13, 1995.

38 Preliminary interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, Pam Wakewichrs office, Lakehead University, and the Thunder Bay Airport, October 18 , 1994.

39 My MA thesis, 'The Creation of Dorothy Smithr s Standpoint Epistemology: A Feminist Appropriation of Male Theoristsn, contains an analysis of the domestic labour debate in feminist theory, which engaged the attention of feminist writers in North America and Europe from 1969 to 1985. S e e p. 76-87,

the life-changing experience of teaching the first Women's

Studies course at UBC- The initial Women's Studies class came

out of an Alma Mater Society Lecture Serfes organized by the

students at UBC which Smith did not attend, Anne Petrie, a

well known commentator on CBC News World, was a major

influence in the establishment of Women's Studies as a formal

part of the university, rather than it being just a lecture

series put on by the Alma Mater Society, Smith described it

as 'completely transforming to discover this practice of

corning from your own experiencef .'O

The Women's Studies Program began as a series of non-

credit lectures in the fall term of 1971 sponsored by Women's

Liberation and the Alma Mater Society at UBC, called "The

Canadian Woman: Our StoryBr, and the founding teachers were

Dr. Dorothy Smith and Dr. Helga Jacobson from Anthropology and

Sociology, Meredith Kimball from the Psychology Department and

Professor Annette KoLodny from the Department of English

Literature. The agenda for the fall term, 1971, included

lectures on IgIntroducing the Canadian Womangs and "Portraits of

Women in Canadian Literature% In 1972, it continued as a

non-credit ten week course from October 3 to December 5,

available f o r men and women either on or off-campus. Cost of

attending the class included a $2 registration fee and there

was a charge of -25 cents per lecture, Free baby-sitting was

available and the

Building at UBC.

lectures were held at the Student Union

Formal lectures, which became popular and

Ibid.

were often attended by hundreds of people, broke up afterwards

into smaller seminars held in other university locations, In

the fall series of 1972, Shelagh Day spoke on "Angerw, Lisa

Hobbs lectured on mSocialism, Communism and FeminismK and

Meredith =&all addressed the class on Itsex Role

Socializationn. Seminars were organized around topics of

INLiberated Relationshipsw, lrMarxism and Feminismw, "Lesbian

Lif e-StylesN1, "Study of the Status of Women in Non-Western

culture^^^ and ItFeminist TherapymqL

A formal accredited course in Women's Studies began in

the fall term of 1973 after the unqualified success of the

non-credit evening program that had been offered for the two

previous years. Here is a student's comment on the course

taken from a pamphlet called Voices of Women Students,

assembled by the Women's Research Collective at UBC in 1975:

Its an absolutely indispensable course. At first there was a lot of argument about whether it was too academic, and a lot of women had come with the idea that it should be more like a sort of sensitivity/gestalt sort of thing. But I really felt strongly after a month that we were going the right way - the whole idea of getting academic information, because too many women just don't have that information. They don' t know what they're arguing about, We have these feelings, without knowing why we have them, Its really sort of a weird thing; youf re kind of left floating around. And now I feel I can put my foot down, and slam my fist down on the table, and

41 WMAC. Vancouver Women's Caucus. The Pedestal, 4, 8, 1972, p . 6.

330

I know what I' m talking about, ̂12

The establishment of the Women's Studies Course was achieved

through struggle, in that the rational process took a total of

thirteen committees to get the course in place. and the

organizers were challenged at every step of the procedure.

The area of women was then considered to be 'intuitiver and

not anything that was thought of as a scholarly concern.43

The curriculum of Women's Studies at UBC was up for

grabs, in that t he re was almost no material available to use

in this original classroom environment. There was a badly

made film made by the National F i l m Board on the Suffragette

Movement- There was a library of three books which Smith used

for the class, one which was written by Catherine Parr Trail.

Another was written by Mirra Komarovsky:

It was about women as wives and it was about the nearest thing to a feminist view. I remember it as being rather a good book. I think she is rather a good sociologist or was,..she may not be alive now. I wrote and told her tha t it had been important to us and she wrote me a very nice letter in a very a sort of, you know, very wavering elderly script - 44

This first Women's Studies Course was the point of departure

for much of Dorothy Smith's feminist scholarship and she

42 In: Auger, Jeannette A. and Jill I?- Thomas. 1975-

Liberated Views : Observations on the Women 's Libera tion Movement. Vancouver: Sociology Department, UBC .

43 Dorothy E. Smith. Lecture. t tWomenrs Studies i n Canada." Lakehead University, October 17, 1994.

" Preliminary interview by the author w i t h Dorothy E. Smith, Thunder Bay Airport, October 18. 1994. Most likely the book by M i r r a Komarovsky that she is referring to is Blue- Collar Marriage (1962)-

thinks of it as the most exciting intellectual experience of

her life, It was in this environment, one she and the

students used to call 'the real universityr, that they

invented a curriculum and learned that scholarship could begin

from womenr s experience. In the early 70s, it was unusual for

women to have attained the rank of professor, so younger women

thought of the female teachers in Women's Studies as

'incredibly strong and good, and brightr ...' convincing models ' . . . 'solid as a rockr . . .really inspiringf .45 The UBC

women faculty members who originally taught Women's Studies

were also instrumental in setting up similar programs in

smaller B.C. communities. The four founding members travelled

widely in the province with this objective.'"

There are some areas of Smith's early scholarship in the

Social Organization of Knowledge which could be reasonably

interpreteda7 to contain linkages to the organized womenr s

movement. By 1970, Dorothy Smith's class in Interpretive

Procedures at UBC included a stronger attention to Marxrs work

and she had begun to use her famous paper, "'Kf is Mentally

4S WMAC. UBC. Women's Office, Item 152, Women's Research Collective. Voices of Women Students. P . 43 .

Helga Jacobson, for example, visited the Tamitik Status of Women in Kitimat, in November, 1977, to discuss women's research. WMAC. Tamitik Status of Women. File 150 . Minutes. Meeting of the Tamitik Status of Women Committee, November 3, 1977.

47 The following interpretations are my own, construed from my reading of S m i t h f s work and the history of the womenf s movement at the time. I have tried to establish connections that younger readers, not having lived through this period, might understand for themselves as being possible linkages between Smithrs work and the dpamics of the women's movement.

111 : An Anatomy of a Factual Accountg1, eventually published

in 1978, as a way of teaching social organization. Although

there was not yet a recognizable presence of feminism in her

teaching methods, she was beginning to be supportive of women

graduate students .48 The paper " 'Kr is Mentally 111" is based

on data that she obtained in an undergraduate course on

deviance that she had taught at Berkeley, The paper analyzes

what Smith referred to as an identifiable 'comunal freezing-

out processr, or dynamic of exclusion of 'Kr by a number of

her friends and acquaintances, based on a subtle, insidious

conceptualization of her activities over a period of time in

which they ultimately characterized her as mentally ill-49

The practice of spurning on the part of the group of

people described in "'K' is Mentally Illtr was similar to a

widespread phenomenon in the early women's movement known as

'trashingr. Dorothy Smith has never made, in her writing, the

connection of ' K ' s experience to the ritual in the women's

movement known as 'trashingr, as it was based on research done

at Berkeley, Nonetheless, it is an observation worth noting,

in that the paper itself was written and introduced to her

students at a time when 'trashingf as a dynamic of exclusion

was becoming a well known concept, This could well be an

unplanned concurrence. The practice itself was a powerful

breach of trust, as in the example of Ti-Grace Atkinson, who

Personal communication with James L. Heap, January 15, 1998.

Smith, D. E. 1990b. Texts, Facts and Femininity: Ekploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. P. 13 -16.

was asked to leave the group she had originally organized, a

radical feminist group known as The Feminists50:

Trashing could be personal or group oriented, each group finding a derogatory term to apply to the others, It was found in all sectors of the movement, but more so in the small group sector when being radical meant being right- The early years brought feminist ideas that were new and =citing; however, as each position developed, it was seen in polemic terms of either/or, The high riding spirit brought with it a level of insecurity as groups took unbending positions, defending their own particular strategy or ideology as the correct line* The end result was brands of feminism which bred contempt for those feminists who did not think or organize in the same way.=

Some feminist groups went so far as to exclude married women

or women who had children, or were derisive of 'straight'

women who chose to live a conventional lifestyle. They often

alienated the very women they were trying to reach.

In Vancouver, for example, the Vancouver Women's Caucus

voted 21 to 18 to expel the Young Socialists and the League

for Socialist Action from the Caucus at a General Meeting on

August 13, 1970. The reason given for the expulsion was the

Young Socialists' desire to build a mass movement on the issue

of abortion while the majority of members wanted to shift from

organisation around issues to an emphasis on constituencies of

women, such as working women and women in education. The

ostracized members accused the general membership of

Ryan, Barbara. 1992. Feminism and the Women's M o v e m e n t : D y n a m i c s of Change in Socia2 M o v e m e n t , Ideology and Activism, New York: Routledge. P. 44, SO, 62.

conducting a 'red-baiting campaignr and a style of democracy

that was ' formal, repressive and constricting' .52

Another more serious incident regarding trashing and

exclusion which occurred, one that became violent, transpired

on the last evening of the Indo-Chinese Conference which took

place in Vancouver at the beginning of April, 1971- Several

North American women met at UBC for a critical evaluation of

the conference- During the meeting, when a Canadian woman was

speaking, an assembly of six women who called themselves

Canadian Union of Rabid Senseless Extremists (C,U.R.S.E.),

made an entrance into the meeting replete with theatre props

and signs prepared to perform guerilla theatre. The ensuing

pandemonium had catastrophic effects on the entire audience:

Immediately a woman stood up grabbing away the sign. She demanded the C.U.R.S.E. women leave- Other women came forward pushing and shoving trying to get the guerilla theatre women out of the meeting. The C-U-R.S.E- women linked arms and refused to leave- At this point a couple of women began beating up on one woman- in the theatre group, the other woman in the skit shouted, 'Don't hit her, she's pregnant', but the American woman kept on slugging her shouting, 'She shouldn't be here thenr. The five C.U.R.S.E. women then formed a circle to protect their pregnant sister,.-by this time the theatre group was in tears, along with half the audience- Some women from the audience rushed up to stop the attackers and calmed them down enough so that the theatre group could do its skit-53

52 WMAC . Vancouver Womenr s Caucus. File 161. IrDef end Democracy in Women's Caucus." "Women's Caucus: A History and Analysis, "

" The Georgia Straight, Volume 5, No. 151, April 8 - 13, 1971. Special Issue. Women's Liberated Georgia Straight. P. 17.

Dorothy Smith, who attended this conference, took a position

against the practice of exclusion Fn the women's movement,

opposing it in terms of an attempt to encourage the

participation of working class women who w e r e under-

represented, saying that 'we can Ieam from our mistakes

without trashing and dividingr - 54

The early protests of the womenr s movement in Vancouver

were often a rejection of and protest against the sexual

objectification of women. The Vancouver Women's Caucus

picketed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at the Seaforth

Armories in Vancouver on his visit to Vancouver on August 8,

1969, with signs that read "Hustle Grain, Not WornenIt, a

reference to his reputation as a ladiesr man who exploited

women to enhance his political image? Another original form

of protest the women's movement was the disruption of beauty

contests, Margaret Benston's article in The Pedestal in 1970,

called "What is a Beauty Contest?", noted that the protest

candidate from Simon Fraser University Women's Caucus, Janiel

Jolley, had been barred from the "Miss Canadian Universityu1

contest at Waterloo-Lutheran. Her protest was to consist of

wearing no makeup and simple clothing to the contest events

and to discuss women's position in Canadian society.56 A

54 Smith, D.E. 1977. llThe Women's Research Centre, Vancouver. l1 unpublished paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, May, 1977, Fredericton, New Brunswick,

S5 Toms, Marcy. 1969. Why Picket Trudeau?' The Pedestal, I, 1. P. 1.

56 Benston, Margaret. 1970. "What is a Beauty Contest?" The Pedestal , 2, 1, p. 3.

similar demonstration took place when the Vancouver guerilla

theatre women disrupted the Miss Teenage B-C- contest on

February 21, 1971 .'' It might be construed that the practice of challenging

these processes of the sexual objectification of women in the

women's movement coincided with Dorothy Smith's early

confrontation with the privileging of objectified forms of

knowledge in sociology- Her quarrel with objectified forms of

knowledge, like Durkheirnrs 'positionless accountsr, might be

understood as a kind of translation process that took place,

from the women's movement, directly to her sociological work-

Smith says no, it did not quite work like that-58 Her first

attempt at disputing an objectifying system prevalent in

sociology came with her paper, "The Ideological Practice of

Sociologyn (1974b). which was a critique of the then prevalent

forms of Marxist thinking. Since her days in graduate school

at Berkeley, she had been uncomfortable with the kind of

sociology in which the activities of people were unrecoverable

in sociological accounts. In her essay, wWornenrs Perspective

as a Radical Critiqge of Sociologyi1 (1974a), she observed that

'the pursuit of objectivityf was paid work done by a

sociologist to create forms of knowledge 'to which they are

otherwise indifferentr :

He works with facts and information which have been worked up from actualities and

WMAC- The Vancouver Women's Centre. File 171. Women's Centre Calendar.

58 $-Mail communication by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, Thursday, April 16, 1998,

appear in the form of documents which are themselves the product of organizational processes, whether his own or administered by him, or of some other agency. He fits that information back into a framework of entities and organizational processes which he takes for granted as known , without asking how it is that he knows them or what are the social processes by which the phenomena which correspond to or provide the empirical events, acts, decisions, etc- of that world, may be recognized, 59

This questioning of objectified forms of knowledge which had

long been the predominant mode of knowledge creation in the

social sciences persuaded Smith to think about a different way

of doing sociofogy, one that pulled apart objectified facts

and information to reveal the organizational processes that

were a part of their construction. She described it as 'the

women's movement and the experience of relying on experience

enabled me to join together and build on a number of strands

in my thinking, among them sociologyrs peculiar language and

how it makes people disappearf

In Chapter Two, I initiated the argument that there was

an logical connection from the 'direct experiencer component

of the SOK to the large-scale incidence of consciousness-

raising groups and their practice of sharing individual

personal experience among women, making this the basis of

political organizing for change and often a starting place for

women's scholarship and activism. There is a great deal of

59 Smith, D. E. 1974a. "Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology. I f . Sociological Inquiry, 44, 1, 7-13. P. 9.

60 E-Mail communication by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, Thursday, April 16, 1998,

historical evidence of the far-reaching effects of the

practice of consciousness-raising and its importance to the

organized women's movement during this period, Dorothy Smith

in fact did belong to more than one consciousness-raising

group." She has stated that participation in the practice of

consciousness-raising was not necessary for learning from the

women's movement about the 'critical and political uses of

womenf s experience' . '* In fact some womenr s experiences with

C-R groups, including Dorothy Smith's, were not always very

satisfying. Rather, she entered into what she describes as a

'dialoguer with the women's movement and its procedures:

I think rather I/we entered into a kind of dialogue within the women's movement in which we were continually discovering our experience under a new aspect, the aspect that came into view when we explored ourselves under the category 'womenr and as we read/listened to other women speaking from their experience in a variety of contexts- The critique of objectifying women made by other feminists came out of this same process -63

This observation on Smith's part creates a tension with what I

have interpreted from a historically distanced position, as I

did not participate directly in the Vancouver Women's

Movement. Given the widespread nature of the practice of

consciousness-raising at the time was one of the movement's

'procedures', and what I argue was likely Smith's 'taken-for-

grantedr relation to it, my own site of time and distance can

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid,

provide an informed insight and one that is not inappropriate,

Further, the utterance, 'dialogue with the women's movementr.

although reflecting an overarching description of Smith's and

other women's relationship to the women's movement, obscures

the very real and individual concrete practices in which women

were likely to participate,

B. Thompson's early article in The Pedestal in 1972 on

small groups or encounter groups, as they were sometimes

called if men were in attendance, related the strengthening

effect that this kind of experience had on women's lives:

Just one last word about that group three years ago- The loved one said something to me in that second group that was pretty good, I thought. I had said I felt boxed in by my poverty and my job and my responsibilities to my children; that I lived in a box. Then I had sobbed like a child- The group moved in and held me, and I stopped and heaved and blew my nose- One heavy lady said, "Do you want to talk about what just happened?" and I said "N0L1l because I was embarrassed about being a baby in front of them- The group spoke of other things and sat around on the floor touching hands and toes and so on, And then Martha's loved one said, lVIrm still thinking about how it must be to live in a box, and I get a very bad feeling. I've been wondering what you could do about that airless little

Anonymity was frequently practised during consciousness-

raising sessions, so 'Marthaf and 'the loved-one' were likely

the only identification that

Participants were encouraged

nowr, and to speak honestly,

the author had for these members.

to keep focused on the 'here and

and Ms. Thompson related that

64 Thompson, B . 1972 - "Feelings. The Pedestal, 4, 7, P. 8-11.

although she sometimes felt chagrined the format provided by

the facilitator, she looked forward to the meetings?'

Consciousness-raising as a protocol and a starting place

for forms of feminist resistance was widely employed in the

Vancouver Womeng s Movement, The Guide to the B- C. Women's

Movement, produced by Western Canadian Womenf s News (WCWN) as

a special project for International Women's Year in 1975

contained a section on Consciousness-Raising, listing nine

publications that were then available on it, including kits,

guides and lists of rap groups available, The guide listed

the historical origins of many of the organisations as

beginning in C-R groups - Vancouver Rape Relief, for example,

advertised consciousness-raising on rape workshops with the

police, and the United Church Women advertised C-R on the

issue of feminist theology, Many small B X - communities had

individual Women's Centres which offered consciousness-raising

groups on a regular basis, places like Burns Lake, Kamloops,

Courtenay, or 100 Mile ~ o u s e . 66

Consciousness-raising as a practice was thought to

validate the authority of women's direct experience, and 1

argue that it was obvious that as a specific convention in the

women's movement, it affected several of Dorothy Smith's

scholarly works from 1968 to 1977. As a code of behaviour in

the Vancouver Women's Movement, it was a specific and concrete

Ibid,

66 WMAC, Vancouver Status of Women, File 158. Western Canadian Women's News. 1975. Guide to the B - C - Women's M o v e m e n t . P, 4 ,

material site which would have supported Dorothy Smith's

initial scholarly attention to women and their concerns.

Smith has described consciousness-raising as a process of

discovery:

Our discoveries of a language, political, cultural, artistic, philosophic, were grounded in the practice called 'consciousness raising'. It has had many uses, but its early uses were to work on how to speak from what we knew had no names, that had to be expressed in any kind of language we could lay hold of that would do the fob - Speaking from experience was a method of speaking; it was not a particular kind of knowledge, but a practice of telling wherein the particular speaker was authority of speaking of her everyday life and the world known to her as she was active in it ,67

Emphasis on the personal lives and experiences of individual

women generated the feeling that women were no longer alone

and isolated with their individual oppression, and that

together as a group they represented the strength necessary to

bring about social change.

The first work reflecting women's experience was Smith's

essay, "Women, the Family and Corporate C a p i t a l i s m " (1973)'

where the social organization of the family was presented as a

'bifurcationr into public and private spheres, and women took

up a social space involved with the private world of domestic

work, The SOK, as it began to be formulated by Dorothy Smith

in this paper had a deductive source in women's experience or

their labour in the home:

67 Smith, D .E. 1990b. Texts, Facts and F e m i n i n i t y : Exploring the Relations of R u H n q , London: Routledge. P . 2 .

The production o f the home as an actual material site of affairs is the direct responsibility of women. They are central to the home as an enterprise, Their work, their ability to manage, and their commitment to the daily drudgery of housework is fundamental - 6B

The earliest feminist component of Smith's SOK method can be

argued to have logically emanated from the domestic sphere, in

the ordinary, everyday concerns of women- Women's domestic

labour was a key ingredient of early feminist theorizing and a

productive force in the historical development of Smith's

Social Organization of Knowledge,

The Vancouver Women's Movement, and its activism

frequently founded in the practice of consciousness-raising,

provided the rudimentary support for the argument for an

authentic 'women's perspectivef, initially drafted in Dorothy

Smith's "Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of

Sociology" (1974a). Womenf s experience of the afternoon soap

opera was used in this paper as a device to describe a place

where womenr s concerns predominated, j ust as men' s concerns

were dominant in a form of sociology that was created and

theorized by and for men- Women in this era could not find a

place for themselves in this kind of sociological theory. An

authorization of women's own direct experience, extrapolated

from the consciousness-raising and other practices of the

women's movement was a feature of Dorothy Smith's firsthand

creation of the SOK, and one that was needed to confront

68 Smith, D. E. 1975-76. lrWomen, the Family and Corporate Capitalism. Berkeley Jorrrnal of sociology, 2 0, 55- 90, P. 69,

sociological theories that were created by and for men.

