Like many academic undertakings, this volume is the result of lunch. In 2012, hoping for a post-retirement adventure, Sarah accepted the position of Director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where Abby served as a founding director in the mid-1990s. We became close colleagues in the short five years that Sarah spent in Ann Arbor. At lunch in late 2017, we were anticipating Sarah’s return to Santa Barbara. In the hope of sustaining the relationship that had deepened over that short time, Sarah said, “We should do something together.”
We might have predicted a successful collaboration as we have many things in common: we were born within two weeks of each other; we were inhabitants of a long-ago cohort of feminist scholars who began as institutional tokens and as more and more women joined the academy, ended up contributing to the re-shaping of our disciplines and institutions; we were both active in developing Women’s Studies departments and promoting multi-disciplinarity in our own research and in the classroom; we both had appointments in Women’s Studies as well as in our social science disciplines. More than that, we saw the world in much the same way, surprising ourselves at how quickly—and how often—we agreed with one another.
At our next lunch, we developed the idea of a book that would assemble accomplished US feminist social science scholars to reflect on gender and its impact on their own research, as well as their own contributions to their discipline’s approach to gender. We anticipated that many of our contributors would comment on changes in their disciplines over time, often with those changes the result of new feminist sensibilities and intellectual projects unimagined even a decade ago. In our volume prospectus, we wrote, “We imagine that each contribution will represent a unique ‘take’ on gender, inflected both by attention to the development of gender as an organizing analytic category within a discipline, and by the choices made in each contributor’s feminist scholarship.” Beyond that, we were eager to see the different ways our contributors approached their reflections; we believed it would be a great strength of the volume to see the range of ideas that would emerge from a relative lack of intellectual constraint.
As this volume represents a stroll through American social sciences, the inclusion of particular disciplines is largely self-evident. However, two disciplines deserve brief comment. At the University of Michigan, and for a long while, both history and psychology have been designated social sciences. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, history is included in the humanities and psychology in the natural sciences. We quickly agreed that insofar as both of these disciplinary practices privilege the empirical investigation of social life, they, along with their sister disciplines, should be represented in the volume. The reader will note that within the volume there is a diversity that is not only biographical, including variation in the entry of a scholar’s cohort into academic life, but also in the specific sub- and inter-disciplines in which many of our contributors locate themselves. These include Women’s Studies, American Studies, Disability Studies, Transgender Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Even so, social scientists all.
It is possible that there was some mystical, “right” way to arrange the chapters, but we could never divine it. We only knew we didn’t want to simply march the reader through each social science discipline in alphabetical order, where first one enters anthropology, then economics, and on and on until one arrives at the outer reaches of sociology. We reasoned that this ordering would not only be tedious, but would re-inscribe the structure of the academy and mask the vitality and intellectual range of the offerings presented to the reader. Another option in ordering would have reflected our wish for contributors to contemplate the way in which cohort made a difference to their histories. But we soon discovered that their intellectual pathways did not map neatly onto age or generation. Maybe, we thought, the best way was to fall back on the alphabet and order the chapters that way (by author? by title?). But that seemed unnecessarily bureaucratic. Still, as social scientists we wanted some sort of reasonable ordering. The solution? A random number table! To this, our readers may respond, “then why have editors?” Our thinking was that with this method we would constrain neither author nor reader, yet be present in this introduction to point out how different essays could be seen in relation to each other—sometimes in surprising ways.
How did we picture our readers and what they would draw from this volume? We first envisioned US feminist scholars who, like us, enjoy reading across the disciplines and draw both insight and inspiration from the interplay of disciplinary perspectives. Our international colleagues as well might find reflections by American feminists useful for comparison with their own evolving disciplines. We also imagined graduate students whose intellectual development and scholarly direction are invariably enhanced by multiple perspectives. Certainly, both of these groups are exceptionally diverse, with very real differences in their routes to particular disciplines and the scholarly passions that guide them. At the same time, we believe that they share an abiding interest in where American feminist social science has been and what the future holds for it. If we are right, we think readers will want to “pair” or link chapters across discipline, topic, and age cohort for complementary insights into specific empirical questions. Of course, we hope that some faculty may be interested in assigning some or all of these chapters to their students, and we know they will have a range of purposes in mind. But some of the directions we offer can also serve as strategies for organizing material for teaching and student reflection. Therefore, we suggest some alternative ways to read, some themes we noticed as frequently discussed, and some that received sustained attention in an individual chapter, but much less cross-chapter treatment.
