In the period from 1930 onwards two Americans are regularly pre­sented as founding fathers to today’s students: Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons. These two American men dominated sociology in the era of Second Wave feminism (1930-68). One of them, Talcott Parsons, became a symbol to feminists of all that was pernicious about malestream sociology, while […]

Freud is not generally regarded as a founding father of sociology, although he does appear in some texts. Freud, whose ideas became widely known in intellectual circles after the First World War, was not a sociologist, but his ideas have been regarded as seminal by many male sociologists since 1920. Freud’s theories are particularly problematic […]

The majority of feminist sociologists, unlike feminist anthropologists, have been unable to draw analytic concepts from Durkheim as they have from Marx and Weber. Liberal sociologists have de facto used the approach to official statistics that Durkheim pioneered, but there are no feminists harnessing anomie or conscious collective as there are fem­inists using ideology or […]

Feminist sociology owes a debt to Weber, but one which is rarely acknowledged. Weber brought into sociology the concept of patriarchy, or to be more precise, patriarchal authority. He differentiated three types of authority (charismatic, bureaucratic and patriarchal), as part of his attempt to theorise nineteenth-century European societies. Feminists after 1968, especially separatist radical feminists […]

There is a relatively large literature in feminist sociology which starts from Marx. Hamilton (1978), for example, used Marx as the funda­mental theorist for understanding how women experienced the passage from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. Feminist writers in Third Wave feminism were critical of Marx’s failure to address sex differences among workers, explore exploitation […]

There are three feminist strategies to be explored: how feminist sociol­ogists have revisited and criticised the founding fathers central to the malestream grand narrative; how feminists have searched out alterna­tive founding fathers; and how feminists have used ideas from the founding fathers to build feminist sociology. At one level, the way the history of sociology […]

the founding fathers of sociology A full-fledged member of the brotherhood of professors, males all. (Cross, 1981: 79) T he previous chapter focused upon the search for founding mothers. This one deals with the uneasy relationships between feminist soci­ologies and the intellectual patriarchy: the founding fathers and the brotherhood of professors who write about them […]

One of the reasons for the exclusion of women from the history of the Chicago School may be related to focus of their research. Topics which are currently part of sociology, and were legitimate topics in the 1890-1920 period, were not regarded as sociological between 1920 and 1980. For example, Annie Marion McLean (1899/1998) studied, […]