Direct experience, as it had been viewed by members of the

discipline of sociology to that point, had dismissed it as

irrelevant in any kind of objectified or 'scientific'

analysis, and students were taught to avoid it as a reputable

source of knowledge,

Although consciousness-raising as an exercise was not

viewed as a way of healing psychological disorders, but as a

source of courage-gathering for women's life changes and

political transformation, it influenced forms of feminist

psychotherapy that were beginning to emerge at the time. The

first collection of essays edited by Dorothy Smith and Sara

David called Women Look At Psychiatry (1975b) was in part an

application of the principles drawn from women's

consciousness-raising groups and applied to the emotional and

psychological lives of women in an effort to alleviate the

oppressiveness of psychiatry and male psychiatrists. Essays

written by Smith in this book are concerned with how the

psychiatric profession organised women's lives by the way that

male psychiatrists created and perpetuated concepts of women's

mental illness, through their authority. Women, on the other

hand, attributed a lack of authority to themselves:

Men represent to both men and women more than merely the authority of a special knowledge. They are invested also with the power and authority of the institutionalized order of ruling of which psychiatry is a part. Thus they appear in their professional contexts with an aura which draws upon the authority of their profession, and the participation of their profession in the governance of our

society- 69

The notion of direct experience, or the idea of an 'insider's

knowledge' absorbed in part from the consciousness-raising

techniques of the women's movement begins its entry into the

scholarly lexicon of the SOK in Dorothy Smith's essays in

Women Look at Psychiatry (1975b) , The of der, male-oriented

model of psychiatry was a place where 'no leakage from the

personal to the impersonal is permitted8

In these essays, Smith began the creation of a new kind

of authority with its roots in the women's movement and

women's authentic experiences, Many of the essays in Women

Look at Psychiatry (1975b) were not scholarly in the

traditional sense, but were the intimate personal experiences

of women's oppressive encounters with male members of the

psychiatric profession, Marsha Enomoto's biographical

narrative of psychiatric treatment, for example, as it was

related to her by a female patient in the essay "It was an

Eighteenth Century Horror Show", is a nightmarish account of a

woman mental patient's personal experience with incarceration,

shock treatment and psychiatric abuse.

Dorothy Smith's maturing scholarship during the

historical events of the Vancouver Women's Movement included

the formation of a loyalty to the politics of Marxist-

feminism, realised partially in the publication of Marxism and

Femin i sm: A Place to Begin, A Way to Go (1977b) , as well as

69 Smith, D.E. and Sara David, eds. 1975b. Women Look at Psychiatry. Vancouver: Press gang. P. 8.

several other essays in this period, Marxism as an interest

was taken up before her adoption of feminist principles, The

reading and appropriation of M a r x r s theory for the creation of

the SOK provided the distinctly materialist element in her

method and an insistence on the grounding of sociology in the

activities of real people in the world, The taking up of

Marxrs work was an important gesture on her part and a venture

into the Marxist-feminist debates of the period, one which she

largely felt excluded her and ignored her scholarship in this

area, especially the Eastern Canadian feminist/academic

community- She described the failure of other Canadian

feminists to recognize her contribution:

Actually I have to say that one of the things that I found really upsetting was that as a Marxist-feminist my work never became a part of the Marxist-feminist debates in Canada ...I don't know whether it was because I was writing on the West coast or whether I was writing the wrong kind of thing or whether Marxist-feminism in central Canada or Eastern Canada was cliquish in some way but nobody ever ref erred to my work. 7L

Dorothy Smith is right about the citations to this small book,

which was published in Vancouver by New Star Books and meant

to be a part of the series of Marxist-feminist books of the

period, like Maria Dalla Costar s The Power of Women and the

Subversion of the Community (1972) , F r o m the time of its

publication in 1977 to August, 1996, Marxism and Feminism: A

Place to Start, A Way to Go (1977b) was cited a total of nine

times, according to Social Sciences Citation Index, unlike

71

Smith, Preliminary intelrview by the author with Dorothy E. Thunder Bay Airport, October 18, 1994.

many of her later scholarly works which garnered citations in

the hundreds. Possibly it was a effect of her marginalized

position in the academic community at UBC and an insensitivity

of Eastern feminists, particularly in Toronto, to the work of

women in Western Canada- Smith's perseverance in the area of

Marxist-feminism contributed to the developing language of the

SOK. She began to locate the origin of her oppression and the

oppression of other women in 'an objective organization of

societyr .72 The two polarizations of the SOK, 'direct

experiencer and the 'relations of rulingr are clearly derived

from her early Marxist-feminist work and Marx's class theory

of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,

Smith's belief was that a Marxist-feminist analysis was

the best way of addressing the economic, political and

personal features of the oppression of women. In M d s m and

F e m i n i s m : A P l a c e to begin, A Way to Go (1977b1, she used the

example of wives who were beaten by their husbands to

illustrate how women's lives were organized by forces external

to them and over which they had little control. A women who

was dependent on a man, and who was being beaten, had her life

regulated by agencies outside the reach of her authority in

two ways: 1) Under a capitalist economic system, marriage and

a family became a trap, which women were unable to leave

because the whole 'institutional organization of the society

is at work to put them back into that relationshipr; and 2)

Through the application of the label of 'battered wifer a

72 Smith, D. E. 197713. Feminism and Begin, A Way to Go, Vancouver: New Star

Marxism: Books. P,

A P l a c e to 10.

woman was incorporated 'into the professional system of

controls ' . " The first battered womenr s shelter, Transition

House, had only just been buf lt in Vancouver,

From 1968 to 1977, Dorothy Smith experienced a deep

change personally, politically, and intellectually through her

involvement in the historic moment of the Vancouver Women's

Movement- This transformation touched specific areas of her

scholarship and the Social Organization of Knowledge: 1) The

organizing qualities in a society had a material foundation in

the authentic lives of human beings, both men and women; 2)

The polarizations of societal organization were divided into

the relations of ruling and localized experience; and 3) Any

sociological inquiry could begin with direct experience as the

initial starting place for the creation of knowledge.

The Vancouver Women's Revolution: Economics, Events and Organizations

Economics

'We've laid our organizational bases on the basis of money from the state, ' 74

Groups in the Vancouver Women's Movement from 1968 to

1977, and most likely in local forms of the women's movement

throughout Canada, rather than relying primarily on their own

resources for the source of their economic and monetary

74 Smith' D.E. 1977b. Marxism and Feminism: A Place to S t a r t , A Way to Go. Vancouver: New Star Books. P, 25.

support, initiated what became a rather precarious and

unreliable prac t i ce of dependency

municipal and d v e r s i ty governments

the

for

federal , provincial,

the funding

women's centres and women's projects- This left women's

activism and the progress of women's status at the whims of

those in positions of power, forces which were often

prejudiced against the advancement of women's status:

The basis of our appeal has been the assumption that in some way or other, these institutions were just and even- handed, that they were in fact democratic, that they were open to persuasion, to pressure to the demands that we might make. We are finding now that this is not so. They are not open, and indeed it is part of our discovery that they never w e r e truly open because their treatments of interventions from the women's movement has always been highly selective, They have always chosen what they should support and what not to support on the basis of what would make the least impact and make the least real change.75

What began grass roots organizing and autonomous fund-

raising on the part of women's organizations culminated in

huge amounts of Eederal funding that were extended often on a

one-time basis during International Women's Year (IWY) in

1975, and were summarily retracted once IWY had come to an

end. For example, when the Vancouver Women's Caucus began to

organize, they held their meetings at women's homes in the

community. The Women's Caucus raised money for their Abortion

Campaign in 1970 by appealing to the medical community to

contribute the cost abortion. for ' the

of pressuring the Provincial and Federal Governments into

actf ng in a responsible mannerr . '" This kind of initiative diminished as the women's movement expanded and there was an

increasing reliance on government funding.

The Western Canadian Women's News Service published a

Guide to the B- C, Women's Movement in 1975 as a special

project for International Women's Year, Of the nine

organizations listed that would provide financial assistance

to women's organizations, all nine were affiliated with the

provincial, municipal or federal governments, The Guide

listed Canada Council grants regarding media projects with

Canadian content, It suggested obtaining Civic Grants from

the Social Planning Department of 'your local city councilr.

Two widely used programmes at the time inaugurated by

financial aid from the federal government were the Local

Employment Assistance Program (LEAP) and the Local Initiatives

Program (LIP) . Provincial financial support was accessed

through the Provincial Status of Women Co-ordinator, the

Secretary of State Women's Programs and the Women's Economic

Rights Branch in the Parliament Buildings in Victoria. The

literature on women's funding initiatives suggested by the

guide contained only one source for autonomous organizational

fund-raising, a Ms, Magazine article called "The Dollars and

Sense of FundraisfngtC in the June, 1973, issue. All other

sources were advice on how to appropriate government money,

76 WMAC. Vancouver Women's Caucus, File 161, Letter, Re: Abortion Campaign Federal and Provincial, The Vancouver Womenr s Caucus is on the March.

for instance, pamphlets like IrHow To Write a Proposal and Get

it Fundedrr and 'Citizenr s Guide to B .C. Government Fundingm .77

Many women at the time considered dependence on government

handouts as a from of 'selling outr or 'co-optationr, but

Dorothy SmLth stated that 'I don't think our work is

necessarily contaminated in those ways'

International Women's Year prompted a comparatively large

inundation of federal government assistance for women's

projects in Vancouver and smaller B.C. municipalities. The

federal government set aside a total of $5 million for the

entire country for IWY, of which half was under the

jurisdiction of the Secretary of State Department - $2.5

million for IWY projects and women's groups. The other half

of the money was used to pay for a three-month advertising

campaign which cost $500,000 and hired an exclusively male

advertising team, and to pay for five regional conferences on

the status of women at a total cost of $1 million, Some of

the remaining $1 million was used to conduct surveys to

measure the effectiveness of the Secretariat in achieving a

change in public attitudes towards women at the end of 1975.

Of the $2.5 million for individual projects, the Secretary of

State allotted $160,000 to British Columbia and the ~ukon.'~

77 WMAC. Vancouver Status of Women. File 158. Guide to the B.C. Women's Movement. 1975. Vancouver: Western Canadian Women's News, P. 6-7,

78 Smith, D . E . 1977. M m i s m and Feminism ..., p. 25.

79 WMAC + Western Canadian Womenf s News Service. File 167. International Women's Year, 1975,

This amount had to cover all the small communities in the

province and grant applications of projects for more than

$25,000 were not considered. In most cases the grants which

were awarded were much less than this- Projects in the

Vancouver area, of course, received the lion's share of the

funding - $106,211, while Victoria women's groups received

$10,240 and communities in the B.C. interior received $41,215.

Grants awarded to women's organizations which directly

effected the intellectual projects of Dorothy Smith were the

amount of $1,918 for the founding conference of the British

Columbia Women's Studies Association, and $16,000 given the

University of British Columbia Women' s office for their "Women

in Focusm audio-visual workshop. The largest grant was

allocated to the Vancouver Art Gallery in the amount of

$25,000 to commission a ballet in tribute to Emily carr.'O

There was enormous controversy over the way that IWY

monies were disbursed, A single woman's centre could cost

between $25,000 and $75,000 a year to operate, including 2 or

3 salaries and basic operating expenses. None of the grants

were sufficient to fund a woman's centre in a large urban

area, and large numbers of women's groups found themselves

competing with each other for the meagre crumbs which the

government allowed. Women's organizations in B.C. and the

rest of Canada were also angry that despite the fact that they

had invested considerable energy in working towards equality

WMAC. Western Canadian Women's News Service. File 167. Secretary of State IWY Grants to B.C. Women. April 29, 1975.

3 52

for women, they were not consulted by the Secretariat in the

preparatory stages of funding distribution, Women were also

upset at the amount set aside for conferences ($1 million).

because they believed that the time for talk was over and

there was a need for action in the implementation of the

findings of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. As a

result of inadequate funding, women's organizations began to

rely largely on volunteer labour, regardless of the fact that

feminists were trying to teach women not to work at unpaid

employment, which to them meant the perpetuation of women's

exploitation,

Traditional sources of fundraising for womenr s groups

based on their domestic labour, like bake sales, etc,, were

rare. The cultural atmosphere of 1968 to 1977 was, in

appearance at least, one of freedom, in the areas regarding

both issues of sexuality as well as finance. For example,

members of the hippie counter-culture sometimes opened 'free-

storesr, where clothing and food could be obtained for

nothing. Some conventional sources of revenue in the women's

movement were maintained, although New Left ideology of the

period incorporated the notion that it was 'uncoo18 to pay too

much attention to capitalist enterprise or to financial

matters, The Vancouver Women's Centre published a calendar

which they advertised was 'entirely produced by womenr -

'volunteer labour as usualf. The price was $1.82 Historical

82

Centre

Ibid, International Women's Year, 1975.

WMAC. Vancouver Women's Centre. File 171. Women's Calendar . 1973 . Final Page.

evidence of the era records women's anxiety and inexperience

in regard to financial matters- The Vancouver Women's book

store, for instance, began with no grants and with only

donations and loans, W h e n asked in an interview about their

plans to pay staff salaries the response was: 'We talk about

it every once and awhile* We are a little afraid of it, We

are not in any competition with any bookstore- 83

Events

The SOK was not produced in an historical vacuum, and the

Vancouver Women's Movement was replete with a rich history

containing a number of consequential occasions which were a

part of Dorothy Smith's temporally situated social setting.

At least two of the historical events in the Vancouver Women's

Movement from 1968 to 1977 have already been mentioned - the

Indo-Chinese Conference held in April, 1973, and International

Women's Year in 1975. There were few incidents which appear

to have been spontaneous or unorganized protest, with the

exception of the unrehearsed occupation of the office of The

Georgia Straight by a group of women on Thursday April 3,

1971- Many of the events of this period were carefully

orchestrated by and affiliated with a specific feminist

organization on definite issues, but the Indo-Chinese

Conference involved an inter-organizational involvement of

women in the Vancouver community, as well as Indo-Chinese,

a3 WMAC. Vancouver Women's Bookstore- File 160.

3 54

Vietnamese, Canadian and American women, I have chosen to

look at these two occasions because of their distinctive

character: 1) the occupation of The Georgia Straight as an

instance, not only of a unplanned event and demonstration of

the increasing militancy of women, but further as a happening

which contained the characteristic grass roots qualities of

the Vancouver Women's Movement and one that occurred outside

of the academic realm; and 2) the Indo-Chinese Conference,

which Dorothy Smith attended as a representative, as an

instance when the issue of racism began to be questioned in

t h e womenr s movement.

The Georgia Straight was a bi-weekly newspaper in a

tabloid format which was sold on the streets of Vancouver and

the suburban communities surrounding the city. On Wednesday

April 2, 1971, the paper released an Easter issue which

infuriated a group of women (in all historical accounts these

women remain anonymous, but some of them may have been workers

for the Vancouver Womenr s Caucus publication, The Pedestal)

who consequently occupied The Georgia Straight headquarters

the next day for t h e purpose of putting together a womanrs

issue of the journal. The offending illustration showed a

nude man who was in the process of being crucified on the

pubis of a headless, naked woman. The insulting effect of the

caricature was exacerbated by the fact that one of the

headlines beside it made a reference to the Indo-Chinese and

Vietnamese women who were in Vancouver for the Indo-Chinese

Conference.

The editorial staff of The Georgia Straight insisted that

355

they had not meant to associate the cartoon with the Indo-

Chinese women, but admitted that they could understand how the

cover could be interpreted in that manner- The position

statement explaining the format of the 'Women's Liberated

Georgia Straightr. agreed that the cartoon represented an

humiliation of women designed to sell the newspaper:

The women feel that much of the paper on a continuous basis is sexist-- that it objectifies and exploits women, rather than seeing women as human beings with a full right to the fu l l equalLty that is the right of all people..,rmrch of the criticism is valid. The Georgia Straight carries many reflections of this society. And this is a society that degrades and exploits women. It has been our intention to put out a paper that reflects the needs of people who are oppressed by the capitalist system. Sexism is one aspect of this oppression,

The editorial in the Women's Issue, which the female

protesters called 'The People's Straight', avowed that they

would make serious attempts to accommodate women's demands,

producing a paper that 'should reflect a greater concern with

the needs of all oppressed groups

The women who assembled 'The People's Straight' worked

with the female staff of the newspaper to publish the special

edition, and the paper came out on time containing 'articles,

pictures and cartoons related to the particular needs and

interests of Part of the women's grievance was the

The Georgia Straight, 5, 157, April 8-13, 1971. Special Issue. Women's Liberated Georgia Straight, Inside Front Cover. Editorial.

Ibid.

86 T h e Pedestal, 3, 5, May, 1971. P. 3 .

reality that the female staff of the paper were w o r k i n g in

subordinate positions.87 The women 'liberatedr the office of

The Georgia Straight not with intentions of sabotage but so

that they could make use of it. The destruction of property

was limited to tearing the front pages off a number of the

Easter Editions, prompting a street vendor to write a letter

to the editor lamenting that 'the action of ripping off the

objectionable portion of the front cover [was] an act of

passion and prejudice. And because of that I am stuck with a

number of papers to sell which have been tornf .88 The

occupation and protest had a positive outcome, in that the

male editorial staff agreed to incorporate the women's

demands, 'at least on a trial basisr, and the sale of the

Women's Liberated Georgia Straight took in $540 which was put

toward a women's centre and defense fund?

Dorothy Smith has often commented bo th in her writing and

teaching, on the bitter controversies w h i c h were a part of the

early women's movement in Vancouver- The conflict that she

has mentioned was conspicuously present in the organizational

stage and during the Indo-Chinese Conference which was held in

Vancouver in April, 1971, which Smith attended. Much of the

planning for the conference took place in the United States.

The proposal for a conference to be held in Vancouver between

Indo-Chinese and North American women emerged from a dialogue

-

'' Womenf s Liberated Georgia Straight, centre page. 88 Womenfs Liberated Georgia Straight, p. 4.

The Pedestal, 3, 5, May, 1971. P. 3.

in association with North Vietnamese women, Women Strike for

Peace (WSP) and the Voice of Women (VOW), A delegation of

three women from New York were chosen to go to Budapest to

consult with the Indo-Chinese women concerning the plans for

the conference, At this juncture, the Vietnamese women made

it clear to the American organisers that they wanted to learn

about and develop large scale contacts with as many Women's

Liberation groups in North America as possible. Even in the

planning stages of the conference it became clear that the

conference was divided into a number of factions, each one

espousing a particular cause and ideology. Preliminary

planning meetings for the conference took place in the United

States - one in New York and two in Baltimore. A further

planning conference was scheduled for December 5 - 6, 1970 in

Buffalo, New York. All of the planning meetings were

conducted and organized by US People's Anti-Imperialist

Delegation or the 'anti-imperialist' contingent of what was to

be the conference in Vancouver in April, 1970

Women's Liberation groups w e r e not contacted until the

final stages of planning, a manoeuvre which infuriated the

members of these organisations, which was further aggravated

by the expectation that Women's Liberation groups pay for the

$10,000 conference. The controversy arose from the anti-

imperialistsr co~ections to the New Left, which was viewed by

the women's movement as male-dominated movement. The women

from the anti-imperialist faction were 'defined in a narrow

90 WMAC . Womenr s Liberation Alliance. File 174. I1Fourth World Manif estoI1 . P . 2,

Left-male context and being imposed upon the women's movement

by Left men by their Left womenr A number of members of

Women's Liberation in Vancouver were 'saddened' at the tactics

of the American women from the anti-imperialist groups, and

consequently compiled a Vourth World Manifestout which they

sent to their Indo-Chinese sisters communicating their concern

over the way that the conference was being organised- The

letter which accompanied the manifesto, was sent to the Indo-

Chinese delegation on January 13 , 1971. " Decisions regarding

the participation of the conference were also made by the US

People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation, It was resolved that

there would be 400 representatives, 20% of whom were to be

Canadian, Of the 80% who were American, half were to be

'Third World womenf and the remaining representatives were to

come from Women's Liberation groups. Six women from Indo-

China attended the conference. Attempts would be made to

contact GI wives, women's groups who worked with GI wives and

women members of the military, as the Indo-Chinese women had

an agenda of peace and an end to the Vietnamese Warag3

The conference was divided along racial and political

lines. The first portion of the conference was set aside for

the Voice of Women (VOW) and Women's Strike for Peace (WSP),

which were long established organizations, 'turned out in

Ibid,

92 WMAC. Women' s Liberation Alliance - File 174. Letter accompanying the "Fourth World Manifesto". January 13, 1971.

93 Ibid, p - 4 .

embarrassingly small numbers * . 94 The second portion was

attended only by the 'Third World' contiagent which consisted

of women from Native groups, black women, Asian Americans and

Canadians, Chicanos and Mgtis, The last two days were

assigned to Women's Liberation delegates:

They came from as far away as San Diego, Nevada, Saskatchewan and Alaska. They cane from community groups, tenants associations, unemployed groups, women's liberations groups and collectives, and gay women's groups. They were predominantly young women with just a scattering of older women from welfare rights organizations- Their discussions with the Indochinese posed most sharply the enormous differences between the women's movements in the revolutionary societies of Vietnam and Laos and those in the 'advancedr capitalist societies of Canada and the US. 95

It was felt that racial tension was diffused at the conference

by keeping the factions separated, but attacks of racism

emerged over inconsistencies in the security arrangements:

By the third day the disputes over security were becoming so divisive between the Third World and white women that it was decided (partly as a result of discussion with the Indochinese) that security would be much relaxed. Immediately the tension was reduced, and from then on security caused no large problems and relations between the Third World and white women improved. 96

As an historical event, the Indo-Chinese Conference was

important in that it highlighted the fragmented, explosive and

94 Roberts, Anne and Barbara Todd. 1971. "Murmurings After the Indo-Chinese Conference," The Pedestal, 3, 5, P* 6- 7 *

Ibid,

Ibid,

quarrelsome nature of the early women's movement, which

Dorothy Smith refers to in her feminist work on a number of

occasions. 97 It further provides evidence that, contrary to a

widely held belief in contemporary feminist scholarship,

issues of race, class and sexuality were of intense interest

to feminists prior to the 1980s- Notwithstanding their lack

of language and an understandable analytical naivete,

feminists in the Vancouver Women's Movement at this time

displayed an intense concern as well as a consciousness of

these problems, The liberation of the Georgia Straight and

the fractious occurrences at the Indo-Chinese Conference form

the sociohistorical backdrop to the creation of the SOK and

the social realities of which Dorothy Smith was a part. Their

inclusion here is meant to convey the depth and complexity of

the social upheaval that was occurring in the Vancouver

community of women, which was mirrored in the early

conceptualization of the SOK method, a repercussion of the

radical changes taking place in the larger society,

Organizations

The social conditions under which the creation of Dorothy

Smithr s scholarly work was organized, reproduced, and

distributed meant that she came into contact with and

maintained affiliations with several feminist organizations in

the city of Vancouver. Some of these were directly connected

97 S e e : Smith, D.E., 1987; 1990a; 1990b.

to the University of British Columbia, like the Women's O f f i c e

and the Women's Research Centre, but others, like the

publishing house Press Gang, were a part of the grass roots

feminist community. These associations were crucial to the

production of the sociological knowledge that she imagined,

and comprised the material conditions in which the Social

Organisation of mowledge was created and proliferated,

Press Gang began as an informal cooperative of five men

and one woman who voluntarily printed posters and other

printed matter for leftist and counterculture groups in

Vancouver, asking only the price of materials in return. They

printed stickers with captions like "Wages for Houseworkn,

"This Exploits and Degrades Womenu, and IrE.T. is a Girl ! And

if She Worked Here, She'd Have Been Paid 51% Less Than the

Boys!u98 The first publishing initiative by Press Gang in

1971 was She Named It Canada Because Thatf s What It Was

Called, a cartoon spoof on the history of Canada put together

by female members of The Corrective ~ollective.~~ The woman

who worked during the early days of the Press Gang collective

found that she cleaned the rollers more of the time than she

operated the presses, so when two of the men left the

organisation, she worked to have them succeeded by two women.

