Dorothy Smith

A Sociology for Women

1. The starting point is that women have been excluded from the discourse of creating intellectual means to grasp and interpret the real world - the intellectual scheme in general - and how this problem may be overcome to create "sociology for women".

2. Since women have not been able to create the intellectual device to interpret the world, they tend to experience what Smith calls the "line of fault" - that is, their actual everyday life experience cannot be expressed comfortably using the languages and objectified knowledges created largely by men. The objectified, abstract, and intellectual knowledges that are given the power of being authoritative voice in our world largely exclude women in the process of its creation. Consequently, women experience this disjuncture between the subjective everyday life experience and objectified concepts.

3. Now, the discipline of sociology is also part of this broader intellectual scheme of objectifying and abstracting some elements of subjective everyday world and presenting them in "objective" form that is detached from the everyday experience, which is local and concrete, and is generalizable beyond local and personal experiences. The problem is that women are largely excluded from this process of creating this objectified and abstract, "intellectual" knowledge. Or, in another word, they are not the "subjects" in the sense that they have agentic power to define and create the discipline at their own initiative, but rather are treated as passive "objects" in the sense that they are the objects of the study but do not participate in the process of the creation of the framework for the very study that studies them. In contrast, for men, who participate in this process, the objectified intellectual discipline appears as natural. For women, however, what Smith calls "bifurcated consciousness" occurs - again, this stands for the disjuncture of the everyday world as experienced by women and the abstracted concepts that express it. After this, Smith draws upon the works of Marx and Engels to claim that, because for the dominant class the ideological structure they have created for themselves appear natural, the whole of reality in the world is never visible from their standpoint but is only visible to the subordinated class - who actually lives the everyday life world, thus allowing the dominant class to concentrate on the creation of abstracted and objectified concepts. In terms of gender, Smith asserts that it is the women who have largely served this function of living in the local, personal and subjective world of everyday life.

4. The sociology for women, then, is a kind of sociology that renders those subordinates - in this case women - living in the everyday world as not only the objects of the study but the subjects in it in the sense that they guide and focus the study that explicates on the problems that is only implicit in the everyday world. Or, in another word, this sociology attempts to explicate on how localized and subjective everyday world comes to be organized socially and become "externalized" system of relations. Yet, overall, explication on what this sociology of women aims to do, and how that goal can be achieved, is remarkably vague and abstract in prose.