We note first that each essay in this volume takes up an individual feminist scholar’s intellectual journey in her own voice and in her own way. In that sense, they are compellingly different from one another. One could certainly read them, as we did initially, as remarkable narratives of the history of a single person’s pathway both in a discipline and in relation to interdisciplinary feminist scholarship. In that way, they prove powerful reading. Alternatively (or in addition), highly idiosyncratic comparisons could be made of any two accounts, focusing on aspects of intellectual development and influence.
Another way to read the chapters would be to choose the ones written by authors from a single graduate cohort; our authors’ doctoral training occurred in five different decades, beginning with the 1960s (Kessler-Harris from history and Martin from sociology) and ending in the 2000s (Coffman-Rosen from psychology). For the remaining decades, our authors come from a range of fields: for the 1970s, we have Hawkesworth, Ortner, Sapiro, and Shields; for the 1980s, Inhorn, Jacobsen, and Nelson; and for the 1990s, Cole, Enke, Feldstein, Hancock Alfaro, and Ostrove. To some degree, preoccupations may reflect the shifting state of disciplines and the emergence of interdisciplines in those decades, but as we will see when we look at major themes, most themes these authors take up cross-cut the decades of graduate education. We note that the single coauthored chapter, by Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove, includes accounts of each of their pathways and reflects experiences that differed in many ways, including their doctoral cohorts.
Perhaps a more fruitful set of juxtapositions involves chapters that address a particular theme that has been a core focus of feminist scholarship across these decades. For example, authors of at least five chapters were preoccupied with issues of activism directed at institutional change. Such concerns are central to both Hawkesworth’s and Jacobsen’s chapters, as well as those of Kessler-Harris, Nelson, and Martin. The last three discuss lawsuits undertaken to challenge the status quo, with the hope of institutional transformation. A related preoccupation across many chapters is the role of feminist organizing within disciplinary professional societies (Sapiro, Jacobsen, and Nelson), in interdisciplinary professional societies (Jacobsen, Kessler-Harris, Martin, Nelson, and Sapiro), and in feminist professional organizations (Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove, Jacobsen, Kessler-Harris, Martin, Nelson, and Sapiro). Clearly, an activist focus in organizations and institutions has persisted across time as a reflection of those social science disciplinary practitioners who press for change.
It is perhaps unsurprising that several authors take up the issue of interdisciplinarity as it has shaped their own work, but we believe readers may find it useful to consider the different forms that process has taken. It comes up as broadening the range of intellectual influences on scholarship, as well as occasionally being a disappointment. The chapters that take up this issue most centrally include those of scholars from psychology, political science, history, and economics (by Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove, Cole, Enke, Feldstein, Hancock Alfaro, Nelson, Sapiro, and Shields).
More topical themes also arise across chapters and might be considered both simply in terms of the individual accounts or in terms of disciplinary contrasts. Themes of power and masculinities are among the most enduring concerns of feminist scholars, and both are well represented in this volume. Consideration of power and power relations is taken up in depth by anthropologist Ortner, organizational sociologist Martin, and three scholars who began in political science: Hancock Alfaro, Hawkesworth, and Sapiro. Masculinities (which also index power relations) are discussed by anthropologists Inhorn and Ortner, organizational sociologist Martin, economist Nelson, and historian Kessler-Harris.