Despite the increased equity of the arrangement, the men and

women experienced a growing tension in their working

98 WMAC. Press stickers.

99 She Named It 1971. [1971, 1972,

Gang. File 144. Collection of printed

Canada Because Thatf s mat It Was Called. 19731 - By The Corrective Collective.

Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers.

environment, so much so that the men began working in the

evenings and the women worked in the day. Divisions erupted

over long-term objectives in that one person thought the

collective should concentrate on profit, one argued for a

position as a printer for the Communist Party of Canada, one

wanted to stop printing altogether, and the women wanted to

form an all-woman printing business, Splits then arose in

November 1973 regarding the measure of quality that should be

included in the printing work, and the people who left at this

time felt that commercial standards of neatness were not

necessary. Sara Davidson and Pat Smith, interested in

augmenting their printing skill, stayed to work at the

publishing house and they expanded to a staff of five or six

women. loo

The Press Gang collective took on the task of publishing

Dorothy Smith's and Sara David's first collection of essays,

Women Look at Psychiatry (1975) . They were as completely

unskilled in a project of that magnitude as Dorothy and Sara

were in book publishing, so when asked in an interview during

August of 1976 about this experience they explained:

We decided about a year and a half ago we were really having problems. The collective was in a collective depression. We kept printing stuff that other people wrote that we didn't necessarily agree with or wasn't terribly important. All our effort was in that direction so we decided that what we would actually like to do was start publishing. We had meetings with Dorothy Smith and Sara David and it took us a long time- We had never

loo WMAC. Press G a n g . File 144. Tress Gang: An All- Woman Print Shop-" Hysteria, 1, I, March, 1980- P, 8.

3 63

done a book like tha t before, We had never been involved in editing, even typesetting or laying out a book of that size, It was all quite new to us and it took US a year from the manuscript to the completed book. We learned a tremendous amount from that book. lox

Women Look at Psychiatry was eventually printed and published

by the Press Gang Collective in 1975. Pat Smith designed the

front cover and sketches in the book were done by Lindy

Filkow ,

Pat Smith of Press Gang characterized the organisation as

one which was 'not at all into women's businessesr and 'our

official rap is we are an "anti-capitalist, feminist

colle~tive~~~.'~~ Their rates at the time were considered

competitive with other Vancouver businesses and they priced

their work on a sliding scale, Money and the size of a salary

seemed to be unimportant to the Press Gang members, who seemed

to have an altruistic agenda when it came to their work- Pat

Smith recalls that she often didn't get any salary at all or

lived on $200 per month, Their business mandate seemed to be

consistent with a leftist ideology of anti-capitalism, where

monetary concerns were secondary to co-operative ideals and

service to the feminist community.

In contrast to an anti-capitalist motivation on the part

of the Press Gang collective, Dorothy Smith was more ambitious

for her first book, Women Look at Psychiatry (1975) . H e r

lo' WMAC. Press Gang. File 144. "Press Gang - Vancouver Feminist Print Shop. " Interview. August, 1976.

lo' WMAC. Press Gang. File 144. "Press Gang: A n All- Woman Print Shop.I1 Hysteria, I, 1, 1980, P. 8-9.

motives were also altruistic ones, given that she and Sara

David signed over the royalties to their book to the B,C,

Womenf s Studies Research ~ssociation. O3 Although

disappointed that the book was not more successful financially

than it was, she held no grudge against the organization:

1 am not at all angry with Press Gang. r think rather I made a mistake in publishing Women Look at Psycbiatzy with them. They produced a good book (it has some defects of workmanship, e.g, a tendency to come apart) but they did an excellent editorial job on it. But where they failed was in neglecting the selling of the book. Connecting with the commercial was, I think not compatible with the kind of craft ethos that was theirs, At all events, taking selling seriously was not something they envisaged and could see that they needed to do or learn how to do as part of the political act of producing feminist work at the time when not many people were doing that, So Women Look at Psychiatry was very disappointing to me, because I had been pretty sure that, following Cheslerfs best-seller on women and madness, it would have had a very good sale.lo4

Regardless of the Press Gang Collective's inexperience they

did attempt to distribute the book using contemporary

marketing techniques, They produced a short-sleeved red T-

Shirt that advertised the book with the slogan, "I'm Not Mad,

I ' m Angry1' printed inside a dark ink blot. An original Women

Look at Psychiatry T-shirt is housed in the Women's Movement

Archive Collection at the Morwiset Library at the University

lo' Smith, Dorothy E. and Sara David, eds, 1975, Women Look at Psychiatry, Vancouver: Press G a n g Publishers. Inside front page,

lo' E-Mail communication by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, February 12, 1998,

of Ottawa, donated by Nancy Adamson,

Early research on the history/herstory and the status of

women in B.C. was often conducted at the UBC Women's Office,

whose headquarters were Room 230 in the Student Union

Building. It was established in September of 1971 as 'an

educational resource service to the members of the university

community and the community at large8 , The Women' 6 Off ice

was run by students at UBC, which made for some organizational

problems, in that their concentration on the demands of the

programs often led to the neglect of their studies. Paxt of

the objective of this research collective was the connection

that it developed and maintained with the larger Vancouver

community:

It has been our attempt in establishing the evening educational program to bring together the ideas and experiences of women both on and off campus, This link between the university community and the community-at-large must be maintained if we are to reach a full understanding of women's situation in contemporary society. We feel that our program has been most successful in breaking down the existing barriers- Because the program attempts to link the interests of university women and community women, it is essential that non- students work as a part of the collective.

Members of the Women' s Office and the Women's Research

Collective were responsible for starting the non-credit

Women8s Studies Course mentioned above, and the Women's

Studies credit course at UBC. The attendance of the lectures

WMAC. UBC Womenr s Off ice. File 152. "The Womenr s Office: An Eval~ation.~~ Page 1.

and workshops put on by the UBC Women's Off ice varied f r o m 50

to 400 people on any given evening. Some workshops had

waiting lists and in the 1973174 term 250 people

registered. lo' They also organized the Womenr s Action Group

which worked to eliminate the most conspicuous signs of

intolerance against women and published A Report on the Status

of Women at the University of British Columbia in 1973.

Addit ionally, they produced the publication The Voices of

Women Students in 1974, which was available free of charge for

students.lo8 The student members of this collective also

accumulated materials far a Women's Resource Library, a

Women's Music Library and organized a film series called

In 1975, during International Womenr s Year, the UBC

Women's Office received a huge grant for $16,000, the second

largest in the province, from the Secretary of State for an

audio-visual workshop called "Women in Focus " . 'OS Dorothy

Smith worked on at least two of the video productions for the

audio-visual library that was established over the course of

the next two years:

I was very interested in this problem of the disappearance of the women's movement in the 1920s and 30s because I was involved in teaching the Women's Studies course, the general introductory course, I

Ibid, I1Attendancet1 . WMAC . UBC Womenr s Off ice. File 152. Press Release,

September 2, 1974.

log WMAC . Western Canadian Women' s News Service, File 167. Thomas Fisher Rare book Collection. F- M. Dennison Collection, Collection 51. Box 9.

had to learn a lot about feminists and socialists in B .C- and then I became interested in why [there was a] lack of continuity,, ,why we didn't know anything about these people. I discovered a woman who was living in an old person's home who had been one of these activists and 1 interviewed her because I was interested in this problem of a gap. In talking with her and in preparfng for it I discovered that there had been actual repression of feminism along with socialism in B.C.UO

The Women's Office created a collection of 3 6 half-hour long

audio-visual tapes, many of which were in colour- They were

accessible to women throughout B.C. for rental and resale at a

reasonable cost, "Women in Focusw became a series of

television programs for women which was aired on Tuesday

evenings at 9:00 p.m. on Vancouverrs Cable 10 Television, and

were shown in smaller B - C. communities ,lfl The Tamitik

Status of Women, a Women's Centre in Kitimat, for example, put

on a monthly program over Channel 10 which was produced by

"Women in Focusn , ' I2

On July 16, 1976 the UBC Women's Office was evicted from

the Student Union Building, the reason given by officials in

the Alma Mater Society that the space occupied by the

organization was 'untenably excessiver . 'I3 After several

Unstructured interview by the author during lunch with Dorothy E. Smith, August, 21, 1997.

'I1 WMAC. Western Canadian Women's News Service. File 167- Thomas Fisher Rare Book Collection. F. M. Dennison Collection. Collection 51- Box 9. International Women's Year. P- 2.

WMAC. Tamitik Status of Women. File 150. Tamitik Status of Women Association, 1989.

lr3 WMAC. UE3C Womenr s Office. File 152. Press Release. August 1, 1976.

meetings, where the issue of space and allocation were never

discussed, the Women's Office and the "Women in Foc~s'~ Audio-

Visual library were forced to relocate to #4 - 45 Kingsway,

sharing the office of the Women's Research Centre of the

British Columbia Women' s Studies Assocf ation. Members of the

Women's Office reported that over their six year occupation of

quarters in the Student Union Building, they 'were frequently

hasselled and undermined by some [male] members of the A.M,S,

student executiver -llq Regardless, their achievements in

women's scholarship were impressive, and Dorothy Smith was an

active participant in their accomplishments,

Monthly planning meetings for the Women's Research Centre

began in November, 1976, when the board, the co-ordinator, and

the volunteers created the organization's policy, planned

projects and attended to financial matters. Among the twelve

founding members of the policy collective were Dorothy Smith,

Helga Jacobson and Roxana Ng- When the Women's Research

Centre became a full time undertaking on January 3, 1977, it

marked the beginning of an increased sophistication in women's

research. The days of inexperience and the lack of a language

to explain womefirs particular circumstances were coming to an

end. The Research Committee identified goals for the centre

which were placed under four categories: 1) Daycare,

especially when it came to the needs of working mothers who

could not afford to pay; 2) Immigrant women, to study laws,

policies and services as they directly affected the lives of

immigrant women, to be used for immigrant women's service

groups; 3) Northern women; and 4) Domestic workers both in

private homes and who worked for janitorial services .Is

Membership in the Women's Research Centre was by subscription

at a cost of $7.50 per year, Affiliation with the centre

meant that an individual could receive 'full length reports

and working papers on such topics as "Marxism and F e m i n i ~ r n ~ ~ by

Dorothy Smith at cost'."6

According to the minutes of the Vancouver Womengs

Research Centre, Dorothy Smith attended every meeting from

January 3 to August 11, 1977, The founding organisers adopted

a fundamental structure for the centre consisting of a Board

of Directors, a Policy Collective and various Research

Committees. Policy around issues of open meethgs, credit for

work accomplished, confidentiality, ownership of any data, and

the use of the research and data by members were considered.

It was also agreed that a policy which encouraged the members

of the centre to do public speaking be adopted and the task

should be rotated, giving the more inexperienced members an

opportunity to acquire this skill- A Wife Beating Committee

was added to the study areas of the centre in April, 1977.

Among the mundane tasks that Dorothy performed for the

collective was the preparation of a list of laundromats with

Cath Alperovitz, that would assist in the distribution of

'I5 WMAC. Women's Research Centre, File 100, tlWomenrs Research Centre . " February 14, 19 77. Brief summary of activities.

WMAC. Womenr s Research Centre - File 100. Subscription letter.

leaflets.lL7 She and Cath Alperovitz also worked together to

devise a course outline for a Women's Studies course backed by

the Burns Lake Women's Centre in connection with the College

of New Caledonia. Helga Jacobson and Dorothy jointly prepared

a working paper on the confidentiality of research- At the

final meeting, before her move to Toronto, she agreed to

summarize other people's work in order to present it at a

workshop set up by the Women's Research Centre to assist the

B- C, Federation of Women in fundraising techniques,uB Andr

shortly before her relocation, the Women's Research Centre

decided to move as well to 'a new office at the old BC Fed

buildingr, at 517 East Broadway, Vancouver- Rent for the new

off ice was the same - $175 per month,1L9

Conclusion

This chapter provides an analysis of the social

conditions which were a logical source for Smith to draw from

in the early creation of her method of examining objectified,

textual forms called the Social Organisation of Knowledge. At

the time of the Vancouver Women's Movement, Smithrs distant

relation to Margaret Fell and her mother' s Suffragette

experience likely assumed a stronger significance. She

lL7 WMAC- Women's Research Centre- File 100- Minutes of the Vancouver Women's Research Centre. April 2, 1977.

WMAC- Women's Research Centre. Minutes of P. C. Meeting. August 11, 1977,

ensured, for instance, that her mother's autobiographical

account of her militant political activism was tape-recorded

before her death in 1976- Feminist exemplars which had

probably receded from her consciousness at the London School

of Economics and the years at Berkeley became a source which

she drew from in a process of identity-formation, alternatives

from her past which bolstered her choice of becoming a

feminist sociologist. Older models of the women's movement

became the subject matter for her Women's Studies classes,

Here I have focused on the pre-formations, events,

ideologies, practices and activism of the members of the early

Vancouver Women's Movement from 1968 - 1977, Unlike the

American women's movement which emerged from the Civil Rights

and New Left activism of the early and mid-1960s, the

Vancouver Women's Movement grew out of the New Left Student

Protest Movement. Events at Simon Fraser University and the

University of British Columbia sparked a radical political

environment in the city, A widespread consciousness of

women's issues occurred simultaneously through the institution

of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in February of

1967. A certain amount of ideological overlapping occurred

between the student movement and the women's movement,

especially in the initial stages, in that Marxist-feminism was

taken up partly from the Marxist elements of the student

movement, and from the dissatisfaction of women's caucuses in

Marxist organizations.

I have examined three interpretive sites where it might

be construed that linkages between phenomena in the organized

3 72

women's movement were translated by Smith as themes in the

early imagining of the Social Organisation of Knowledge.

These are : 1) the ' communal freezing out process ' , examined

in Dorothy Smith's famous essay, "K' is Mentally Illtr (1978),

which I argue is similar to a ritual in the early women's

movement known as 'trashingr; 2) the early protests in the

women's movement often took the form of the disruption of

beauty contests, a protest against the objectification of

women, similarly, the Social Organization of Knowledge was a

method to uncover the organizing power of objectified forms of

knowledge in sociology; and 3 ) the widespread practice of

consciousness-raising, with its emphasis on authority of the

personal experience of women, and its affect on the 'direct

experience' component of the Social Organization of Knowledge.

Although these could be interpreted as logical connections,

Dorothy Smith argued that it was a 'dialoguer with the women's

movement which affected her early scholarly work.

Dorothy Smith's early scholarly/feminist work was

reinforced and inspired from the introductory work she

accomplished in the first Women's Studies courses at UBC, an

intellectual enterprise that was also derived from the women's

movement. Events like the women's occupation of the offices

of The Georgia Straight and the Indo-Chinese Conference held

in Vancouver in 1971 formed a part of the social history which

gave rise to the SOK, Finally, the organisations in which

Dorothy Smith played a founding role w e r e a another source of

her feminist scholarship, as well as providing for the

material conditions under which her work was published.

373

CHAPTER NINE

SPLITTING TnE WEBL: THE SOX AND THE TORONTO WOMEN'S MOVEMENT, 1977-1998

There is a very ordinary. mundane aspect of the women's movement which we usually donf t think about, To a very great extent, it begins in texts, By texts, I don't mean a text book or anything as formal as that. I just mean anything which might come to us in the form of words on paper. whether in articles in magazines, in newspapers or in books, We might even consider television and movies as a kind of text, In any case there are words or images fixed in a material form and without their speaker's presence, In any kind of way the women's movement has come to us, it has to a large extent travelled to us in this form.*

Dorothy Smith's relocation to Toronto marked the

beginning of a new phase in her work. and more particularly in

The idea for this title came from the following quotation from Dorothy Smith's article called "The Renaissance of Womenn (198423) in Knowledge Reconsidered: A F e m i n i s t O v e r v i e w published by the Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) . P - 8 :

"1 have this dream: in Toronto, in front of an apartment building near my office, [the old Rochdale building on the South side of Bloor Street West near Huron Street] there is a large sculpture of a woman hunkered down on her hams, Her head is bowed down almost between her knees. She is hunched over - a massive but passive sculpture emphasizing rounds and cunres. the weight of the back, thighs, shoulders, all her shape. In my dream she starts to get up. I see that she is covered with a scarcely visible web which has held her down. In my dream she stands up, she stretches, raises her powerful arms to the sky and splits the web."

Smith, D. E. 1979f. I1Using the Oppressor's Language.I1 Resources for Feminist R e s e a r c h , Special Publication 5, Spring, 1979. In Search of a Feminist Perspective: The Changing Potency of Women. March 4 - 5, 1978. University of Waterloo. Proceedings. P. 10-20,

the form of the women's movement that confronted her when she

arrived, Her sons were now teenagers, so it was a time that

she described as 'nutty teenagers with nutty friendsf, and the

pressures of single parenthood and a demanding career resulted

in the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, which persisted

for about four years.3 The changes in her approach to

sociology over the next two decades were enormous, and the

twenty years at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

were the site of her most substantive contributions to

sociology, theoretically, and at the category of method, As

the opening quotation testifies, Smith's interest in textual

forms of knowledge, which had its genesis in her Interpretive

Procedures class at the University of British Columbia, began

in earnest after her arrival in Toronto, and found a

meaningful connection to the organized women's movement. Even

now, in 1998, though she is at a point in her career where she

is in semi-retirement, she muses about writing a book about

the This is the interval when the Social

Organization of Knowledge becomes a formal course in the

sociology department curriculum at OISE/UT, and through the

intellectual affiliations that take place with her students

and other collegial relationships, it matures to the

Interview by the author with Dorothy E, Smith at her office at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, November 11, 1994.

Personal communication by the author with Dorothy E. Smith, December 8, 1997,

recognizable method that it has become today.

The Toronto Womenrs Movement was a vastly different

configuration than the community of women Smith left behind in

the Vancouver, At first, Marxist-feminist writers comected

to the Toronto Women's Movement had given a weighted attention

to theories that explained the skills and value of work in the

household, in the form of the domestic labour debate. As the

women's movement matured and diversified and women gained more

access to the public sphere, domestic labour gradually

diminished as a intellectual interest. Already formed and

divided into a throng of groups based on sexuality, racially

and ethnically defined needs, and cultural pursuits, members

of the Toronto Women's Movement were unmindful to any possible

offering Dorothy Smith could make, indeed, were at first

indifferent to her scholar~hip,~ Ten years had passed since

the women's movement had been introduced in Toronto, when a

women's caucus at the University of Toronto's student league,

the New Left Caucus, renounced male chauvinism in the

organization and formed one of the first five Women's

Liberation groups in North America.= There had been time

enough for trashing, factional division and the fractious

nature of the early women's movement to have taken effect.

Interview by the author with Dorothy E. Smith at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, November 11, 1994.

" Prentice, Alison, et al. 1988. Canadian Women: A History. Toronto : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. P . 353.

Instead of a feminist community who all knew, or knew of each

other, Toronto was segregated into communities of women based

on class, race, sexuality as well as political and academic

affiliations, presenting, by the force of numbers and

separation of interests, increased barriers to net-working.

This chapter subsumes a far-reaching, intellectually

complex duration of Dorothy Smithrs scholarly career, covering

the effect of wornenrs activism as an interdisciplinary

renaissance for women in the 1980s which included sociology.

