F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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Institutional Ethnography (2005)
Dorothy Smith
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It’s hard to recall just how radical the experience of 
the women’s movement was at its inception for 
those of us who had lived and thought within the 
masculinist regime against which the movement 
struggled. For us, the struggle was as much within 
ourselves, with what we knew how to do and think 
and feel, as with that regime as an enemy outside us. 
Indeed we ourselves had participated however pas-
sively in that regime. There was no developed dis-
course in which the experiences that were spoken 
originally as everyday experience could be trans-
lated into a public language and become political in 
the ways distinctive to the women’s movement. We 
learned in talking with other women about experi-
ences that we had and about others that we had 
not had. We began to name “oppression,” “rape,” 
“harassment,” “sexism,” “violence,” and others. 
These were terms that did more than name. They 
gave shared experiences a political presence.
Starting with our experiences as we talked and 
thought about them, we discovered depths of alien-
ation and anger that were astonishing. Where had all 
these feelings been? How extraordinary were the 
transformations we experienced as we discovered 
with other women how to speak with one another 
about such experiences and then how to bring them 
forward publicly, which meant exposing them to 
men. Finally, how extraordinary were the transfor-
mations of ourselves in this process. Talking our 
experience was a means of discovery. What we did 
not know and did not know how to think about, we 
could examine as we found what we had in com-
mon. The approach that I have taken in developing 
an alternative sociology takes up women’s stand-
point in a way that is modeled on these early adven-
tures of the women’s movement. It takes up 
women’s standpoint not as a given and finalized 
form of knowledge but as a ground in experience 
from which discoveries are to be made.
It is this active and shared process of speaking 
from our experience, as well as acting and organiz-
ing to change how those experiences had been cre-
ated, that has been translated in feminist thinking 
into the concept of a feminist standpoint—or, for 
me, women’s standpoint. However the concept 
originated, Sandra Harding (1988) drew together 
the social scientific thinking by feminists, particu-
larly Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, and myself, 
that had as a common project taking up a stand-
point in women’s experience. Harding argued that 
feminist empiricists who claimed both a special 
privilege for women’s knowledge and an objectiv-
ity were stuck in an irresolvable paradox. Those she 
described as “feminist standpoint theorists” moved 
the feminist critique a step beyond feminist empiri-
cism by claiming that knowledge of society must 
always be from a position in it and that women are 
privileged epistemologically by being members of 
an oppressed group. Like the slave in Hegel’s par-
able of the master-slave relationship, they can see 
more, further, and better than the master precisely 
because of their marginalized and oppressed condi-
tion. She was, however, critical of the way in which 
experience in the women’s movement had come to 
hold authority as a ground for speaking, and claim-
ing to speak truly, that challenged the rational and 
objectified forms of knowledge and their secret 
masculine subject. Furthermore, feminist stand-
point theory, according to Harding, implicitly 
reproduced the universalized subject and claims to 
objective truth of traditional philosophical dis-
course, an implicit return to the empiricism we 
claimed to have gone beyond.
The notion of women’s standpoint—or indeed 
the notion that women’s experience has special 
authority—has also been challenged by feminist 
theorists. It fails to take into account diversities of 
SOURCE: Excerpts from Institutional Ethnography by Dorothy Smith. Copyright © 2005 by AltaMira Press.
Reproduced with permission of AltaMira Press via Copyright Clearance Center.

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