Finally, intersectionality is discussed in many papers as a central theoretical perspective. It is the main topic of Cole’s and Hancock Alfaro’s chapters. It is also an explicit central concern (with varying structural referents—often race and gender, but also disabilities, gender, and ethnicity) in the essays by Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove, Feldstein, Kessler-Harris, Ortner, and Shields. More implicitly, Enke takes the issue up in discussing race and gender, as does Inhorn in terms of the experience of gender within some Muslim communities.
A few more themes of intense concern to feminist theorists were each addressed by authors. For example, three of our authors focused centrally on labor, including on housework as labor; this included both of our economists (Jacobsen and Nelson), as well as historian Kessler-Harris. Three also took up issues of gender similarities as well as gender differences from the perspective of three different fields: political science (Sapiro), economics (Nelson), and psychology (Shields). Four addressed issues of motherhood and reproduction in very different ways and contexts: Feldstein, Kessler-Harris, Inhorn, and Nelson. Four more included a focus on sexual harassment: Hawkesworth, Kessler-Harris, Martin, and Shields. Finally, three included focused attention to sexualities (Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove, Enke, and Kessler-Harris).
Five very important themes were taken up in detail in only one chapter each. These include class (Kessler-Harris), disabilities (Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove), religion (Inhorn), immigration (Kessler-Harris), and trans experiences (Enke). We note that some of these issues are emergent in the more recent decades and will likely characterize more scholars’ focused attention in the decades ahead, but some have been relatively long-term preoccupations of at least some feminist scholars, but never center stage for many. We are very happy they are part of this volume, showcasing some brilliant contributions in these areas that should encourage more.
One other detail is not quite a theme, but might attract some readers’ interest. All of our authors refer to important contemporary scholars’ impact on their work. In addition, nearly all of our authors mention the influence of one or another foundational thinker on them and/or on the field; this kind of reference came up regardless of doctoral cohort. It is perhaps unsurprising that Sapiro’s chapter on political theory mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, but our economists (Nelson and Jacobsen) mentioned many thinkers across disciplines: Mary Daly, Mary Hartmann, Helene Cixoux, and Virginia Sapiro. Equally, Hancock Alfaro, who defines herself as truly interdisciplinary, discusses nineteenth-century theorist Maria Stewart, and early work by historian Joan Scott, political scientist Mary Hawkesworth, and bell hooks, among others. In other cross-disciplinary references, Hawkesworth discusses legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, and Martin cites the work of Harvard Business School researcher Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Many authors mention early disciplinary predecessors. Jacobsen and Nelson mention economists such as Myra Strober, Barbara Bergmann, Marianne Ferber, Nancy Folbre, and Francine Blau; anthropologist Ortner discusses Mary Douglas. Our historians mention the impact of earlier historians: Feldstein describes the influence of Jacqueline Jones; Kessler-Harris outlines Gerda Lerner’s; and Enke discusses Elizabeth R. Kennedy’s. Sociologist Martin discusses Joan Acker and Raewyn Connell, and psychologist Shields reviews the impact of Sandra Bem, Kay Deaux, Brenda Major, Alice Eagly, Mary Parlee, and Janet Hyde. Some authors discuss or mention the same thinkers (e.g., Hancock Alfaro and Ortner both mention DuBois, and Jacobson and Nelson both mentioned Strober). Psychologists Coffman-Rosen and Ostrove mention “previous transgressive scholars” and some refer to influential activist/writers (Enke on Madeline Davis and Leslie Feinberg). We believe these references are more than obligatory nods to past thinkers but reflect a shared sense of the importance of recognizing at least some of the work that enabled one’s own.
We should note what we did not intend with this volume as well. We did not intend it to serve as a comprehensive account of developments in feminist scholarship within the social sciences, or in any particular social science field, over five decades. We did not intend it to “cover” all important feminist scholars’ contributions within or across fields, to reflect the most important ones, or to serve as a guide to the field of women and gender studies from the perspective of the social sciences. We hope and believe the volume offers material that can contribute to others’ efforts to accomplish any or all of those scholarly projects, but they were not our goals, nor does it achieve them. Instead, we hope these essays are food for thought: thought abo...