It historicizes an era encompassing the weakening of Marxrs

influence as a theorist, and class as an analytical category,

and the rise of poststructuralist and postmodern philosophy

that occurs with its concomitant seepage or contamination of

history and sociology from its origins in literary theory.

These two decades of Dorothy Smith's life and work lend

themselves to logical arrangements and consequently this

chapter will be organised as follows: 1) the affect of the

women's movement on Social Organization of Knowledge from 1977

to 1989; 2) Dorothy Smith's response to the incursion of

poststructuralism and postmodermism in the 1990s, and her

interest in the text as a site of sociological investigation;

and 3) The rise and development of the Toronto Women's

Movement, from 1977 to the present.

The Social Organization of Knowledge and the Toronto Women's M o v e m e n t , 1977 - 1989.

Anyone who has been a student of Dorothy Smith's, and has

visited her office, knows of its apparent chaos, a trait which

many of her students find highly amusing. She would be the

first to attest to the accuracy of this statement. There are

some theories as to the reason for this idiosyncrasy, which

include: I) a form of rebellion against the importance that

her mother placed on domestic skills, and her mother's

proficiency in the organization of the home; or 2) a lukewarm

interest in domestic pursuits, due to an unequivocal obsession

with scholarly endeavours. When the sociology department

moved from the sixth to the twelfth floor, on the event of

O1sE/UTrs amalgamation with the University of Toronto in

November, 1996, her office got 'spruced upr a bit, as a

consequence of the move, but the last time I was there, things

had begun to retrogress once more, to the level of piles of

paper, books, envelopes, etc. and its traditional muddle. As

a productive force, women's domestic skills over the centuries

seem to have contributed to the development of a contemporary

feminist configuration, at least in the case of Dorothy Smith,

wherein women are more apt to be interested in the public

sphere than in the private.

In Chapter Two I formulated a conceptual framework for

the components of the Social Organization of Knowledge, which

included the notions of social organization, direct

experience, document and text, botanizing, the text-reader

378

conversation, and forms of disjuncture- The development and

creation of the SOK did not proceed in an orderly fashion, and

it proceeded project by project essay by essay, in bits and

pieces hidden and contained in the plethora of scholarly work

that she produced from 1977 to 1989. This is not to say that

her individual journal articles were not focused and

organized, only that her thinking on the SOK was not linear,

and that the project of uncovering the progression of this

thinking is rather like the huge task of tidying up her

office, looking for the patterns of her work in the course of

this operation. It requires extracting the relevant portions

from the mountain of material that she generated at a time

when her creativity was at its most prolific and inscrutable.

This section will concentrate on formulations of the some

components of the SOK and how these concepts have evolved

during a decade which finally allowed, through the concerted

pressures of the women's movement, women's concerns to take

centre stage in sociology.

In the duration of 1977 - 1989, Smith published 44

articles, including translations of former articles and book

reviews. In the same interim, she presented 67 public

lectures and/or unpublished papers at various universities and

con£ erences . The m a j ority of this work was done on behalf of

women's status, to create a place for women's perspective and

standpoint in sociology. Of the articles done on or about

Dorothy E- Smith's curriculum vitae.

379

women, three possible categories emerge: I) articles which

deal with the women's socially organized exclusion from the

ruling culture; 2) articles on women's inequality in the

family based on a Marxist-feminist analysis; and 3) essays

that formulate a specific form of sociology for women,

including both theory and method, In addition, Smith has

written essays which deal solely with aspects of the SOK and

the text, several of which have been already examined in

Chapter Three, "The Social Organization of Knowledge: An

Overvieww- A reasonable place to begin is the way that

Dorothy Smith views the social organization of exclusion that

marked women's lives.

First in a series of essays on the topic of women's

socially organized exclusion from participation in the

productive or creative aspects of human society was Dorothy

S m i t h r s paper called, llA Peculiar Eclipsing: Womenr s

Exclusion from Manr s Culturew (1978a) - This work was an

expanded version of an article that was first published in

1975, in DBC ~epores* under the title Tdeological Structures

and How Women are Excludedtr, and in 1976 in Priorities: A

Publication of the N - D o P o Women's ~ o m n z i t t e e ~ , under the same

title. She argued that women have been systematically, and in

Smith, Dorothy E . 1975, Vdeological Structures and How Women are Excludedm. U8C Reports. A Special Issue for International Women's Year at UBC, 21, 5, 6-8.

Smith, D. E. 1976. *Ideological Structures and How Women are Excludedtt. Priorities: A Publication of the N . D . P . Women's Committee, 4, 2, 7-10, 27-28,

an organized fashion, excluded from a means of expression in

men's culture, and when they have actively insisted on their

right to expression, they have almost a k y s been forcibly

repressed. The governing part of society mostly made up of

men is what organized women's lives:

These organizations are part of the larger apparatus of ruling the society, the apparatus which puts it together, co- ordinates its work, manages its economic processes, generally keeps it running, and regulates and controls it* This means that the forms of thought we make use of to think about ourselves and our society originate in special positions of dominance. Since these positions of dominance are occupied by men (almost exclusively), this means that our forms of thought put together a view of the world from a place which women do not occupy. Hence, the means that women have had available to them to think, image and make actionable their experience have been made for us and not by us.''

Social organization, in this kind of setting, is conceived of

as an hierarchical force working from the top to the bottom,

where women are victimized and situated in a social

environment over which they have little control. In the

argument of women's exclusion as being a deeply embedded

property of social organization, Smith emphasized that the

problem for women was more serious than simply just bias or

prejudice, and further, was a part of the organization of

capitalism. This type of power formation exhibited itself at

lo Smithr D. E. 1978a. "A Peculiar Eclipsing: Women8 s Exclusion from Manr s Culturet1 - Women's Studies International Quarterly, 1, 4, 281-295. P- 282.

a multitude of levels of authority, in Freudian theory of

sexuality, the literature on mothering, in the mass media, in

the spiritual and intellectual intelligentsia, in the social

organization of education, at the level of discourse and

conversation. Women were excluded from power, or when they

attempted to move beyond their prescribed boundaries they

receive 'ridicule, vilification and an opposition f r o m menr."

Much of Smith's work on the socially organized exclusion

of women from 1977 - 1989 were studies of women within the

educational environment, both at the level of teaching and

administration. One extensive research project in this area

was published in 1978 and was a collaboration with Marilee

Reimer, Connie Taylor and Yoko Ueda, and other m e m b e r s of the

Wollstonecraft Research Group called "Working Paper on the

Implications of Declining Enrolment for Women Teachers in

Public, Elementary and Secondary Schools in Ontarion (1978d) .

This is one of the few investigations in her curriculum vitae

that is heavily weighted in statistical analysis, as it

pertained to women in the educational system in Ontario. A

large report consisting of some 80 pages, most of the

attention was given to tables which analyzed the position of

women teachers in comparison to men. The position of women

teachers in the Ontario educational system was not argued to

be the sole consequence of discrimination, but inequality.*

statistics were employed to provide an entry into the social

organization of the educational system. In theory, men and

women should have been competing equally for positions along

the hierarchy of the educational structure, but the social

organization of this structure was one of segregation,

exclusion, and inequality. Even women who remained unmarried,

for example, and who should have had an equitable standing and

opportunity with men, based on the organization of the

sequence of a man's life, did not have a balanced entrance to

promotion. It was being a woman that enabled their inequity,

not the burden of a household and its repercussions for their

occupational obligation^.^

Dorothy Smith also wrote about the effect of the

relations of ruling on the various organizations within the

women's movement, in the essay mentioned above called Where

There is Oppression There is ResistanceIr (1979~). She argued

that since the organizations and projects that identified

themselves as feminist and part of the Canadian Women's

Movement depended largely on state funding, their autonomy was

at risk. She admitted that it would have been difficult for

women to proceed otherwise. This dependency had its down side

Smith, Dorothy E. , Marilee Reimer, Connie Taylor and Yoko Ueda. 1978d. Working Paper No. 2 4 . Ifworking Paper on the Implications of Declining Enrolment for Women Teachers in Public, Elementary and Secondary Schools in Ontario1'. P- 3-4.

Ibid, p . 9 *

in that it enabled 'a process of absorptionr:

As the process of absorption goes on, its effects are a progressive weakening of the active dialogue, the active political talk; the continual challenges and advances, The problem is not that we donr t continue to talk. Rather our talk isnr t fed and vitalized by an intimate practical action. Now when the women's movement comes together, the call for a new theoretical base is made in a practical vacuum. The practical base of the political process is being leached away -

This essay noted the increased organizational capacities of

women through larger and more powerful networks, but the

attendant erosion of the energy and imagination of the women's

movement was 'like a starfish eating a clam, sucking the

living tissues from the shellr, as a result of the processes

of control in place through systems of organizati~n.~~

The theoretical construct which was at the basis of

Dorothy Smithr s method for a sociology for women was called

'the standpoint of womenf, a phrase which was first mentioned

in the essay "A Peculiar Eclipsing: Women's Exclusion from

Man's Culturel1 (1978a). This theory was based on the

experience of women and the social organization of their

lives, an experience 'directly felt, sensed, responded to,

prior to its social expressionr and the sociology for women

began at the point where this experience was impinged upon by

l4 Smith. 1979a. op. cit., p. 14.

IS Smith, 1979a, op. cit., p. 13.

an external social organization,16 The social organization of

women's lives has meant that their primary experience has

historically taken place in the household, and because of this

was antithetical to the sociological concept of agency, which

imputed the possibility of choice. Women had few options in

the way that the organization of their lives proceeded:

Women have little opportunity for the exercise of mastery and control, Their working lives are not structured in terms of a project of their own. The housewife, for &ample, becomes rather highly skilled at holding together and coordinating the threads and shreds of several lines of action, the projects of more than one individual, while herself pursuing none. The conflicts academic and professional women experience when they are also housewives are partly conflicts between opposing modes of organizing C O ~ S C ~ O U S ~ ~ S S -I7

In creating a sociology for women, social organization was a

pervasive aspect of the society in which we live, an everyday,

taken- f or-granted feature of our lived lives . l1 Institutional

Ethnography: A Feminist Methodn (1986d) was concerned with

the ordinary yet hidden ways in which human lives are directed

and co-ordinated. In her own experience, the simple act of

walking with her dog in her own neighbourhood was ordered by

City By-Laws, the neighbours' lawns, the forms of ownership of

her neigbourhoodrs homes/apartments and her neighbours'

l6 Smith, D. E. 1979b. .A Sociology for Women'. In: Sherman, J., ed. The P r i s m of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. P. 135,

individual expectations that were influenced by these kinds of

organization.18 Social organization was at work in the

ordinary event of having lunch with a friend, or going to the

laundromat- Every part of social life was externally

organized by a further extended series of social relations

with some form of organizational power of control. In

sociology, the control worked at the level of categories,

labels and abstraction, so that the work and activities of

what was being analyzed disappeared. For example, the the

category 'single motherf made the work accomplished in this

experience disappear, or what single mothers did in relation

to their children's education did not get understood as a form

of work.19

The greatest part of Smith's work in the period from 1977

to 1989 was spent in the creation of a Marxist-feminist

analysis of the social organization of women's lives. In

1979, she wrote a paper called lrWomen's Inequality and the

~arnilyll~~, work which she identified as comprising part of a

book that she was writing for New Star Books in Vancouver on

women and class, which ultimately did not get published. This

la Smith, D.E. 1986. ltInstitutional Ethnography: A Feminist Method", Resources for Feminist Research, 15, 1, 6- 13. P. 7,

l9 Smith, 1986, OF. cit., 8.

20 It was eventually published as: Smith, Dorothy E. 1981b. "Women's Inequality and the Familyn. In: Moscovitch, Allen and Glenn Drover, eds, Inequality= Essays on the Poli t i c a l Economy of Social Welfare. Toronto : University of Toronto press.

essay was a study of the social organization of women's work,

both within and outside the home, and the historical changes

that occurred in class settings of women's inequality. Using

examples from farm households in Canadian history, she showed

that women held a position comparable to a managerial capacity

in the organization of the home, The wife's work in the

household fostered her husband's situation in the economic

domain, but it did not contribute to a womanf s own

advancement. She argued that the early Canadian farm family

functioned in much the same way that a small business would in

a capitalist mode of production, and womenf s work capacity was

assumed to be inexha~stible,~' Under the rise of the middle-

class family and capitalism under a corporate form, business

became separated from the home and social organization assumed

two distinct configurations. where men moved from easily from

one to the other, but women were increasingly isolated, and

'the domestic world becomes truly privatizedr, and her work

was an appropriation, a private one, rather than a public

one. 22 Smith' s work on the social organization of women in

the family from a Marxist-feminist viewpoint followed

recurrent themes of historical changes over time,

One well-known Marxist-feminist analysis that Dorothy

Smith wrote during the period of the 1980s described as a

renaissance for women, was one she shared with Varda Burstyn

Smith, 1979f, op. cit., P. 14-15.

22 Ibid, p . 23-

387

called Women, Class, Family and the State (1985b) . Varda

Burstyn was an active member of the Revolutionary Marxist

Group and a socialist feminist? She wrote on a regular

basis for the Socialist V o i c e producing such articles as

"Socialism and Feminism: The Beginning of Herstory" (1978)

and "Spring in English Canada: The Flowering of the Women's

Movementrt (1978) ,24 She also wrote a long editorial letter to

the Marxist newspaper In Stnzggle commenting on the process of

'rethinking huge questionsr, that was besetting the

organization with regard to women8 s issues 125

W o m e n , C l a s s F a m i l y and the State (1985b) analyses a

social organization of women in the family where again they,

and other family members, have little control over their

condition, creating a dependent situation for women:

Choice, decision, moral commitment, love, hate, alienation, are there in a context and in conditions in which family members have no choice, where their particular commitments to each other make a difference in the terms of the fate of individuals and of the family as a relational working unit, but do not change the conditions, means, grounds, of what they may or can do* No matter how it is done, where men are wage earners and women cannot earn enough outside the home to

23 Varda Burstyn was responsible for the donation of the archival material from the Revolutionary Marxist Group to the Women's Movement Archive Collection at the Morriset Library at the University of Ottawa.

WMAC. File 86. Revolutionary Marxist Group.

'* WMAC. File 86. Revolutionary Marxist Group. Letter from Varda Burstyn to In Struggle, November 4, 1981. Published December, 1981.

provide for their children independently of a man and his wage, dependency permeates every aspect of the interpersonal process in the home - regardless of how loving, how caring, how much or little respect each has for the other, how they have been able to work together, how much the man has learned to grant autonomy to his wife, or she has learned to assert herself vis-a-vis hint?

As part of an organization of work in a capitalist economy,

womenf s domestic Labour had, until the womenr s movement,

remained obscured from the external means of production, even

though it was a indispensable factor in the process of

economic production and the reproduction of the worker.

Women, C l a s s F a m i l y and the State (1985b) is one of the few

places where Dorothy Smith analyzes women's domestic labour

under capitalism, as it was a theoretical debate she largely

eschewed, not unlike her disinterest in domestic labour as a

practice, already mentioned in the introduction to this

section. She preferred instead to write in a mode of macro-

sociology, to deal with larger issues, such as the corporate

order, the educational system, and the organization of

relations in political economy.

2 6 Burstyn, Varda. 1985 . Women, Class, Family and the State. By Varda Burstyn and Dorothy E- Smith. Forward by Roxana Ng. Toronto: Garamond, P. 6.

Dorothy Smith's R e p l y to Poststructuralism in the 19908

Dorothy Smith's response to the encroachment of

poststructuraEsm and postmodernism in socioLogy throughout

the 1990s became manifested in her work as an interest in the

text and discourse, which had been taken up by theorists like

Barthes and Foucault- She displayed a willingness to confront

this theoretical paradigm, but with an attendant loyalty to

the materialism which she appropriated in her earlier career

from Marxf s The German Ideology. What emerged was an amalgam

of the two eras, the materialism drawn from Marxist-feminism

on the one hand, and postmodern theory on the other. Other

than being amenable to adopting a sociological interest in

'discourse' and the 'textr, and an attention to the work of

Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Smith never does embrace

the posturing of poststructuralist language with its

specialized lexicon and references to the psychoanalytic and

the semiotic.

At the very point when one would expect a decrease in

productivity, Dorothy Smith's career trajectory in the 1990s

has escalated. She continues to write in a driven and

prolific manner. Since 1990, she has published two books and

some thirty odd articles, written a number of unpublished

pieces, and contributed at least half a dozen smaller magazine

articles to Canadian Dimension. Her curriculum vitae was

updated in July, 1997. From 1990 - 1994, she participated in

56 public lectures, conferences and addresses. Since 1990 her

academic awards have increased, from the Outstanding

Contribution Award for the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology

Association (1990). the Hawthorne Lecturer for CSAA (1990),

the John Porter Award (1990), the Degr Prize Lecturer at the

University of Waterloo (1991), the Landsdome Professor at the

University of Victoria (1991). LL-D. Honoris Causa from the

University of British Columbia (1992), the Kerstin Hesselgren

Professor in Sweden (1993). and the Jessie Bernard Award for

Lifetime Achievement from the American Sociological

Association (L993). At the time of writing this dissertation,

she is about to release a new book in the fall of 1998, based

on a collection of the papers which she has published since

1990, called Writing the Social: Cri t ique, Theory and

Inves t igat ions.

The categories of her work at this time are several, for

instance, she has written some articles in the area of women

and education. Two examples of this are her work with Alison

Griffith, wWomenrs Work as Mothers: A New Look at the

Relation of Class, Family and School Achievementu (1989e) and

"Girls and Schooling: Their Own Critique" (1995a). Two

essays are unique in their subject matter. "Whistling Women:

Reflections on Rage and Rationalitym (1992b) is an historical

rationale for the event of the Montreal Massacre that occurred

at LrEcole Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989, and

there is an introduction to a collection of essays by Sally L.

Hacker to which Smith wrote an introduction. She had spent

several days interviewing Sally Hacker shortly before she

died_27 There are two papers which directly address, and are

a critique of, postmodern theory. One is an unpublished

paper, "The Out-of-Body Experience: Contradictions Within

Femini~rn~~ (1992e) , and Telling the Truth after Postmodernisml~

(1996b) . Of all these papers, the majority, eleven in

are devoted to the analysis of the text, textual forms and

textually-mediated discourse, a huge body of evidence of her

tenacious fascination with this area.

One of Dorothy Smith's forays into the materiality of the

text is an unpublished paper called "Texts in ActionN which

she wrote with Jack Whalen in Oregon. They were interested in

examining how the text entered into the social organization of

sequences of talk, and how the text, in standard conversation

analysis, is not usually recognized as part of the talk- They

argue that the text 'can be seen to operate as something like

a third party to the talkr :

Like Levy, we insist on the materiality of texts to how they operate- However, we have decided to remain with the term of 'textr in part because the notion of 'documentf is counter intuitive in many ordinary contexts, but also because we want to preserve the term as a bridgehead connecting the analysis of texts as constituents of social organization with literary and cultural theory. Our use of

27 Smith, Dorothy E., ed. 1990. Doing it the Hard W a y : Investigations of Gender and Technology, By Sally Hacker, London: Unwin Hyman. P. 1,

28 This documents the articles which she has written/published to May 15, 1998.

the concept of text insists on its materiality - hence on its local presence. in whatever form, 29

This work analyzed the way that the text operated in the local

setting of 9 - 1 4 emergency dispatching in a public safety

communication centre, where Jack Whalen worked for a period of

some fifteen months, and in this local site, it is the

computer text that becomes the third party in the sequence of

talk between the call-taker and the caller,

The material form of the 'textr varies in Dorothy Smith's

recent work, in that the article called "Politically Correct:

An Ideological Codet1 is an analysis of a radio documentary,

the CBC program 'Sunday Morning* hosted by Mary Lou Finlay.

This work is typical of Dorothy Smithr s recent work, in that

she is often partial to Foucault's notion of discourse, and

has been developing a theory of public and other forms of

discourse based on Mikhail Bakhtinrs idea of speech genre in

his theory of the novel.30 Another paper examines the "Report

of the Climate Committeem (Committee to Make the Department

More Supportive of Women). It is an analysis of a report

written by a junior faculty member of the Political Science

Department at the University of Victoria, and the response to

29 Smith, Dorothy E. and Jack Whalen. lrTexts in Actionw. Unpublished paper. This essay was likely written in the Spring of 1996, when Dorothy Smith's reduced work load at OISE/UT allowed for her to work with Jack Whalen in Oregon.

30 Smith, Dorothy E. 1995~. "Politically Correct : An Ideological Codem. In: Richer, Stephen and Lorna Weir, eds . Beyond P o l i t i ca l Correctness : Toward the Inclusive University. P. 29-30,

that report, a letter from some eight male faculty members

demanding an apology from the Climate Committee members.

