F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
class and race as well as the various forms and 
modulations of gender. White middle-class hetero-
sexual women dominated the early phases of the 
women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, but 
soon our, and I speak as one, assumptions about 
what would hold for women in general were chal-
lenged and undermined, first by working-class 
women and lesbians, then by African-North 
American, Hispanic, and Native women. The 
implicit presence of class, sexuality, and colonial-
ism began to be exposed. Our assumptions were 
also challenged by women in other societies whose 
experience wasn’t North American, by women 
such as those with disabilities and older women 
whose experience was not adequately represented 
and, as the women’s movement evolved over time, 
by younger women who have found the issues of 
older feminists either alien or irrelevant.
The theoretical challenge to the notion of wom-
en’s standpoint has been made in terms of its alleged 
essentialism. It has been seen as essentialist because 
it excludes other bases of oppression and inequity 
that intersect with the category “women.” The cri-
tique of essentialism, however, assumes the use of 
the category “women” or “woman” to identify 
shared and defining attributes. While essentialism 
has been a problem in the theorizing of woman, it 
cannot be extended to all uses of such categories. In 
practice in the women’s movement, the category 
has worked politically rather than referentially. As a 
political concept, it coordinates struggle against the 
masculinist forms of oppressing women that those 
forms themselves explicitly or implicitly universal-
ize. Perhaps most important, it creates for women 
what had been missing, a subject position in the 
public sphere and, more generally, one in the politi-
cal, intellectual, and cultural life of the society.
Claiming a subject position within the public 
sphere in the name of women was a central enter-
prise of the women’s movement in its early days 
in the 1970s and 1980s. A powerful dynamic was 
created. While those making the claim first were 
white middle-class women, the new subject posi-
tion in public discourse opened the way for others 
who had found themselves excluded by those 
who’d gone before. Their claims were positioned 
and centered differently, and their own experience 
became authoritative. It is indeed one of the 
extraordinary characteristics of the women’s 
movement that its continual disruption, its internal 
struggles against racism and white cultural domi-
nance, its internal quarrels and angers, have been 
far from destructive to the movement. On the 
contrary, these struggles in North America and 
Europe have expanded and diversified the move-
ment as women other than those with whom it 
originated gave their own experiences voice.
W
omen
’
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tandpoint
and
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elations
Standpoint is a term lifted out of the vernacular, 
largely through Harding’s innovative thinking and 
her critique (1988), and it is used for doing new 
discursive work. Harding identifies standpoint in 
terms of the social positioning of the subject of 
knowledge, the knower and creator of knowledge. 
Her own subsequent work develops an epistemol-
ogy that relies on a diversity of subject positions 
in the sociopolitical-economic regimes of colo-
nialism and imperialism. The version of stand-
point that I have worked with, after I had adopted 
the term from Harding (previously I’d written of 
“perspective” . . . ) is rather different. It differs 
also from the concept of a feminist standpoint that 
has been put forward by Nancy Hartsock in that it 
does not identify a socially determined position or 
category of position in society (or political 
economy).
i
Rather, my notion of women’s (rather 
i
Hartsock’s concern is to reframe historical materialism so that women’s experience and interests are fully inte-
grated. Of particular importance to her is the adequate recognition of the forms of power that the women’s 
movement has named “patriarchal.” Women’s marginal position, structured as it is around the work associated 
with reproduction and the direct production of subsistence, locates women distinctively in the mode of produc-
tion in general. For her, taking a feminist standpoint introduces a dimension into historical materialism neglected 
by Marx and his successors. She designs a feminist standpoint that has a specifically political import. It might, 
I suppose, be criticized as essentialist, but, if we consider not just North America and not just white middle-class 
professional North America, it’s hard to deny that Hartsock is characterizing a reality for women worldwide. In 
Canada a recent census report shows that while women’s participation in the paid labor force has increased 
substantially over the past thirty years, “women remain more than twice as likely as men to do at least 30 hours 
a week of cooking and cleaning” (Andersen 2003, A7) and are more involved in child care than men, particularly 
care of younger children.

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