Deegan labels the years 1920 to 1965 the ‘dark era of patriarchal ascendancy’ (1995: 333). It is in this period that the pioneering women died or retired and were not replaced. She argues that the only two senior men who were remembered positively by women graduate students were W. Lloyd Warner and David Riesman. Riesman, however, had been parachuted into Chicago, and was marginalised by the powerful men. Championing women and holding feminist ideas merely confirmed his marginality. The women trained from 1939 onwards tended to marry (Helen McGill Hughes, Carolyn Rose, Alice Rossi, Rose Laub Coser, and Rosalie Wax were all married to distinguished sociologists). Anti-nepotism rules prevented them from being given posts
at the elite universities where their husbands worked.
Much of the history of the period from 1945 to 1965 is regarded as a second golden age, and that is discussed in Chapter 7. In the remainder of this chapter I have drawn out three general issues, none apparently ‘about’ gender, which actually became points of struggle about women and/or feminists in sociology, which can be seen to underlie long-standing problems over what sociology is, and whether women’s concerns have any place there. There are three issues here: (1) qualitative versus quantitative methods; (2) research topics; and (3) the distinction between pure and applied social science.