Smith pinpoints the construction formats of each text,

identifying what makes the women's committee report less

authoritative, and the appropriation of legal jargon by the

male professors in their letter, which authorizes their

demands. 3r

One poststructuralist theorist thae Dorothy Smith has

turned to in the explication of 'textr is Roland Barthes,

whose 1977 essay, "Work and Textw, supports a materialist

account of the text, in that 'it reinstates the reader/writer

or listener/speaker as actual people situated and active in

the everyday/everynight worlds of their own

Barthes is quoted in her recent essay, "From the Marginsrr

(1997~) which studies several 'subtexts', i-e., several long

quotations from several authors in different disciplines, to

observe how these branches, sociology, anthropology, and

political science have incorporated and developed methods for

objectifying the realities of people's lives. In one of my

interviews with Dorothy Smith, she once informed me that she

3' S m i t h , Dorothy E. 1997. IrReport and Repression: Textual Hazards for Feminists in the AcademyIr. Linda Eyre and Leslie Roman, eds . Dangerous Territories. New York: Routledge,

32 Smith, Dorothy E. 1997~. IrFrom the Margins: Women's Standpoint as a Method of Inquiry in the Social Sciencesw. Gender, Technology and D e v e l o p m e n t , 1, 1, 113-135. P. 115,

was addicted to reading3, in that she always had a book in

her hand, on planes, at home, in her office, or, as I have

sometimes observed her, walking down the hallways of OISE/UT.

Now, in her contemporary approach to sociology, the text has

taken over her consciousness, and since its formations and

configurations are incalculable, she seems to have found an

infatuation to last her to the end of her days.

Milestones of The Toronto Women's Movement, 1967 - 1988

This historical analysis covers the beginnings of Women's

Liberation in Toronto, and its rise to the height of feminist

activism in the 1 9 8 0 ~ ~ documenting Dorothy Smith's connections

andfor direct participation, and its attendant changes over

that time. The periodization for this historical treatment

ends at 1 9 8 8 ~ ~ ~ when the Toronto Women's Movement was

doubtlessly at its most powerful, and was begiming to deal

seriously with the issue of its endemic racism. Whereas the

Vancouver Women's Movement was characterized by a 'grass

rootsg quality, the

33 Interview bv

Toronto mode of

the author with

feminist activism in the

Dorothy E. Smith during - lunch in the OISE/UT cafeteria, August 21,-1997.

34 The choice of the date of 1988 as a n end to the historical treatment to the Toronto Women's Movement is an arbitrary one, chosen to restrict the analysis to a manageable time frame which could be adequately dealt with in the space of one chapter. A whole book could be written on the fascinating history of the Toronto Women's Movement, so I: have had to rigorously limit my approach.

1980s was eclectic, splitting off into various networks based

on class, sexuality' (dis) ability, academic connections,

groups based on racial and ethnic affiliations, political

interests, issues of the moment, and cultural concerns. I

make an attempt here to include historical evidence which will

have a direct or indirect affiliation with Dorothy Smith, with

the exception of the introduction to Toronto Women's

Liberation, when she was still in Vancouver. I have included

the early years in the Toronto Womenr s Movement as a way of

comparing the activism that was accomplished by women in

Vancouver, analyzed in Chapter Eight, and a way of documenting

the continuity of the Toronto Women's Movement. Due to the

complexity of feminist activism that 1 am recovering, many of

the events and groups may not have a firsthand connectedness,

but would certainly be aspects of the Toronto Women's Movement

which Dorothy Smith would have been aware of, and would have

been a part of the social environment which was an ongoing

force in the site of the production of her work.

Thus, the organization of this chapter is not a mirror

image of the way that Chapter Eight is organized with regard

to women's activism in Vancouver. I begin by providing an

historical background to the Women's Liberation Movement in

Toronto before Dorothy Smithr s arrival, as a way of

orientation to the Toronto Women's Movement. As feminist

publishing was a strong force in the Toronto Women's Movement,

and an important venue for Dorothy Smith's academic and

intellectual work, I provide a segment studying several

feminist journals and publishing enterprises which emerged

during the renaissance period of the 1980s, including a the

history of the confrontation with endemic racism in the

Women's Press. Rather than providing a separate section

devoted to economic analysis, as in Chapter Eight, the

financial resources mobilized by the Toronto Womenr s Movement

will be integrated section by section,

Introduction to Toronto Women8 s ~iberation~'

At present, there is no comprehensive feminist work

available on the local histories of Canadian Women's

Movements, even though there are several historical treatments

of the Canadian Women's Movement as a whole, leaving a huge

gap in the knowledge that is accessible on feminist a c t i v i s m

in C a n a d a . Mentior, of the Toronto Women's Liberation Movement

(WLM) as a specific entity is restricted to a few scattered

pages in several texts, and a few paragraphs in Prentice et

a1 , ' s Canadian Women: A History (198 8) - 1 would argue that

35 In most accounts, the Canadian Women's Movement begins with the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women on February 16, 1967, This w a s set up on the example of a number of similar Commissions on Women's Status that. had been organized internationally, principally, the U.S. Status of Women's Committee, 1961-63; France, 1966; and West Germany, 1962-66. The first such Committee on the status of women was set up by the League of Nations in 1935, followed by the United Nations in 1946. See: Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. 1970 - P. 1.

most of the work done to date on this fascinating area of

Canadian women's history is comprised of a bare bones of

material, and is frequently deficient in any kind of vigilant

analysis, with the possible exception of Canadian Women: A

History (1988) . More recent work making a positive

contribution to the history of the Canadian Women's Movement

are Pierson et al., 1993; and Agnew, 1996. The rich resource

of historical material available at the Morriset Library

Special Collection, the Women's Movement Archive Collection

(WMAC) has largely untapped in the documentation of Canadian

womenrs history. The possibilities for this kind of work are

unlimited, and there is a stockpile of knowledge yet to be

reclaimed in this area.

The earliest organizing in Toronto, mentioned in the

opening statement of the chapter, emerged from the Canadian

student Left, specifically, the Student Union for Peace Action

(SUPA) in August of 1967 .36 Dorothy Smith was teaching at the

University of Essex at Colchester at the time, and would

arrive in Vancouver in the September of 1968. During the

first year of the women's movement in Toronto, 1967-68, only a

few sporadic meetings were held, and the principal objective

of the WLM at this time was the preparation and presentation

in Ottawa of the "Brief to the House of Commons Health and

Welfare Committee on Abortion Law ReformI1. It documented the

36 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement. Limpus, Laurel as told to Sherry Rochester. "The History of the Toronto Women's Liberation Movementrr. February, 1971.

appalling statistic that 800 women in Canada died in 1967 as a

result of illegal abortions or home remediesm3' Women who

belonged to the Women's Liberation Movement also belonged to

the Toronto Student Movement, and at this time a split

occurred, forming the New Left Caucus. These women were being

pressured from both sides on the issue of loyalty - the Left and Women's Liberation, The division of the women from the

New Left Caucus took place in the following manner:

Some men in the New Left Caucus were circulating a paper of little anecdotes which were very chauvinistic in character - bad caricatures of femininity. It accidentally fell into the hands of the women's caucus of the group. Ten women read it, blew their minds, got together in one night and wrote a position paper. In that paper, we said we had no intention of working with men who, in private, had that kind of caricature of us, We said that we didnr t think that jokes about being feminine were at all funny- We considered leaving the left, but we decided that we should tell them to leave insteadD3'

Another of the original community-related events challenged by

Toronto Womenrs Liberation occurred at a 'winter bikinir

contest in 1968 where protesters held up a meat-cutter's chart

to symbolise the merchandising of female flesh, and another

student appeared in a full-length fur coat, with a sign

37 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, Women's Liberation Group. Brief to the House of Commons Health and Welfare Committee on Abortion Law Reform. P, 4.

C File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation. Laurel Limpus, op. cit., p.5,

reading "I: have a mma"

In the second year of Toronto Women's Liberation, 1968 - 69, several women from Toronto and Ottawa attended the Chicago

Women's Liberation Conference- This had a important influence

on early feminism in Toronto, and was the first q o s u r e for

most of these women to the practice of consciousness-raisingr

who had 'never heard of consciousness-raising before at

allr - 4 0 The central debate of this conference was centred

around women who advanced the idea of consciousness-raising

and those who believed that the main oppression that women had

to face lay in the question of Marxism. After the occasion of

the Chicago Conference, the WLM group called a meeting and

about 20 or 30 women from the University of Toronto attended,

which was described as 'pretty middle class', and for the

first few months just congregated for the purposes of chatting

to each other on various issues. Many of the women had

concerns around aligning Women's Liberation with a Marxist

viewpoint, and it was in these meetings that dreadful

arguments broke out on this question, and led to the first

split and the formation of the Toronto New Feminists. It took

about two months of clashes for the first split in Toronto

Women's Liberation to take place-4f This account of the

39 Prentice, et al., 1988, op. cit., p. 353.

'O WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation. Limpus, op- cite, p. 2.

41 Ibid,

division that led to radical feminism in Canada differs from

that in Canadian Women: A Eiistory (1988) - This version

stated stated that it was Bonnie Kreps who started the first

radical feminist group in Canada, abruptly leaving a meeting

of Toronto Womenf s Liberation in 1969, rejecting the idea that

women's oppression lay in the home.42 It was based on a

letter from Kreps, a former activist with radical feminists in

New York. Rather than being the consequence of the actions of

one person and one event. the inauguration radical f e m i n i s m

in Toronto was likely the result of the elongated context of

two month stretch bitter quarrelling the Toronto

culminating in the incident of Krepsf leaving, Many of the

women in Toronto Women's Liberation were unwilling to entirely

repudiate male members of the Left, and felt that although

they were oppressors, they should not be the enemy.43

Toronto meetings began take procedural

and structural issues into account, and the group's

organization became increasingly formal. Qualifications for

membership in the Toronto WLM were: 'a person is a member if

she is a woman, comes to general meetings, puts her name on

42 This is documented in two places, using the same letter from Bonnie Kreps : I) Prentice et a1 - . eds . 1 9 8 8 . Canadian Women : A History, Toronto : Harcourt , Brace, Jovanovich, P . 357; and 2) Burt, Sandra, Lorraine Code and Lindsay Dorney. 1993 , Changing Patterns: Women in Canada- Toronto : McLelland and Stewart. P. 165.

Limpus, cit ,

the mailing list, and considers herself a memberr ,4q The main

organization, which in 1969 consisted of about 150 members,

was divided into subgroups based on individual activities.

The responsibility of sharing information among groups was the

responsibility of the 'chairmanr, and decision-making was

enacted on a democratic basis* Women's Liberation in Toronto

at this time still aligned itself with the New Left and it

formulated specific policies with regard to other Toronto

groups, and participation in projects with other groups, It

welcomed women affiliated with the press, but insisted that

they adopt the group's attitude to the press, namely that 'we

will not be able to rely on the llbourgeois pressw to build the

kind of movement that we Women were encouraged to

participate in strikes, projects of various kinds, to do radio

programmes, and to use discretion when representing the

rn~vement.'~ Women like Molly Moore began to organize new

women's dinners, many retreats for w o m e n were held in the

summertime, and services like Dial-A-Commie were in~tituted.~~

Financial affairs for the new Women's Liberation Movement

in Toronto were fairly straightforward, although an ideology

44 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, Structural Procedures Accepted July 1969, 0092.

45 Ibid.

Ibid. This document was typed by volunteer labour by Steve Moore, Worker-Student Alliance, Toronto Student Movement.

47 Limpus, op. cit ,

of anti-capitalism, also present in the Vancouver Women's

Movement, likely interfered with any detailed historical

documentation of ordinary monetary concerns, so evidence

available for an economic analysis of available resources is

sparse. Rent for the WLM office at the University of Toronto

was $40 per month and other expenses included the telephone,

$20 per month; Dial-A-Commie at $50 a month and office

supplies costing $10 per month. O f f ice work was usually

accomplished by volunteer labour and members were requested to

pledge a certain amount of money each month to cover

expenses. 48 Fund raising for the Toronto Womenr s Caucus took

the form of selling Women's Liberation literature at meetings,

where a table for pamphlets and donations would be set up.

Greeting cards with a Women's Liberation graphic, both for

Christmas and year round use, were also sold.49 In 1970,

Women's Liberation literature was generated through Hogtown

Press, and it was suggested that women on the literature

Committee work directly with Hogtown to eliminate duplication

of bo~kkeeping.~~ Money for subscriptions to newsletters was

petitioned, and members of Women's Liberation were available

for speaking engagements, where an honorarium was charged.

48 WMAC. File 509 . Toronto Minutes of the General Meeting.

49 WMAC. File 509. Toronto minutes. No date-

'' WMAC- File 509. Toronto Minutes of the General Meeting,

Women's Liberation Movement. September 15, 1970.

Women's Caucus, Early

Women's Liberation Movement. September 15, 1970,

Rita MacNeil, who was then a member of the Toronto Women's

Caucus, wrote songs for the Women's Liberation Movement, and

the Caucus charged $2 for a recording of

In 1969, an amendment was made to the criminal code on

abortion in Canada, allowing for three physician member

hospital boards to decide whether or not a woman was eligible

to receive a legal abortion, At the same time, a further

legal change was made making it no longer a criminal offense

to give out information on birth control methods- In the

summer of 1969, the Toronto WLM began an educational campaign

around the problem of women's general lack of knowledge of

birth control, and were provided with free space a couple of

evenings a week on the University of Toronto Campus- Later

on, it was found that great numbers of women were much more

interested in finding out information on the availability of

legal/illegal abortions. Abortion quickly became the central

issue of the Toronto WLM in 1969 to 1970, and the office which

had provided solely birth control information was given the

name of the Women's Liberation Birth Control Information and

Abortion Referral Clinic- They had attained information on

legal abortions in England and safe, reliable, but illegal

abortions that were available in several parts of Canada for a

cost of between $200 and $400. For most women, this was too

expensive, and so the women at the centre began assisting

WMAC. Toronto Women's Caucus. Open Letter from Iva Stanley of Toronto Women's Caucus, October 15, 1971,

404

pregnant women in the complex process of going before hospital

abortion boards.52 The same year, a report emerged in the

press quoting Sherry Brydson, a University of Toronto student

member of the WLM, who stated that she was arranging '2 or 3'

abortions per week for young women in Quebec and even

suggested that there might be enough students to organize

charter flights to England for the purposes of obtaining

abortions. Another member of Women's Liberation denied any

involvement on the part of the movement in procuring abortions

in Quebec and el~ewhere.'~ By September of 1970, there was

direct evidence of involvement of WLM in the procurement of

abortions. The WLM Newsletter reported that a Mr. Mitchell

from Detroit, Michigan, was the business manager for a group

of physicians who called themselves "the D and C Sixw who were

organizing an abortion clinic in Niagara Falls, New York, The

report by Lyn Center stated that the abortion collective would

assist the group of doctors to 'make their first thou or twor

by chartering a bus from Toronto to send 20 or so women at a

rate of $300 per abortion, $200 if the pregnancy is in its

52 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement. Brief to the Badgley Committee to Study Therapeutic Abortion Law by Harriet Kideckel. A Brief History of the Toronto Women's Liberation Birth Control Information and Abortion Referral Centre, 1969-70-

53 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement. uWomen8s student movement denies sending girls for Quebec abortions. Toronto Star, September 26, 1969.

eighth week or less . '* In response to the 1969 legislation, women's liberation

groups across Canada organized a protest called the Abortion

Caravan in May, 1970, which for 11 days travelled from

Vancouver to Ottawa with a coffin symbolic of all Canadian

women who had died of illegal abortions, the climax of which

was the event of the women protesters chaining themselves to

the Visitor's Gallery in the House of Commons, using the

militant tactics of the S~ffragettes.~~ After the Abortion

Caravan, member's of Toronto WLM consolidated to form an

abortion collective, whose work consisted of maintaining an

answering service at the Women's Liberation Abortion Referral

Service at Spadina and Harbord. 56 According to the 1970

minutes of the WLM in Toronto, the work of the abortion

collective quickly became frustrating, Consequently the

abortion collective made the decision to operate autonomously:

Last month the abortion collective came to present its case to the general meeting for support, enlightenment and fresh ideas, We came away with an overwhelming feeling of an impotent organization unable to come to grips with the reality of any practical situation, We didn't come away

54 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, Minutes of the General Meeting. September 15, 1970. "Abortion Days ! rr by Lyn Center,

55 Prentice, et al., op. cit . , p. 354. An account of the events of the Abortion Caravan can be found in Pierson, Ruth Roach, et a1 , 1993 . Canadian Women's Issues. Volume I. Strong Voices. Toronto : James Lorimer. P . 123 - 127.

56 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement. Abortion and Birth Control Collective.

with one new constructive idea, The upshot of the meeting is that the collective will make its own decisions, run its own affairs, and forget about obtaining any sort of intelligent response from Wt- There was a whole series of questf ons and criticisms from people who were totally naive of our past and present (eg. contacting doctors, discussing clinics) - Its hard to imagine how frustrating such suggestions are until you realize how hard we worked during the summer & how we exhausted nearly every possibility only to have the hospitals tighten up the abortion quotas?'

In April of 1971, the Toronto Women's Liberation Abortion and

Birth Control Collective prepared a brief, "A Realistic

Programme for Birth Control and Abortion for Ontario Under the

Present Federal Law", outlining the then current situation of

abortion alternatives for women and made suggestions for

change. Of the 230 hospitals in Ontario which were eligible

for three-member physician committees, few had actually

organized them, and the ones who had, used them over-

cautiously, if at all. This brief recommended that all

hospitals set up therapeutic abortion committees, and that the

federal government establish approved abortion clinics that

have birth control and venereal disease educati~n.~~

By the early 19708, what had begun with a single

organization in Toronto, the Women's Liberation Movement, that

identified itself as socialist, and interested in addressing

57 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, WLM Newsletter. November, 10, 1970. Abortion Report by Carolyn Ross.

the practical side of women's concerns, had split into several

groups. Some of these w e r e the Women's Coalition, which

included the Toronto New Feminists, a radical feminist group,

Saint Joanr s Alliance, the Womenf s Committee of the United

Auto Workers, the Toronto Women's Caucus (a group of women

formed by a break with Toronto New Feminists, and had 100

members with 600 on a mailing list in October, 1971); Voice of

Women, and Rising Up Angry, which included the Leila Khaled

Collective, the Young Socialists, and the Womenf s Commission

of the League for Socialist Action- Splitting and chaos were

ordinary occurrences, a phenomenon that did not necessarily

mean negative consequences for the women's movement, but could

be interpreted the creation of a vibrant diversity. Besides

the early split of the New Feminists, several women left the

Women's Liberation Movement documented by a letter on October

3, 1971, signed by seven members of the group. They

criticized the movement for 1) a decline in membership, due to

a 'system of friendship alliancesr which they felt was

undemocratic; 2) its elite nature as it was comprised of 'a

very select group of womenr; and 3) a lack of structure, i,e-

no regular minutes kept at meetings, that they believed was

necessary for mass political work-59 The issue of 'red-

baitingr was one that sparked division between Women's

s9 WMAC. File 509. Toronto Women's Liberation Movement, Letter from Barb Cameron, Charnie Cunningham, Lynn Lang, Ruth McEwan, Cathy Pike, Judy Skinner and Leslie Towers to the Toronto Women's Liberation Movement. October 3, 1971,

Liberation and socialist groups- In late March, 1971,

Corileen North and Yvonne Trower, founding members of the

Toronto Women's Caucus, resigned from the group asserting that

it had been allowed to be dominated by a Trotskyist group, the

League for Socialist Action, The Trotskyist women, voting as

a bloc majority had begun to control the business meetings of

the Toronto Women's Caucus. This kind of friction was

characteristic in Toronto, and in the patterns of localized

women's movements elsewhere in North America, and a necessary

part of the phenomenal growth of feminist politics and

culture. By the time Dorothy Smith arrived in Toronto,

diversification had already taken place, and becoming a part

of this women's movement proved to be a difficult process.

Feminist Publishing in Toronto

The earliest forms of publishing in the Toronto Women's

Movement came in the way of individual newsletters and briefs

put out by early feminist organizations, 'usually cranked out

on Gestetners, without much regard for aesthetic appealrO6'

One of the first in Canada was the Toronto Women's Caucus

publication called The Velvet Fist, established in 1970, which

was published every six weeks, subscriptions costing $2 for 10

60 Pierson, Ruth Roach et al. 1993. Canadian Women's Issues. Volume I. Strong Voices. Toronto : James Lorimer.

issues. 61 The Toronto Women's Place Newsletter printed from

1972 - 1976 had a circulation count of 3.000 in the height of

its reputation, in a feminist publishing industry which in

Canada seldom exceeds a spread of 2,50 0. 62 Feminist journals

in Toronto, by the time Dorothy Smith arrived at OISE/UT in

1977, had become more refined. and rather than publishing

group news began dealing with poetry and articles on feminist

political and cultural interests- Almost immediately on her

arrival, she published llEducation and Women's Exclusion from

Our Culturew (1979d) in Fireweed: A Women's Literary and

Cultural Journal. Fireweed, a quarterly journal that dealt

with politics and literature, which began publishing in

1978 . " Another of her early Toronto articles, "Where There

is Oppression, There is Resistancem (1979~) was printed in the

special Fifth Anniversary Issue of Branching Out: A Canadian

Magazine for Women which started as a periodical in 1974. and

by 1980, had began to run out of resources. Dorothy Smithrs

speech on "Gender, Class and Powerm at the Marxist Institute

on September 27, 1984 was reviewed by Barbara Cameron in 1984,

in Cayenne: A S o c i a l i s t Feminist Bulletin, which had a brief

61 WMAC. Toronto Womenrs Caucus. Open letter from Iva Stanley to Women's Liberation, October 15, 1971.

62 Pierson, op. cit., p.408-9.

63 Pierson, op. cit., p . 408.

410

run in the 1980s .64 Dorothy Smith was also a support person

in Toronto for an exiled member of a Russian feminist

collective, who had helped to create the first feminist

journal in Russia in s i x t y years, Tatiana Mamonove was

invited by several Canadian feminists to tour Canada, and

Smith helped to co-ordinate her visit in Toronto, from

February 26 - March 1, 1981, with Eve Zaramba of Broadside, Carolyn Egan from the International Women's Day Committee, and

Shelley Acheson of the Ontario Federation of Labour."' Traces

of Dorothy Smith's influence exist in feminist publishing in

Toronto from the late 1970s onwards, either in the way of

published articles, reviews or advertisements of her books.

