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Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) co-coined the term sociology and wrote extensively about social life, its patterns, causes, consequences, and problems, making her a key figure in early sociological thought.
What was Martineau’s subject matter for sociology?
It was social life: its patterns, causes, consequences and problems.
What was the importance of happiness?
For Martineau, examining happiness was the way to judge the fairness of human societies
But how is happiness to be measured? It has to do with how much humans are able to fulfill their human nature.
She argued that a system of social arrangements is conducive to human happiness to the extent that it allows individuals to realize their basic human nature as autonomous moral and practical agents.
The opposite of autonomy is domination, the enforced “submission of one’s will to another”
What is domination?
Societies are shaped by power relations that maintain inequality.
Domination occurs through gender, class, and race hierarchies.
What were morals?
The fundamental principles and values that guide a society (e.g., justice, equality).
Collective ideas of proscribed (bad) and prescribed (good) behaviors (culture)
Should be analyzed to assess a society’s true commitments.
What were manners?
The practices and behaviors that reflect a society’s morals.
Patterns of action and association (social structure)
Discrepancy between morals and manners reveals social problems.
What were anomalies?
A misalignment between a society’s morals or ideals and its manners or everyday practices an anomaly; a difference between goals and actions
Discrepancy between morals and manners reveals social problems.
In the U.S. we have “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
4 Anomalies in the US
The institution of slavery, the unequal status of women, the pursuit of wealth, and the fear of public opinion.
Martineau emphasized the 'outsider' perspective and the study of social facts, appreciating informed observations and the collection of evidence from various locations.
Everyone can be a “traveler” in society who can make informed observations about what they see.
Similar to Durkheim, there was an appreciation for the study of “things” (like to social facts) to be collected from different locations which reflected the “common mind”
Examples: Architectural remains, language from books and other sources, national music...etc.
How does Martineau use Multi-Level Comparisons?
Martineau compares societies on their formal institutions (religion, law, science, polity, kinship, economy, education...etc.)
as well as their informal institutions: norms of hospitality, travel, colloquialisms, money, nature, decorum, entertainment, children’s comportment, housing, sexuality...etc.
After examining different formal and informal institutions, Martineau then analyzes society’s moral well-being.
What are a country’s cultural aspirations (morals) and how well does this align with actual behaviors (manners)?
Autonomy or Domination?
Martineau measured this by looking at what the cultural attitudes towards autonomy and domination were- the condition of the less autonomous (women, racial minorities, servants, the homeless...etc.); and the extent to which the country provides necessities for these less autonomous.
Some folks have less autonomy than others!
Note: The domination of women in marriage was similar to the domination of American slaves
Indulgences in both cases exist instead of justice (being allowed freedom by men/slave owners replaces authentic autonomy)
What is the sexuo-economic relation?
Women are economically dependent on men, making gender inequality structural, not natural.
Thus conceptualized, gender stratification is the primary tension in the economies of all known societies, producing, in effect, two sex classes—men as a “master class” and women as a class of subordinated and disempowered social beings.
Calls for economic independence for women.
Why do men dominate women?
Man’s domination of woman springs from his need for sociability with or recognition by an Other.
Out of this primary (mother and child) though distorted need for sociability or recognition arises male domination and female subordination. “So he instituted the custom of psychologically bonding with her while increasingly appropriating all economic agency in the relationship and thus all relational control. She, thus, becomes increasingly dependent, increasingly disempowered economically, increasingly maimed in terms of personal growth.”
Metaphor of the Corset
A metaphor for how society restricts women physically and socially.
Symbol of patriarchal control over women’s bodies and lives.
Anomalies between morals and manners! - Martineau
Tyranny of fashion…
Thus, Gilman’s metaphor of the corset is similar to Marx’s notion of false consciousness?
We accept our own domination and take it for granted
In both cases, “the facts are there”—the inequality is there—but the person “does not feel it”; they do not see or know of it. They have internalized the pressures and constraints as her own.
What was the yellow wallpaper?
Semi-autobiographical about a woman’s descent into madness. • We see the mental breakdown from the inside out
In the story, truth is the domain both of science and of men.
The protagonist in the story is at the mercy of her husband not only because he is the man, but also because he is the doctor
This dual legitimacy means that it is his—and only his— assessment of the protagonist’s health and treatment that counts.
