F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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Smith continues to be an active teacher and scholar. As professor emerita in the 
Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for 
Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor in the Department 
of Sociology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, she continues to educate and inspire 
a new generation of scholars dedicated to institutional ethnography (see, for instance, 
Campbell and Manicom 1995).
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Although Dorothy Smith has written on a wide variety of topics, including education, 
Marxism, the family, mental illness, and textual analysis, she is most well known as one of the 
originators of standpoint theory.
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Smith uses the notion of standpoint to emphasize that 
what one knows is affected by where one stands (one’s subject position) in society. We begin 
from the world as we actually experience it, and what we know of the world and of the “other” 
is conditional on that location (Smith 1987). Yet, Smith’s argument is not that we cannot look 
at the world in any way other than from our given standpoint. Rather, her point is that (1) no 
one can have complete, objective knowledge; (2) no two people have exactly the same stand-
point; and (3) we must not take the standpoint from which we speak for granted. Instead, we 
must recognize it, be reflexive about it, and problematize it. Our situated, everyday experience 
should serve as a “point of entry” of investigation (Smith 2005:10).
Put in another way, the goal of Smith’s feminist sociology is to explicitly reformulate 
sociological theory by fully accounting for the standpoint of gender and its effects on our 
experience of reality. Interestingly, it was Smith’s particular standpoint as a female in a male-
dominated world, and specifically as simultaneously a wife, mother, and sociology graduate 
student in the 1960s, that led her to the formulation of her notion of standpoint. By overtly 
recognizing the particular standpoint from which she spoke, Smith was bringing to the fore the 
extent to which the issue of standpoint had been unacknowledged in sociology. This point is 
quite ironic, really. Sociology was explicitly set out as the “scientific” and “objective” study 
of society when it first emerged as a discipline in the nineteenth century, but because its first 
practitioners were almost exclusively men, it implicitly assumed and reflected the relevancies, 
interests, and perspectives of (white, middle-class) males.
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“Its method, conceptual schemes 
and theories had been based on and built up within the male social universe” (Smith 1990a:23).
The failure to recognize the particular standpoints from which they spoke not only left soci-
ologists unaware of the biases inherent to their position; in addition, it implicitly made the disci-
pline of sociology a masculine sociology. In other words, by focusing on the world of paid labor, 
politics, and formal organizations (spheres of influence from which women have historically been 
excluded) and erasing or ignoring women’s world of sexual reproduction, children, household 
labor, and affective ties, sociology unwittingly served as a vehicle for alienating women from their 
own lives (Seidman 1994:212–13). This is the irony mentioned previously: at the same time that 
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The term “feminist standpoint theory” was actually not coined by Smith. Rather, feminist standpoint 
theory (and hence “standpoint theory”) is traced to Sandra Harding (1986), who, based on her reading 
of the work of feminist theorists—of which the most important were Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, 
and Hilary Rose—used the term to describe a feminist critique beyond the strictly empirical one of 
claiming a special privilege for women’s knowledge, and emphasizing that knowledge is always 
rooted in a particular position and that women are privileged epistemologically by being members of 
an oppressed group (“epistemology” means how we know what we know, how we decide what is 
valid knowledge) (Smith 2005:8; see also Harding 2004).
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Although Smith did not focus on race, as you will shortly see, Patricia Hill Collins built on Smith’s 
work by illuminating how race is intertwined with gender and class standpoints.

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