Another feminist periodical that started originally in

Toronto was The Other Woman: A Revolutionary Feminist

Newspaper. It began publication in 1972 and the price was

twenty-five cents per issue. In this journal, it is possible

to trace the development of increasingly polished forms of

feminist analysis and the evolution of a language of feminism

through the decade of the 1970s. In the first two years, the

layout technique lacked any kind of skilled approach, The

winter, 1972, edition contained the article "Each One Teach

Onett, and was a feminist lesson on the basics of electricity.

64 WMAC. File 364. Cayenne. Toronto. Cayenne: A Socialist Feminist Bulletin, November/December, 1984.

65 WMAC . International Women8 s Day Committee. Toronto. Letter to Carol Egan from Chrystia Chomiak, Thursday, December 11, 1980.

A cartoon portrayed Pierre Trvdeau strapped into an electric

chair with appropriate head gear with the caption, Electrical

Power: Make Electricity Work for In 1973, it reported

the arrest of Adrienne Potts, a feminist song-writer:

On May 15 [I9731 Adrienne and a friend walked down Bloor Street after seeing a movie at Rochdale. They w e r e approached by two men in a car. Thinking the two men were two male chauvinists out cruising, A d r i e ~ e gave them the finger and continued walking- The men circled around the block twice and identified themselves as Metro Toronto Police from 52 Division. They said that it was NOT VERY LADYLIKE to tell police officers to fuck off, Adrienne was then told she was under arrest for possession of marijuana, even though she had not been searched and did not have anything on her ,€'

The above passage attends the early f e m i ~ s t issue of sexism,

to police brutality and harassment, and the plain verbal and

gesticular language used at the time of the early women's

movement, phenomena which were not usually reported in the

mainstream press.

Ms. Potts was also involved in the renowned nrBrunswick

Fourt1 incident which occurred on January 5, 1974 with Sue

Wells, Heather Beyer and Pat Murphy, in the Brunswick Tavern

on Bloor Street West, The four women were drinking in the

tavern and were joined by a man who became obnoxious and when

the women asked him to leave their table he came back and

66 WMAC. The Other Woman: A Revolutionary Feminist Newspaper. Winter, 1972 , P . 11.

67 I1Adrienne Potts 2bzestedIu- The Other Woman: A Revolutionary Feminist Newspaper, 1, 6, 1973, p. 5.

poured beer over Adrienne's head, The Bmswick Tavern

provided an outlet for customers to get up on the stage and

sing, so Adrienne and Pat went up to the stage and to the

melody of "1 enjoy being a girl", began to singtt :

When I see a man who's sexist And who does something I donr t like, I just tell him that he can fuck off I enjoy being a dyke I've always been an uppity woman I refuse to run I: stand and strike Cuz Lr m gay and 1' m proud and T r m angry And r enjoy being a dyke.

The bar manager disconnected the microphone after the first

few lines and shortly afterwards eight police officers arrived

and the women were arrested, abused by the officers, and

thrown into a paddy wagon- It took five hours to complete the

paper work for charges of creating a disturbance. Judy

LaMarsh handled the case free of charge, arguing that their

detainment amounted to a form of false imprisonment- Three of

the "Brunswick Fourt1 were acquitted, but as Judge Waisberg

considered Adrienne Potts to be the loudest woman in the group

and the 'obvious' cause of the disturbance, he gave her a

suspended sentence and three months probation.='

By October 1974, The Other Woman was giving a great deal

of attention to feminist art and culture and had a photo of

Rita McNeil on the front cover by Annette Clough, promoting

WMAC, File 357. Brunswick Four. "Four Women Claim Police Harassmenttf .

WMAC. File 357. Brunswick Four. "The Brunswick Four Minus One : Trialtr .

McNei1° s music. Born a Woman: Rita MacNeil Song-Book was the

f i r s t book of songs to emerge from the Canadian Women's

Movement, and was published by Women's Press, Rita MacNeilrs

initial compositions came out of her experience with the

women' s movement. The Other Woman also published an account

of a student show that took place at the Ontario College of

Art in February, 1973, in the student's gallery. It was a

show called tcWomenrs Worktr, put on as a contrast to commercial

galleries which discriminated against women, an exhibition

which 'was a tremendous critical and educational successr and

resulted in a Women's Artmobile which drew its material from

women artists from all over Southern Ontario. In 1974, a

story appeared about Cora, the Women's Liberation Bookmobile-

Travelling around small-town Southern Ontario, it carried

materials on wages for housework, feminist novels and poetry,

non-sexist children's books, the law, abortion, birth control

and lesbianism. Design for the periodical was still rough,

for example, subtitles were done i n crude hand-printing.

A change in format in The Other Woman appeared in 1976.

It began with its usual simple layout style, with an article

about interviewing Miss Canada 1975, who had assimilated the

language of the women's movement in her acceptance speech. It

included an account of the protest of the Miss Canada Pageant

The Other Woman, 3, 1, August, 1974.

'I The Other Woman, October, 1974, p. 14.

414

that had been organized by a coalition of Toronto women.72

The next edition featured an article on feminist credit

unions, m a r k i n g a change to practical financial matters, from

the journal's original mandate of reporting events reflecting

the early women's movement preoccupation with sexism and

ideology. It gave sensible advice on how to open a credit

union, using the example of the Metro Toronto Women's Credit

Union, which held its first meeting on February 27, 1976. 73

A radical transformation took place in the structure of

the periodical by the following issue, in that it began to

contain sophisticated advertisements, graphic designs, and

book reviews, Dorothy E - Smith' s and Sara Davidr s Women Look at Psychiatry was reviewed by Margaret Murray. The review was

uncritical, and supported Smith's remark in Chapter Eight

about the inferior quality of the book's binding:

it gathers together factual information and experiential reports in a well- balanced and easy flowing fashion; it is an eye-opening source book for those new at the game and as Press Gangrs first major publication it is a success,-a small note. the book is poorly bound, the glue leaving something to be desired (like its function) . i found that by the time i had read the book in its entirety, the book and its jacket had gone their separate ways. 74

This issue of The Other Woman included attractive graphic

72 The O t h e r Woman, 4, 1, 1976, p. 3 .

73 Ibid, 4, 3, 1976, p. 4-6.

" Ibid, 4, 5, 1976, p. 21.

designs promoting the women's book store, Papyrus, Goldberry

Natural Foods General Store, the Times Change W-*e

Employmeat Service, and the ad from Glad Day Gay Liberation

Books and Periodicals at 4 Collier Street, likely a new source

of income for the periodical. The next edition featured an

interview with Press Gang Publishers, In 1977, The Other

Woman included Pat Leslie's letter of resignation, who

attributed her disillusionment to the fact that 'there is no

power in being a working-class lesbian'.75 She left because

she felt alienated from what she felt was a middle class

women's movement, and she had been responsible for most of the

work for the journal for a period of five years.

Just after Dorothy's arrival in Toronto, Broadside,

another feminist newspaper, began publishing in 1979, this

time 'in a cheaper tabloid format8 . 76 Right at the beginning

of publication of this news magazine there is clear archival

evidence, in the form of three separate lists with her name on

them, that Dorothy Smith was on a list of prominent Toronto

women that were targeted for the purposes of fundraising for

the new feminist newspaper. This would seem to indicate that

the Toronto feminist community was immediately aware of her

growing reputation as an author. Other prestigious women on

these lists included Margaret Atwood, Mary O f Brien, June

7s Ibid, January-February, 1977, p. 11.

76 Pierson, op. cit., p. 4 0 9 .

416

Callwood, Laura Sabia, Judge Rosie Abella, and Kay

~acpherson. " Broadsf de kept reasonably welbdocumented

financial records, right from the time they were first

established. For the first six months of operation, from

October, 1979, to March, 1980, production costs were $1,200.

The organization produced an annual projected budget of

$44,100 in fixed costs, and a projected average annual revenue

of $34,545, The Broadside Collective predicted an annual

shortfall of $9,555, based on subscription rates $8 per annum

and $12 for two years. 78 By March 30, 1982. their reported

net loss was much less, $2,618-16, in that the revenue from

sales for the previous year were $21,925.02 - 7 9

Financial strategies for raising capi ta l for Broadside

were very ambitious in the begiming, They offered preferred

shares to company Directors, as Ontario law at the time meant

they had to sell shares within the exacting controls set up by

the Ontario Securities Commission. This law effectively made

it impossible to raise capital by selling shares that might

entail high risk to friends and casual supporters. Each

member of Broadside was required to buy $500 worth of common

shares as a condition of membership, and with this capital. as

77 WMAC. F i l e 356. Broadside. Three fundraising lists, c. 1979,

78 WMAC. F i l e 356. Broadside. Pro forma budget projections - May, 1979.

WMAC. F i l e 356. Broadside, Income Statement. Year End, March 20, 1982.

well as the preferred shares, donations from non-members, a

credit union loan and an advance from a member, they managed

to cover the deficit which they met with the first year of

operation. Their financial objectives, according to a

fundraising letter which was sent out by Eve Zaramba on June

29, 1980, stated that they intended to raise $100,000 in the

following few years and $20,000 by the end of 1980."

Fundraising for Broadside also took humbler forms - The

collective organized a It Strawberry Brunch for Friends of

Broadsidetu, at $15 per ticket on June 14, 1981, and a

"Broadside Bingo Night 'I, on March 19, 1983 ,

A much larger project was the co-sponsoring of a New

Year's Eve Dance in 1981 with W o m y n l y Way Productions, who had

first refusal rights to Mama Quilla 11, the popular all-woman

feminist rock band which was active in the Toronto music scene

from 1978 - 1982- Mama Quilla 11 played for other feminist fund-raising events like the "Fireweed Festival", supporting

the feminist journal Fireweed at Harbour Front in Toronto in

September, 1979, and did a benefit concert for Press Gang

Publishing House in Vancouver in May, 1981.~' Debate erupted

over the issue of whether or not to make Broadside's New

WMAC. File 356. Broadside. Letter to Hellie Wilson, Ottawa, f r o m Eve Zararnba of the Broadside Collective, June 29, 1980.

81 WMAC. File 356. Broadside. Tickets.

'' WMAC. File 438. Mama Quilla 11. Feminist Rock Band, Toronto, 1978-82. Mama Quilla I1 Performances 1981-82 - Some Highlights.

Year's Eve party a "Women Onlyn dance* There had been no

prior discussion, and the Toronto !?ornenrs Bookstore sold the

tickets costing $15 (buffet included) on the understanding

that everyone was welcome, Some irate women who had not been

consulted threatened to picket the dance, and to encourage

others to boycott the dance 'in the name of lesbians and

Toronto s womenr s communityr , 83 Further, Mama Quilla' s

drummer was induced not to work at the dance if men were in

attendance, in spite of the terms of her contract. Broadside

prepared a statement attempting to diffuse the atmosphere of

conflict, saying that, yes, they had made a mistake by not

discussing the issue thoroughly beforehand, but that they

would honour anyone who bought tickets.

After ten years of continuous publication Broadside

missed a deadline due to extreme financial problems and their

dependence on volunteer labour, The collective was forced to

suspend publication in February, 1989, stating the problem to

be 'burn-out brought on by continuing financial insecurity' .*'

The instability experienced by the collective was also felt by

other feminist publications in Canada:

In the middle of the 1980s, with the advent of the Consenrative government, the Secretary of State Women' s Program, (probably the biggest supporter of feminist publications) was required to

83 WMAC. File 356. Broadside. Broadside Editorial re: the New Year Dance. Draft.

WMAC. File 356. Broadside, Letter to WancyI1 from Susan G. Cole for the Broadside Collective, n.d,

establish "eligibility criteriau, that forbade women's groups to take any particular stand on abortion (read pro- choice) , or to promote any particular lifestyle (read lesbian) , By 1990, the federal budget under the leadership of Finance Minister mchael Wilson had cut all operational support to the nationally funded feminist periodicals, B5

Old contributors of Broadside were asked for a donation of

$100 or anything they could afford, and requested to help with

a special edition to mark its 100th issue- In a letter of

appeal to other feminist groups, a request was made for

support needed to be able to continue printing? The sad

announcement of Broadside's decision to discontinue publishing

was released on International Women's Day in 1989. They

called a public meeting to discuss the newspaper's future at

OISE on Thursday March 16, 1989 at 7pm, saying that unless

there was some kind of intervention from the feminist

community, they would have to close their doors at the end of

March. As a final gesture, they were given the funding by the

Ontario Women's Directorate to produce a tenth anniversary

issue

In addition to feminist periodicals and newspapers,

diligent attention to the book publishing of women's history,

politics and culture began in earnest with the establishment

WMAC. File 356- Broadside. Letter to subscribers from The Broadside Collective, April 18, 1989.

WMAC. File 356. Broadside. Letter to subscribers from the Broadside Collective, April 18, 1989.

of The Women's Educational Press, the original feminist

publishing enterprise in Canada, through its pioneering

declaration which they called The Oscroft M a n i f e s t o in

February of 1972 .88 Up until the mid-1970s, it received

enough state funding to support six or seven staff members.8g

Through some financial assistance from the Department of

Manpower and Immigration, the Press was able to produce its

first compendium of feminist essays and commentary in July of

1972, called Women Unite! An Anthology of the Canadian

Women's M o v e m e n t - It contained a number of classic essays,

notably "Sisters, Brothers, Lovers ...Listen,,.", written in

the fall of 1967 by Bemstein, Morton, Seese and Wood, m e m b e r s

of the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) . It was a paper

addressed to men of the New L e f t , written for a membership

conference of SUPA, part of the first organizing experience of

Women's Liberation in ~anada,'' The collection also contained

Peggy Morton's early essay "A Woman's Work is Never Done-,,or

the Production, maintenance, and reproduction of Labour Powerrr

(1970) . Women U n i t e l was originally put on a back burner

88 Gabriel, Chris and Katherine Scott. 1993 . "Womenr s Press at Twenty: The Politics of Feminist Publishing. In: Carty, Linda, ed- And Still W e Rise: F e m i n i s t Political Mobilizing i n C o n t e m p o r a r y Canada. Toronto: Womenrs Press. P. 27.

89 Gabriel and Scott, 1993, op. cit., p. 40.

Bernstein et al. 1967. "Sisters, Brothers, Lovers. . . Listen. . . . In: Women Unite! A n Anthology of the Canadian Women 's Movement. 1972 . Toronto : Canadian Womenr s Educational Press. P. 31-39.

because the Discussion Collective No, 6 of the Toronto Women's

Liberation Movement could not afford to publish it, and when

they sent it to an external publishing source, they insisted

on editing privileges, which the collective refused to grant.

Finally, at the formation of The Canadian Women's Educational

Press, the Discussion Collective permitted the material to be

edited and it was published.9f

During 1984 - 1985 Dorothy Smith began negotiations with

the Canadian Womenr s Educational Press (usually called simply

Women's Press) with a prospectus for a book of four essays

entitled "A Sociology for Womenw, This was five years after

the publication of her groundbreaking article of the same

name, published in The Prism of Sex: E s s a y s in the Sociology

of Khowledge (1979) . She was dealing at the same time with

New Star Books in Vancouver for a work on women and class,

which the editors at Women's Press were more interested in,

and the Managing Editor, Jane Springer, emphasized 'that if

for any reason New Star is u n a b l e to do the book, we would

very much like to consider The S o c i a l Issues Group at

Women's Press felt that "A Sociology for Womenw, since it was

directed at a specific discipline, would not be as marketable

as an analysis of women and class. After some months, the

S o c i a l Issues Group finally made the decision not to publish

91 Bernstein, 1967, op. cit., p. 7-8.

92 WMAC. File 99. Women's Press. Letter to Dorothy Smith from Jane Springer, Managing Editor of Women's Press, December 19, 1984,

her collection:

After some deliberation, we have decided it was not for Women's Press- Although we have done some academic publishing, w e are increasingly opting in favour of academic books that can be used in community college courses and in first and second year undergraduate courses in universf ties, 93

As it turned out, Smith never did publish any of her writing

with Toronto's leading feminist publishing company. Instead

she turned to the mainstream publishing industry, and most of

her work has been published through the University of Toronto

Press, Routledge in England, and Northeastern University Press

in the United States, who originally published The Everyday

W o r l d As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987).

By the late 19809, a crisis erupted in the Women's Press

organization around what was represented in the media, and

what was felt by many members of the publishing company, to be

the hidden problem of an exclusionist and racist publishing

policy. The episode was characterized by M a r g i e Wolfe, now

President of the Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario,

to be a serious power struggle between two groups of women,

one tha t had little to do with racism, and one t h a t was

largely played out a m o n g white women, Margie Wolfe, a former

member of Women's Press and now co-owner of Second Story

Feminist Press argued that the issue of racism was used in a

93 WMAC. File Smith from Maureen March 26, 1985.

99. Women's Press. Fit zgerald, Managing

Letter to Dorothy Editor, Women's Press,

power struggle to replace one group of women with another."

On August 9, 1988, The Women's Press made headlines in the

Toronto Globe and Mail, "Stories of White Writers Re j ectedgl

and "Race Issue Split Women's Pressfr, when the Publishing and

Policy Group rejected three contributions to the anthology of

short stories called Iinagining Women,95 Until this impasse

Women's Press works had never addressed the question of

'race8, and had published few books by women of colour,

Margie Wolf e' s "Working With Words : Feminist Publishing in

Canadaw, for example, published in 1982 in a Women' s Press

anthology called S t i l l A i n ' t Satisified! Canadian Feminism

Today, makes no reference to an endemic racism in the Canadian

Womenr s Movement, but was rather an analysis of the

differences between mainstream and feminist approaches to

publishing. During the late 1970s, at the time of Dorothy

Smith's arrival in Toronto, the organizational structure of

The Women's Press changed to one that was two-tiered,

Formerly, the whole membership had decision-making power as to

what was published, but this now was transformed into a number

of smaller collectives which dealt with different subject

areas, for instance, the Social Issues Group that dealt with

Smith's manuscript. The ordinary day-to-day responsibilities

of the Press fell to the salaried staff, which now held the

94 Intemiew by the author with Margie Wolfe at Second Story Feminist Press, July 27, 1998-

95 Black, Ayanna, 198 9. "Recognizing Rac i smIt . Interviews by Ayanna Black. Fuse, ~pril/May, p. 27.

balance of power in the organization, along with long-time

members.96 With this type of organizational structure in

place, Gabriel and Scott (1993) argue that the way was paved

for a working practice in The Women's Press which 'effectively

excluded many groups of women - including younger women working in the movement - and suppressed dissentr ,''

Dispute on the issue of racism in The Womenr s Press

publishing policy arose in the fall of 1986 concerning a

project to have an all Women of Colour Almanac, which some

members were opposed to on the basis of 'business

considerations' ,g8 It was put forward by some members that

this argument concealed an element of suspicion, anxiety about

losing authority and fear of working with an outside group of

women of colour. It intensified to become a serious problem

in May of 1987, around the collective consultations regarding

the handling of racism in the women's movement in a draft of

Feminist Organizing for Change (1988) , co-authored by Briskin,

McPhail and Adamson. The disagreement came from Larissa

Cairncross who challenged the complete inattention to the

matter of racism in the manuscript:

It is not only insufficient at this point to make a statement that the book is "based on experiences when the issue of racism did not have a high profile in the

9h Gabriel and Scott, op . cit . , p . 41.

WMACr File 99. Womenr s Press. Press Release, May 11, 1988.

womenr s movement" (p - 14) to account for the absence of this central discussion from the book, its almost a non sequitur, It is unacceptable within the framework of an analysis that calls itself llsocialist- feminist to omit this discussion, 94

Cairncross suggested that the authors: 1) Define the problem

correctly and fully; 2) Examine the role of racism in the

development of the movement as a white woman's movement, the

forms it took, and the objective reasons for its exclusive

power in the organization of resistance to women's oppression

in the marketplace, in the home and in the street, She made

the proposal to re-organize the book with an initial chapter

requiring more research called "Racism as a Formative Element

of Feminist Organizati~n~.~~~ This sparked a long two and

one half hour discussion of the status of Feminist Organizing

for Change by the Publishing and Policy G r o u p of Women0 s

Press, which offered a contract for the book that was

conditional on the specific suggested changes already noted

above- The memo to Linda Briskin, Margaret McPhail and Nancy

Adamson warned that the conditional nature of the contract

also meant the potential use of a 'killr clause, often used in

the publishing business, but one that had never been used by

the Women's Press. The book was approved for publication 'on

condition that a revised m s . [manuscript] incorporating a

99 WMAC . File 9 9. Women' s Press, Brief from Larissa Cairncross to Maureen Fitzgerald, Managing Editor, The Women's Press. Re: The treatment of racism of the women's movement in Feminist Orsanizinq for Chancre.

satisfactory examination of the intrinsic role of racial

exclusivity in the development of the womenr s movement ' . The storm that ensued on the issue of structural racism

in the publishing policy of Women's Press one year later was

likely one of the most bitter and complex confrontations in

the history of the women's movement in Canada, After the

debates around Feminist Organizing for Change (1988 ) , members

of the Women's Press began the mechanism of consciousness

raising on how endemic racism was affecting the publication

policy of the organization. The result was the formation of a

separate conclave called the Popular Front-of-the-Bus

~aucus.~O~ It divided the Women's Press members into two

factions, with the Popular Front-of-the-Bus ~aucus'~~

becoming the majority, and the Publishing and Policy Group the

minority, The uproar around the split in membership took

place at a regular meeting of the Publishing and Policy Group

on May 11, 1988- Two statements were read at this encounter:

I) a statement by Susan Prentice which expressed her dismay at

the letters sent by the Fiction Group to the authors of

lo' WMAC. File 99. Women's Press. Memo from Maureen Fitzgerald to Linda Briskin, Margaret McPhail and Nancy Adamson re: Feminist Organizing for Change. May 20, 1987.

WMAC. File 99. Women's Press. Press Release, May 11, 1988.

lo3 Members of The Women's Press who aligned themselves with the Popular Front-of-the-Bus Caucus were: Larissa Cairncross, Ann Dector, Maureen Fitzgerald (Managing Editor) , Chris Gabriel, Heather Guylar, Rona Moreau, Michele Paulse, Susan Prentice, Katherine Scott, and Wendy Waring.

Imagining Women, which dealt with the structural racism in

their stories; and 2 ) a statement read by Ann Dector on

behalf of the newly formed Popular Front -of -the-Bus Caucus,

which ended with the statement 'And we are leaving NOW to

begin that work8 .f04 At this point the entire Popular Front-

of-the-Bus, the bulk of the Women's Press membership, got up

and withdrew from the meeting.

By May 16, 1988, the Publishing and Policy Group

(PPG)' '~ had issued its own press release clarifying their

position as to how they felt new initiatives in policies of

anti-racism should take place, The PPG stated that the

debates that had taken place over what should actually be done

had been misconstrued as an attitude of opposition to any kind

of anti-racist program of action, Their view of the division

was :

The Press is now divided into those who believe they have the correct position on combatting racism and the rest of us who stand accused of "resistingN and I1not getting it right? This division has resulted in considerable time being spent on an internal process of cleansing, historical blaming and scapegoating, instead of more positive contributions to building an anti-racist women's movement. In this highly charged environment it has

lo* WMAC. File 99. Women's Press. Open Letter to All Members of Women's Press from the Popular Front-of-the-Bus Caucus re: The PPG Meeting of May 11, 1988 and Anti-Racism at the Press.

Members who aligned themselves with the Publishing and Policy Group were Judi Coburn, Connie Guberman, Liz Martin, Lois Pike, Graziela Pimental, Christa Van Daele, Margie Wolfe, and Carolyn Wood-

been increasingly difficult to separate out a politic of guilt and self- recrimination from the constructive unlearning of racism which is our task,

According to a brief that was issued by Women's Press on

November 21, 1 9 8 8 , after the Publishing and Policy Group had

been locked out of Womenr s Press in July, 1988 ,lo' the PPG

then exercised the use of an obscure by-law in the

organizationr s constitution, which gave power to an

arbitrarily chosen three-member board on which they held the

majority, It was documented that the PPG used this legal

loophole to interpret the membership as to make qualified many

women who had long ceased to be involved in the Press, to

exclude many current members, and to convene a General

Membersr Meeting to divide the assetsloe of Womenr s Press,

especially the backlist of publications and office equipment.

The brief stated that old members were solicited for their

loyalty and support, a strategy which ultimately failed, and

the minority then requested that all further transactions take

place with lawyers present. log For example, former members

WMAC. File 99. Womenr s Press. Press Release. May 16, 1988.

Interview by the author with Margie Wolfe at Second Story Feminist Press, July 27, 1998.

Personal communication with Kari Dehli, August 6, 1998.

log WMAC, File 99. Womenr s Press. Brief. What's Been Happening at Women's Press, November 21, 1988.

Lorie Rotenberg, who worked at the Press from 1972 to 1974 and

Deirdre Gallagher, who had worked on an a summer Opportunities

for Youth Project in 1976, wrote statements that supported the

will of the majority, the Popular Front-of-the-Bus Caucus,

urging the withdrawal of the PPGrs motion-u0

The end result was that Margie Wolfe's position was

terminated and she accepted a seven month severance package,

after being refused the rights to titles by the majority of

members ,111 Lois Pike and Carolyn Wood were removed as

Directors of the Corporation of the Press by the provisions of

By-Law 1, Section 3 of The Canadian Women's Educational Press

by a requisition dated July 15, 1988. The formal meeting

which dissolved their positions took place on August 2, 1988,

and they were replaced with elected members .l12 One positive

outcome of this grave series of events was the development of

a draft of anti-racism guidelines which were eventually

adopted by the Women's Press in 1988, which entailed

accountability, inclusiveness, affirmative action and editing

policies, and an amendment of its power structure.'* It

'lo WMAC. File 99. Women's Press, Rotenberg. Letter to Women's Press from June 25, 1988.

WMAC, File 99 , Womenr s Press, Press Authors. December 21, 1988,

I* WMAC. File 99. Women's Press.

Statement by Lori Deirdre Gallagher,

Letter to Womenr s

REQUISITION. Dated at Toronto, 15th day of July, 1988. NOTICE OF MEETING, Toronto, July 16, 1988- Signed by Maureen Fitzgerald, President, Canadian Women's Educational Press.

Gabriel, op. ci t . , p. 46-47.

began a mandate to publish fiction where the protagonist

resembled the author in terms of race and ethnic group.

Another propitious consequence of the episode, which came

about the same year, was the formation of Second Story

Feminist Press, only a few months after the lock-out of

members of the Publishing and Policy group in July, 1988.

Starting with nothing, not even a loan guarantee system, it

immediately received backing from the publishing industry, in

that the University of Toronto Press agreed to distribute

their books and they procured the commitment of several

American distributors. Several writers left Women's Press and

supported the new enterprise- Further, thirteen commissioned

sales representatives quit the Women's Press en masse and

aligned their support with Second Story Press. Today, Second

Story Press has a publication list of about 100 books,

publishes about 10 books a year, and has a catalogue which

includes children's books, novels, cookbooks, and academic

material under their Women's Issues Publishing Program.''*

The Women's Press continues to thrive as an organization.

Controversy still follows them, as three books that they

published are presently the centre of a dispute in British

Columbia, Asha's Mums, Belindars Bouquet and O n e Dad Ttvo Dad

Brown Dad Blue Dad, all children's books at the kindergarten

and Grade One level which examine the experience of same sex

'I4 Interview by the author with Margie Wolfe at Second Story Feminist Press, July 27, 1998-

431

parents, have been banned for use in the Surrey, B-C- public

school system, The ban w a s the first one ever to be

challenged in Canada by a coalition of parents, students,

teachers and authors, and to be heard in the B.C. Supreme

Court, Ashars Mums was a particularly successful book, in

that it has in print since 1990, and has sold 8,000

copies, '1-5 Funding cuts by the Ministry of Culture in 1997

had a serious effect on the publishing industry. Women8 s

Press survived a financial crisis in 1997 w h e n their loan

guarantee of $90,000, with a deadline of December 31, 1996 was

about to be rescinded by the Ontario Development Corporation.

It was extended for another three months, and in the meantime

they secured alternative funding and made plans to reduce

their need for a line of credit to $25,000- In 1997, it

earned approximately $250,000 per year and published about six

titles per annum, which it planned to reduce to three, in

order to trim costs.116 Womenr s Press celebrated 25 years of

feminist publishing in December, 1997.1L7

'15 Q u i l l and Quire, 63, 10, 1997, p. 22.

Globe and Mail, January 3, 1997. P, CIO . 'I7 Globe and Mail, December 11, 1997. P. C4,

Conclusion

By the 1990s, the text and 'textually-mediatedr forms of

discourse began outweigh a former attention to Manc in Dorothy

Smith's work, as a response to the pervasiveness of

poststructuralist and postmodem theory. Most of her writing

in the 1990s reflects this interest, and although she was

willing to engage the theory of the poststructuralists,

Barthes and Foucault, it is not at the expense of a

materialist approach. Social organization that occured from

the 'relations of rulingf, becomes an organization that is

studied almost exclusively in textual forms, through the

computer used in 9-1-1 emergency calls, radio documentary, and

the textual cast of contemporary feminist activism in a

Canadian university.

This final chapter is an historical sociology of the

Toronto Women's Movement from 1967 to 1988, the time of its

most vibrant activism. It began with an orientation to the

early Women's Liberation Movement and its origins in the New

Left Student Caucus at the University of Toronto. The 1980s

constitute the height of the women's movement in Canada, where

feminist publishing and feminist culture explode in Toronto,

This time span reflects the positive outcome of a series of

stressful events, in that the trashing and division that has

taken place in the 1970s became the outcome of the growth and

power of t h e womenr s movement in its heyday, and when

diversity gave rise to the politics of inclusiveness in the

late 1980s. This is a women's movement where Smith's

participation was predominantly scholarly in the form of its

activism, which included the coming into season of the Social

Organization of Knowledge.

CHAOTER TEN

CONCLUSION

During my childhood, my father had an irksome habit of

quoting proverbs to me, a fixation, 1 am ashamed to say, that

in my own mature years, I have also adopted. The one he

repeated most often, to nry profound irritation, was ItWisdom is

the principal thing; therefore get wisdom and with all thy

getting get understandingn (Proverbs 4 : 7 ) * I have more than

once heard the comment from my colleagues that Dorothy Smith's

work was difficult to understand, thus in many ways I saw my

primary objective for this work as uniting an analysis that

was as genuine as possible with reflective interpretation. 1

saw my role as a translator - one willing to use all the historical evidence and technical resources at my disposal to

understand and then explain her work. Dorothy Smith has

developed her own lexicon and style ('relations of rulingr,

'standpoint of women', 'bifurcation of consciousnessf are a

few of her most well known concepts) one that has become

recognizable in our discipline. I would venture to guess that

there are many sociologists who, if given a passage of her

work in an anonymous form, would quickly be able to identify

the author. In order to 'translate' her work for the thesis,

I made use of two language 'dictionariesf: one was the

historical as well as geographically relevant forms of the

womenrs movement; and the other was the limitations of the

traditional and neo-classical canons of the sociology of

435

knowledge, which was used as the logic for Dorothy Smith's

creation of a new method, the Social Organization of

Knowledge. The women's movement and the sociology of

knowledge were examined in Chapter Two, providing the

problematic, or the sociological puzzle, which this

dissertation seeks to unravel: the knowledge of her work that

would continue to be obfuscated if some of the logical and

obvious social origins of the Social Organization of Knowledge

were to remain unexamined-

The body of criticism that has accumulated in the

interpretation of Dorothy Smith's work contains evidence that

these scholars, in the course of their respective analyses,

have frequently misinterpreted the likely social and

intellectual origins of her thinking* As I have argued in the

introduction to the thesis, the origin of her 'standpoint of

women' method of beginning sociological inquiry, and a way of

begiming studies in the Social Organization of Knowledge is

acknowledged by her to be the actual experience of women in

the world, in the form of their household labour, which has

been a common thread for the material experience of women,

despite their differing experiences of sexuality,

(dis) ability, race and class. Bandyopadhyay, one of her early

critics, misread the materialist foundation that she tried to

establish through the use of M a r x , by attempting to quash her

argument that ideology only becomes ideological when ideas are

put into practical use. By the mid-1980s. Sandra H a r d i n g had

created the category of 'feminist standpoint epistemologiesr,

which, while establishing Dorothy Smith as a well known

scholar, especially in the United States, does so with a

misunderstanding of her work, with Harding's emphasis on a

philosophical origin in the work of Hegel and his master-slave

metaphor.

Critiques in the 1990s of her standpoint of women theory

are most often ones argued on the basis of: 1) the critique

that the standpoint epistemology, as it has come to be known,

was incapable of incorporating the standpoint of women of

colour (Lemert, 1992; Cornell, 1992; Collins, 1992); 2)

critiques that came from scholars adhering to a postmodem or

poststructuralist theoretical orientation, who faulted her

materialist approach (Cheal, 1990 ; Clough, 1993 ; Kennessey,

1993; M a n n and Kelley, 1997); and 3) a number of critiques

that seem to have been accomplished without a careful

attention to her work, which I would categorise as criticism

for its own sake, offering little in the way of suggestions

for the amelioration of her theory (Doran, 1993; Hekman,

1997). Dorothy Smith's work has variously been accused of

being capable of handling only the 'single case study8

Bandyopadhyay, Pradeep. 1974. "A Critical Note". Catalyst, 8, 55 - 61. P. 55.

Harding, Sandra, 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. P. 26,

(Bandyopadhyay, 1974); 'the standpoint of women is judged to

be superior to that of menr (Cheal, 1990); 'being of interest

to women and womenr s studies onlyr (Hak, 1992) ; as itself

ideological (Doran, 1993); and as having Schutz' theory of the

lifeworld as the origin of her approach (Hekman, 1997) . Recent work that 'get Cs] it rightr 3, is that which has

correctly pinpointed the origin of her theoretical work in

women's labour (Harding, 1992; Weeks, 1995; Denzin, 1997)-

This dissertation has attempted to clarify the misconceptions

that have accrued in the body of criticism around Dorothy

Smith's work concerning the social origins of her thought.

As I originally imagined, my dissertation became a

focused and extended sociology of knowledge, one that

incorporated two interwoven themes: 1) an interpretive

historical sociology of intergenerational patterns of the

women's movement, and the argument that the principle of

women's equality has been transmitted through the generations

of women in Dorothy Smith's family; and 2) a historical

materialism attentive to suitable 'productive forcesr, a term

In an interview with Dorothy Smith where we discussed at length the social origins of her 'standpoint of women' theory, she told me she would withdraw her support for my doctoral project if I did not 'get it rightr, I had made the mistake of concentrating on the philosophical origins of 'standpoint epistemologiesr in the Hegelian master and slave metaphor, taking the interpetation that Sandra Harding had created in 1986. Dorothy was passionately adamant that the origins of her thinking came from women's experience - in the execution of household labour. Here I am reproducing Dorothy Smithfs own terminology from an interview during lunch in the OISE/UT cafeteria, August 21, 1997 .

appropriated from M a r x and Engelsf The German Ideology, that

formed a part of the creation and development of Dorothy E.

Smith8 s SOK method,

The history of women's relation to household skills and

labour, and how women, in their political activism on their

own behalf, have appropriated that household labour, are

argued to change in the forms of the women's movement that are

represented here, It is a dissertation which is written

almost exclusively from the standpoint of women, which, as

Dorothy Smith has argued, begins in the ordinary domestic

practices of women as they are realized in their labour in the

household. This thesis is an historical sociology of

generations of women, mothers and daughters, the historical

forms of their domestic labour, and the relationship of this

labour to their various women's movements, and the ultimate

outcome of this labour and activism, the intellectual product

created by Dorothy Smith called the Social Organization of

Knowledge, This concluding chapter puts in order exactly what

these various historical relationships of women to domestic

labour have been, and what part they played in the creation of

Dorothy's method.

The form that women's skills in the household took in

Margaret Fell's time were rich and incredibly varied,

demanding much of women's time, inventiveness, effort and

competence. Many of these talents were related in Genrase

Markham's ancient guide to women8 s work called Country

Contentments (1623 ) , where it was recounted that women were

required to know and be skilful in a wide range of

occupations, including cheese-making, baking, caring for the

sick, farming, beer-making, spinning, weaving, and the

creation of sturdy clothing for their families. Margaret Fell

and her daughters, although they had help from a number of

servants with these household and farming chores, likely knew

how to perform these tasks themselves- Their relationship to

these household tasks and skills was one of high esteem, pride

and honour, and I argued that it was through these strengths

that they gained from the day-to-day ordinary work in the

household, that they conceivably gained a measure of the

strength and courage to move into the public sphere as

activists on behalf of other Quaker women. This was the first

setting for intergenerational transmission of 'feminismr from

mother to daughter in Dorothy Smith's family, when Margaret

Fell, through the conversion of her whole family to the Quaker

way of life, began the process of teaching her daughters the

principle of women's equality, a part of the Quaker doctrine.

It was also the point of departure the transmission of women's

domestic household skills, the labour which reproduced the

material conditions of the Quaker women's lives. The

relationship of these women to their labour in the household

was argued to be connected to their sense of worth as women,

and the starting place for the creation of the SOK.

Every historical form of the women's movement in this

dissertation is argued to have a relationship to womenf s

labour in the household and their everyday lives. During

women's activism in the Suffrage Era, this affiliation becomes

oriented to class divisions in British society, in that

working class women still associated pride with the hours of

drudgery required by their labour in the home, but middle

class women, at least those who could afford it, hired working

class women to do this work, Working class women were often

involved in the domestic service in Edwardian Britain.

Dorothy Smith's grandmother, Lucy Ellison Abraham, nee

Golding, was a middle class woman who could afford to have

servants, and during her suffrage work, Dorothy Foster

Abraham, Dorothy Smith's mother, lived at home at 2 Kingsmead

Road in Birkenhead, and likely had domestic responsibilities.

Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy Foster Abraham had inherited

the principle of women's equality, likely from their Quaker

heritage, but as 'daughters', the form of their activism was

different. What would have been rejected by the Quaker women

of Margaret Fell's time, given their loyalty to pacifism, was

taken up by the succeeding generations of women in their fight

for the vote. It was a militant, all out women's war against

the British government to achieve this end. The unique

quality of the Womenfs Social and Political Union (WSPU), was

their appropriation of women's domestic skills, putting them

to good use for the 'causef, and, as a jarring contradiction

to us, militancy and feminine values were co-existent.

Dorothy Foster Abraham began farming in Wensleydale

shortly before the end of World War I, and most women who had

worked during the War returned to the household. A partial

franchise was achieved for women in 1918, so a great many

suffrage groups, except, of course, the militant WSPU,

continued to work for the full franchise, There was a return

to an ideology which prescribed home-making for women, and the

activism that took place was centred around pragmatic

concerns, such as children's health, housing, and the death of

women in childbirth, They began to work for projects such as

the Nursery School Movement, issues that reflected their

responsibilities as mothers and housewives. Dorothy Foster

Abraham began to develop the skills in the household, such as

making Wensleydale cheese, baking bread, etc, that would

enthral Dorothy Smith as a child when she was old enough to be

allowed to 'hang aroundr her mother's kitchen. This is the

time when Dorothy began to learn about women's experience and

discover her respect for women's labour. Women returned to

their traditional mode of operation, which was their work in

the domestic sphere, and if they did venture out into public

activism, it was based on what was 'acceptablef as far as

their established societal roles as women would allow, A

similar pattern occurred during World War 11, when women

worked during the time of actual warfare, but returned to the

home once the war was over. Dorothy Foster Abraham

contributed to the war effort through her domestic skills, as

a member of the Women's Institute, which sold fruits and

vegetables and made jam as a part of their wartime

contribution, When Dorothy Smith began studying at the London

School of Economics, it triggered the beginning of a divided

loyalty, as she fell in love first with sociology, then with

her husband, Bill Smith,

When feminism and the women's movement began to gather

momentum in America about ten years after the publication of

Simone de Beauvoirrs The Second Sex in its English translation

in 1952, it was largely a response to women's prescribed

relationship to domestic labour. Dorothy Smith was studying

for her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley,

struggling between faithfulness to two environments which she

loved. the w o r l d of her children, and the realm of sociology.

Betty Friedan's formulation of 'the problem that has no name',

was constructed as women's boredom and intellectual atrophy

due to their forced confinement to labour in the household,

When women began to talk to each other once again, it was

about their problems as middle class housewives and their

frustrating relationships with men. Black women in America in

the 1950s and early 1960s experienced a different oppression

based on racism, however, and they were more likely to be

active in the public sphere than white women, in that they

were often forced to work for white women as domestic servants

to make a living, and were often highly involved in civil

rights activism as ordinary workers and leaders,

Through the involvement in the women's caucuses of New

Left political groups and the practice of consciousness-

raising, members of Women's Liberation in the late 1960s began

to intellectualize their experience by theorizing, through

Marxist concepts, their experience of domestic labour. It was

a debate which was to engage women's attention for a decade

and a half, from c. 1969 to c, 1985, Dorothy Smith's

involvement in the women's movement was a continuation of the

feminist axioms of women's equality that she had learned from

her mother and grandmother, but it was a form of feminism that

she created on her own terms, eschewing militancy, for

example, and applying feminist principles to sociology, but

not to issues that arose from women's direct experience in the

household. She applies women's direct experience with

household labour to a sociological method, rather than using

this experience as a basis for political activism on behalf of

women's status- Her contribution to the women's movement and

the advancement of women's status was realized through the

discipline of sociology, through her work towards its

feminization and its politicization,

In the 1 9 8 0 ~ ~ the Social Organization of Knowledge became

a practical i~ovation for sociology, a method of studying the

mundane, ordinary aspects of social life as they are affected

by the textual forms of its organization. She concentrates,

in her writing, on the examination of the social organization

of women's lives and the study of the 'textr as a subject for

investigation. Smith does not participate formally in the

domestic labour debate, due to a disagreement with the

approach of her peers, who began their analyses with Marxist

concepts, instead of beginning with women's direct experience

of labour in the household. Instead, women's direct

experience is felt by her to be the fundamental ingredient in

her 'standpoint of womenr method of begi~ing sociological

inquiry, a method which can be used as a component of the

Social Organization of Knowledge. Women's domestic labour is

something that attracted her respect, even if it was not

something that she wanted to take up as a vocation, or an

activity which sustained her attention or interest. Household

labour is a vocation whose skills she learned to admire,

through the example of her mother, but one that she theorized

for sociology, rather than practised- Dorothy Smith, as well

as the feminist scholars who are her peers, have long since

discarded an interest and preoccupation with the theoretical

implications of domestic labour, and moved on to the concerns

of a postmodern world,

This thesis has situated the life and work of a world-

renowned feminist sociologist, Dorothy E. Smith, in the

context of an historical sociology of women's movements which

are argued to be a productive force behind the creation of her

work. It is a reminder that an individual sociologist whose

work was feminist in its orientation, regardless of the extent

of her contribution, was dependent on the productive genius of

other women, both in her history, and in the contemporary

women's movements of which she w a s a part* Dorothy Smith gave

to the women's movement, but more importantly, she also

received a legacy of women's activism from previous

generations, and from the work of her peers- Through the

women's movement, many other feminist sociologists have worked

to authorize the presence of feminist consciousness within the

discipline of sociology in various inventive ways, so much so

that the mention of 'feminismf as a standpoint barely raises a

murmur anymore, when it once was considered a risky

undertaking, Feminism is an accepted part of classical

theoretical approaches and methods in sociology, and

frequently is required learning in introductory and

undergraduate texts. Such has been the strength of the

womenf s movement and its influence on Dorothy E . Smith, and her subsequent authority in sociology, so that her particluar

're-makingr of the discipline could be putatively rebelled

against and changed by future women sociologists bent on

change, improvement and amelioration of its theories and

methods.

The Collected Works o f D o r o a y E. Smith1

1959, llLegitimate and Illegitimate Deviance: The Case of the State Mental Hospital, " Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2, 1, 15-39.

1963. l8Power and the Frontline: Social Controls in a State Mental Hospital. Ir A Doctoral Dissertation Prepared for the University of California at Berkeley,

19 65a. "The Logic of Custodial Organization. Psychiatzy, 28, 4, 311-323.

1965b. I1Front-line Organization of the State Mental HospftaLW Adininistrative Science Quarterly, 10, 3 , 381- 399. Reprinted in: Hasenfield, Yeheskel and Richard A- English, eds. 1974, Human S e d c e Organizations: A Book of Readings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1966. "The Role of Sociologyin Medicine-" In: Folta, J. R. and E. S . Beck, eds - A Sociological Framework for Patient Care. New York: John Wiley.

1968, IrAcademic Women- It Essax Review, 1, 1.

1971 - nHousehold Space and Family Organization. Pacif ic Sociological Review, 14, 1, 53 -78. Reprinted in: Davies, E- I. and K. Herman, eds. 1972. Social Space. Toronto: New Press and in: Cardwell, J. Do, ed- 1974. Readings in Social Psychology: A Symbolic Interactionis t Perspective . Philadelphia: F , H. Davies .

1973. I1Women, the Family and Corporate Capitalism-It In: Stephenson, Marylee, ed. Women i n Canada. Toronto : New Press, Reprinted in: Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2 0 , 1975, Summer, 55-90.

1974a. I1Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology. Sociological Inquiry, 4, 1, 1-13. Reprinted in: McNall, S o , ed- 1979. Current Perspectives in Sociology and in: Harding, Sandra, ed. 1988. Feminism and Method01 ogy: Social Science Issues. Bloomington : Indiana University Press,

Does not include book reviews. This compilation conforms to the sequential arrangement on Dorothy E. Smith's curriculum vitae, updated July, 1997.

19 74b. IrThe Ideological Practice of Sociology. Iv Catalyst, 8, 39-54. Reprinted in an abbreviated form as Theorizing as Ideologyvr in: Turner, Roy, ed, 1974, E~omethodo logy : Selected Readings. Harmondsmith, Middlesex: Penguin,

1974c. "The Social Construction of a Documentary Reality," Sociof ogicaf Inquiry, 44, 4, 257-268 .

1975a. wIdeological Structures and How Women are Excluded," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Special Issue for International Womenr s Year, Women in Canadian Social Stmcture , 12, 4, Part I, 353-369. Reprinted in: Grayson, Paul J, , ed. 1980, Class, State, Ideology and Change, and Gaskell, Jane S. and Arlene Tigar McLaren, 1987, Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective, Calgary, Alberta : Detselig Enterprises -

1975b. Women Look at Psychiatry. Edited by Dorothy E. Smith and Sara J1 David. Vancouver: Press Gang.

I1Women and Psychiatry. In: Smith, D, E, and Sara J. David, eds , Women Look at Psychiatry, Vancouver: Press Gang -

"The Statistics on Women and Mental Illness: How Not to R e a d Them- In: Smith, D, E, and Sara J. David, eds, Women Look at Psychf atry. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers,

"A Feminist Therapy Session." By Dorothy E. Smith and Rita MacDonald. In: Smith, D. E, and Sara J. David, eds . Women Look at Psychiatry. Vancouver : Press Gang Publishers,

1976a. What it Might Mean to do a Canadian Sociology: T h e Everyday World as Problematic. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 1, 3, 363-375.

1976b. "K ist Geiteskrank. " In: Weingarten, E., F. Sack and J. N. Schenkein, eds . Ethnomethodologie: B e i trage auf einer Soziologie des Tagslebens . Frankfurt : Suhrkamp .

1977a. vlSome Implications of a Sociology for Women." In: Glazer, Nona Yetta and Helen Youngelson Waehrer, eds. Women in a Man-Made World. Second Edition. Chicago : Rand-McNally .

1977b. Marxism and Feminism: A Place to Begin, A Way to Go. Vancouver: New Star Books.

1977c. IvDoes G o v t . Funding Co-Opt?I1 Kinesis, 6, 11, 5 -6 .

1977d- "The Women's Research Centre, Vancouver: An Alternative Model for Research," Unpublished Paper Presented at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Fredericton, New Brunswick, May, 1977-

1978a- IrA Peculiar Eclipsing: Women's Exclusion from Men's Culture. It Women's Studies Iizternational Quarterly, 1, 4, 281-295,

1978b- "'Kt is Mentally 111: The Anatomy of a Factual Account, ~ociology, 12, 1, 23-53.

1978~- "The Exclusion of Women in Forming the Values and Beliefs of Society-" Socialization and L i f e Skills, March. Report of the Proceedings of the Canadian Teachersr Federation Workshop on the Status of Women in Education held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, November 6-8, 1977 - Ottawa: Canadian Teachersr Federation,

1978d. "Working Paper on the Implications of Declining Enrolment for Women Teachers in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools in Ontario." By Dorothy E, Smith, Marilee Reimer, Connie Taylor and Yoko Ueda. Report for the Commission on Declining Enrolments in Ontario.

1978e. "Racism: What is Our Responsibility?" Society, 2, 1, 4 .

1979a. "The Intersubjective Structuring of Time: An Analysis of How it was Done on a Particular Occasion/ A n a l y t i c Sociology, 2, 1, c13-e12.

1979b. Sociology for Women-" In: Sherman, Julia A. and Evelyn Torton Beck, eds. The Prism of Sex: Essays in the Sociology of Kizowledge, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,

1979~- "Where There is Oppression, There is Resistance." Branching Out, 4, 1, 10-15.

1979d. "Education and Women's Exclusion from Our Fireweed: A Women's Literary and Cultural Journal, 3 -4, 29-40,

1979e. Wducational Cutbacks and the Workload of Elementary School Teachers. Ir By Dorothy E. Smith and The Wollstonecraft Research Group. Women in the Education Workforce, September, Ottawa: Canadian Teachers8 Federation.

1979f. I1Using the Oppressor's Language," Resources for Feminist Research, Special Publication 5, p - 10-20. In Search of the Feminist Perspective: The Changing Potency of Women. March 4-5, 1978. University of Waterloo-

1980a. TRIAW in the 1980s: The Role of a Research Institute in the Furthering of Personhood-" Resources for Feminist Research, Special Publication 8, pp - 131-13 3, Third Annual Meeting of the Canadfan Research Institute for the Advancement of W o m e n (CRIAW) , November 9-11, 1979.

1980b- IrTextual Analysis as Explication of a Social Relation: An Examination of the Reader-Text Relation in a Psychiatric Case History- " Unpublished paper presented at the meetings of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences Association, October, 1980 -

l98la. I1Le Partie-pris des Femmes . Translated by M. Verthuy. In: Cohen, Yolande, ed. Femmes et Politiques. Montre'al: Le Jouriteur. P. 139-44,

198Ib. wWomenFs Inequality and the In: Moscovitch, Allan and Glenn Drover, eds - Ihequality: Essays on the P o l i t i c a l Economy of Social Welfare. Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

19 8 1c - "On Sociological Description: A Method From M a r x , Human Studies, 4, 4, 313-337.

19 8 Id. "The Experienced World As Problematic : A Feminist Method. " Twelfth Annual Sorokin Lecture, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, January 28, 1981.

1981e- "A Method for a Sociology for Women,fit Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, 1981.

1982a. "Women Class and Family-l1 In: Hersom, Naomi and Dorothy E. Smith, eds- Proceedings and Papers from a Workshop held at the University of British Columbia, January, 1981. Women and the Canadian Labour Force, Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1982b. "The Active Text: A Textual Analysis of the Social Relations of Public Textual Discourse/ Unpublished paper presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, August, 1982.

19 8 2 c - "Where are the W o m e n ? l1 Unpublished paper presented with Gilles Malnarich at the Conference Commemorating the Centenary of Marxr s Death, University of Manitoba, March, 1982.

1983a. "No One Commits Suicide: Textual Analyses of Ideological Practices. Human Studies, 3 09 -3 59 .

1983b. I1Women, Family and the Productive Process.It In: Grayson, J. Paul, ed- Introduction to Sociology: An Al tema te Approach. Toronto : Gage.

1983~- IrWomen, Class and Family. " In: Miliband, Ralph and John Saville, eds , The Socialist Register, London: Merlin Press

1983d- Ifwomen and the Making of Class * It Unpublished paper presented at the Meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Vancouver, 1983.

1984a- ItTextualLy Mediated Social Organi~ation,~ Iiztemational Social Science Journal, 36, 1, 59-75.

1984b- "The Renaissance of Women-lt In: Franklin, Ursula Martius et a1 . mowledge Reconsidered: A Feminist Overview, Ottawa : Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women,

1984~. "The Deep Structure of Gender Antitheses: Another View of Capitalism and Patriarchy. " H u m a n i t y and Society, 8, 4, 395-402,

1985b. Women, Class, Family and the S t a t e . By Varda Burstyn and Dorothy E- Smith- Introduction by Roxana Ng- Toronto: Garamond,

1985c. uEthnomethodology m d Textual Analysis." Unpublished paper presented at the Boston Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Boston University, August, 1985.

l985d. If Feminist Research and Womenr s Experience : When Mothers Talk," Unpublished paper presented to the Conference on Motherwork, Montreal, October, 1985,

1986a- El Mundo Silenciado de las Mujeres, Santiago, Chile: CIDE .

1986b. A Future f o r Women at the University of Toronto: The Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Women. By Dorothy E, Smith, A. J. Cohen, J, Drakich, Do Rayside and G. Burt, Centre for Women's Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Occasional Papers No. 13.

19 8 6c. The Women Educators ' Computer Conferencing Research Project Report - Toronto : Federation of Women's Teachersr Associations of Ontario.

1986d. ltInstitutional Ethnography: A Feminist Method.Ir Resources for Feminist Research, 15, 1, 6-13,

1986e. ffWomen and the Inertia of the Educational System? Canadian Dimension, 2 0, 3, 33 -4,

1986f- "The Rise and Fall of Feminist Organizations in the 1970s: Dayton as a Case Study." By Judith Sealander and Dorothy E, Smith, Feminist Studies, 12, 2, 321-341,

1987a. The Everyday World As Problematic: A F e m i n i s t Sociology, Toronto : University of Toronto Press,

1987b, IcAn Ethnographic Strategy for the Study of Textually- Mediated Relations of Ruling: The Making of a DACUM, " The Nexus Project Occasional Paper No- I- Depaxtment of Sociology in Education- Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

198 7c - Feminism and the Malepractice of Sociology* It Popular Feminism Papers No. 3 , Toronto: Centre for Women's Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

1987d. "Constructing Cultural Knowledge: Mothering as Discourse, By Alison I - Grif f ith and Dorothy E, Smith, In: Gaskell , Jane and Arlene McLaren, Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective, Calgary, Alberta : Detselig Enterprises,

1988a. "Writing Women's Experience into Social ScienceJ1 F e m i n i s m and P s y c h o l o g y , I , 1, 155-169,

1988b. trDetermining Training Needs in the Plastics Industry," The Nexus Project Occasional Paper No, 5 . Department of Sociology in Education. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ,

1988~- IrFemininity as Discourse- l1 In: Roman, Leslie GI and Linda K- Christian-Smith, eds - Becoming F e m i n i n e : The Politics of Popular Culture, London: Falrner Press.

1988d. "Writing Sociology: The Feminist Contradi~tion,~~ Unpublished paper presented by invitation to the Conference on Feminist ran sf or mat ions of the Social Sciences. If Hamilton College, New York, April, 1988 -

1989a- Tomment on Sandra Hardingrs 'Is There a Feminist Method? Feminism in Philosophy N e w s l e t t e r , Summer, 44 - 46 -

1989b- IrFeminist Reflections in Political Economy.Ir S t u d i e s in P o l i t i c a l Economy, 3 0 , Autumn, 3 7 - 5 9 . Reprinted in: Connelly, Patricia M, and Pat Armstrong, eds. 1992- F e m i n i s m in A c t i o n = Studies i n Political Economy. Toronto: Scholarsf Press,

1989~. "Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy." In: Wallace, Ruth, ed. Feminism and Sociological Theory- London: Sage.

1989d- "Gender, Power and Peace, In: Gorham, Deborah and Janice Williamson, eds . Up and D o i n g : Canadian Women and Peace, Toronto: Women's Press.

1989e- IIWomenrs Work as Mothers: A New Look at the Relations of the Family, Class and School A c h i e v e m e n L n In: Miller, Gale and James Holstein, eds . Perspectives on Social Problems, Volume I - Greenwich, COM, : JAI: Press.

1989f. T h e Out-of-Body Experience: The Social Organization of Textuality. Unpublished paper presented at a panel memorializing Sally Hacker at the meetings for the Society for the History of Technology, Sacramento, California, October, 1989-

1990a. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A F e m f n f s t Sociology of Kbowledge, Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

1990b. Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling- London: Routledge,

1990~- Doing it the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology- Edited by Dorothy E. Smith and Susan Turner. Boston: Unwin-Hyman,

1990d. "What did You Do in School Today? Mothering, Schooling and Social Class-" By Dorothy E. Smith and Alison Griffith. In: Miller, Gale and James Holtstein, eds - Perspectives on Social Problems, Volume 2 . Greenwich, Conn,: JAI Press.

1990e. Toordinating the Uncoordinated: Mothering, Schooling and the Family Wage. By Dorothy E, Smith and Alison Griffith. In: Miller, Gale and James Holstein, eds- Perspectives on Social Problems, Volume 2 - Greenwich, Conn. : JAI Press,

1990f- "The Job-Skills Training Nexus: Changing Context and Managerial PracticeJr By Dorothy E. Smith and George Smith, In: Muller, Jacob, ed- The Political Economy of the Communi ty College , Toronto : Garamond .

1991a. "Writing Women's experience into Social S~ience.~~ Feminism and Psychology, 1, 1, 155-169,

1991b. Status of Women in Ontario Universities: F i n a l Report. Two Volumes, By Dorothy E, Smith, Janice Drakich, Penni Stewart, B o d e Fox and Alison Griffith. Toronto: Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

1992a. llSociology from Women's Experience: A Reaffirmati~n.~~ Sociological Theory, 10,1, 8 8 - 9 9.

1992b. -Whistling Wornen: Reflections on Rage and Rationality- In: Carroll, William K, et al, , eds . Fragile T r u t h s : 25 Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.

1992~- "Remaking a Life, Remaking Sociology." In: Carroll, William K, et ale, eds. Fragile Truths: 25 Years of Sociology and Anthropology in Canada, Ottawa : Carleton University Press.

1992d. "Texts as Action." Unpublished paper co-authored with Jack Whalen, Marilyn Whalen and Marilyn Carter presented at the Conference on lrEthnomethodology: Twenty-Five Years Laterrr at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, August, 1992.

l992e. "The Out -of -Body Experience : A Contradiction for feminist^.^ Unpublished paper presented in a session the Sociology of Culture, Gender and Power at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh, August, 1992.

1993a. "What Welfare Theory Hides." In: Grover, Glenn and Patrick Kerans , eds - New Approaches to Welfare Theory. Aldershot, Hants, England: Edward Elgar,

1993b- "High Noon in Textland: A Critique of Clough." Sociological Quarterly, 34, 1, 183-192.

1993c. 'I'Literacyr and Business: Social Problems as Social Organi~ation.~' In: Holstein, James and Gale Miller, eds . Reconsidering Social Constructionism : Debates in Social Problems Theory. Part 11. New Challenges in Social Constructionism. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

1993d- "The Standard North American Family: SNAF as an Ideological Code. " Journal of Family Issues, 14, 2, 5 0 - 65.

1994a. llVerfungsverhaltnisse, Textualitat und Hegemonie." (The Relations of Ruling, Textuality and Hegemony). Das Argument: Zeitschif t fur Philosophie unde Sozialwissenschaften, 206, 36, Jahrgang Heft 4/5, 693- 712.

1994b. "Familienlohn und Mannergewalt-I! In: Alcoff, Linda, Frigga Haug, Klaus Holzkamp, Birgit Romrnelspacher and Dorothy E . Smith, eds . Sexueller Mibrauch: Widerspruche eines offenlichen Skandal s. Forum I(ri tische Psychologie 33. Argument Speziale, 33-54,

19 94c- "Making Connections, Thinking Change Together: Women Teachers and Computer Networks - I' By Dorothy E, Smith and Linda Harasim. In: Bourne, Paula et al- , eds, F d s m aad E d u c a t i o n : A Canadian View- Volume 11. Toronto: Centre for Womenr s Studies in Education,

19 94d, IrA Berkeley Education, Ir In: Meadow-Orlans , Kathryn P . and Ruth A, Wallace, eds - Gender and the A c a d e m i c Experience: Berkeley Women Socio logis t s~ Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

1995a. Girls and Schooling: Their Owz Cri t ique, By Dorothy E. Smith, Liza McCoy, and Paula Bourne- Ontario Institute for Studies in Education: Centre for Women's Studies in Education Publication Series.

19 95b - lrComrnent on Kenneth Dauberr s 'Bureaucratization - the Ethnographerr s Magic1 , C m r e n t A n ~ o p o l o g y , Spring, 88-99.

1995~- "'Politically Correctr: An Ideological Code." In: Richer, Stephen and Lorna Weir, eds- Beyond Political Correctness : Toward the Inclusive Universi ty. Toronto : University of Toronto Press.

1996a. lrContradictions for Feminist Socf a1 Scientists, In: Gottfried, Heidi, ed. Feminism and Social Change: Bridging Theory and Practice, Chicago : University of Illinois Press -

l996b. I1Telling the Truth After Postmodernism. Ir Symbolic Interaction, 19, 3, 171-202,

19 9 6c. I1Connecting Feminist Research . It Clippingdale, Linda, ed . Voix Fenzinis tes/Feminist Voices, Memories and Visions: Celebrating 20 Years of Feminist Research with CRIAW/ICREE', 1976-1996, 178 -183,

1996d. "The Relations of Ruling: A Feminist Inq~iry.~~ Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies, 2, 3 , 171-190,

1996e. Response to Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorner s Essay: "The Missing Revolution: Ten Years Later. " Perspectives: The ASA Theory Section Newsletter, 18, 3, 3-4.

1996f. "Texts in Action. If Unpublished paper by Dorothy E , Smith and Jack Whalen,

1997a. "Wife Abuse and Family Idealizations: The Violent Regulation of Family Regimes, In: Ronai, Carol Rambo , Barbara Z s e m b i k and James Feagin, eds* Everyday Sexism in the Third MXllennium, New York: Routledge.

1997b. I 1 R e p o r t and Repressf on: Textual Hazards for Feminists i n the Academy. " In: Eyre, Linda and Leslie Roman, eds - Dangerous Territories : Strugg1es for Difference and Equality in Rducation* New Y o r k : Routledge.

1997~. Tram the Margins : Womenr s Standpoint as a Method of Inquiry in the Social Sciences-" Gender, Technology and Development, 1, 1 , 113-135,

1997d. Comment on Hekmanrs Truth and Method: F e m i n i s t Standpoint Theory Revisited. Ic Signs: Journal of Women in Cul tu re and Society, 22, 2, 392-398-

l998a- I F R e g u l a t i o n or Dialogue, IF In: Pavlich, D e n n i s , Sharon K a h n , and Nichola Hall, eds - Academic Freedom and the ~nc lus i ve U n i v e r s i ty, Vancouver : University of British Columbia Press,

l998b. Writing the Social: C r i t i q u e , T h e o r y and Investigations. Toronto : University of Toronto Press -

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