Gilman maintains that the traditional division of labor renders women economically dependent on men and, hence, necessarily strips women of their freedom.
The woman receives both her social status and her economic viability not through her own labor, but through that of her husband.
This makes her labor not her “own,” but a property of the male.
What is the sociobiological tragedy?
Women are not “underdeveloped men, but the feminine half of humanity in undeveloped form.”
Women are “oversexed,” there is too much emphasis on their sex distinction.
Jane Addams link to the chicago school?
The group of women we shall call “the Chicago women’s school” were also creating a sociology and a sociological theory.
Pioneered urban sociology and applied social work.
Advocated for studying social issues through community engagement.
What is a democratic social ethics?
To achieve the democratic transformation of all parts of the society through the inculcation of social ethics.
Addams defines social ethics as the practice of rules of right relationship that produce and sustain in the individual an orientation to action based on “concern for the welfare of a community” or “identification with the common lot”
1) No “one set of people are of so much less importance than another, that a valuable side of life pertaining to them should be sacrificed for the other”
2) All people may be active agents, not simply included in the hopes of some elite but themselves actively hoping, planning, participating, thinking
3) As active agents all people seek opportunities to enact the imperative to kindliness which has evolved in humanity
4) The personal safety of all members of the democratic social unit is tied to the personal safety of each.
What is bifurcated consciousness?
The awareness of a division between formal textual descriptions of life and one’s own lived experience
For Addams, this bifurcation was in the division between the world seen through literature read in college and a series of glimpses of the real life of the poor as she traveled in Europe after graduation.
What was vantage point?
The practice of rendering accounts of social reality from the perspectives of the various individuals involved.
What are paradigmatic case studies?
Using real-life examples to analyze larger social patterns.
Example: Hull House as a case study of urban poverty and reform.
In 1889, she and Ellen Gates Starr arranged to rent Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago’s nineteenth ward, an area of impoverished working-class immigrants. Their plan, which Addams recounts in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910/1990), was to try to learn and help by living simply as neighbors among the poor.
Collectively they embarked upon a range of social experiments, including social clubs, garbage collection, apartments for working women, consumer cooperatives, evening classes, trade unions, interventions in strikes, industrial reform legislation, investigations of working conditions, solutions to unemployment, and platforms for Hull House debates.
What are belated ethics?
Ethics that are misaligned or inappropriate to the modern organization of material production that Addams saw as characterized by “the discovery of the power to combine”
Within the household and family, the belated ethic of the family claim restricts women’s sense of ethical responsibility for the larger society, leading them to feel ethically adequate even when they exploit their domestic help so long as the needs of their family and immediate circle of friends are addressed
What is bourgeoisie philanthropy?
All bourgeois philanthropy, no matter how well intended, is really only a palliative, a restitution to the working class, the real creators of wealth, of what has been taken from them.
Charity efforts by the wealthy often reinforce existing inequalities.
True change requires structural reforms, not just donations.
First Real Sociological Discussions about Race
“Together, Cooper and Wells-Barnett both consciously drew on their lived experiences as African American women to develop a “systematic consciousness of society and social relations.”
They lay the foundation for a feminist sociological theory based in the interests of women of color.” (329)
They originate what will become known as standpoint theory: sociological analysis from a particular standpoint. For Cooper and Wells-Barnett, it was being African American women in Capitalist America.
What is the fundamental relationship in society for Cooper?
Power
Groups are the product of power relations. They arise when some individuals are deemed to share common traits that distinguish them from the rest of the population and become a self-identifying group as they have common experiences because of their shared location in a society’s stratification hierarchy.
Cooper and Wells-Barnett define power as a group’s ability to influence social outcomes affecting its members, ranging from ongoing negotiations among groups (equilibrium) to a constant ability to produce outcomes seen as being in a particular group’s interest (domination).
Methodology: Wells-Barnett
Advanced: both multi-faceted as well as qualitative AND quantitative
Statistics, interviews, secondary data analysis
For her work on lynching, uses newspaper reports (words from the oppressor) and analyzes these.
This is what we would now call “content analysis.
Journalistic
Methodology: Cooper
Similar to Wells-Barnet in the use of the oppressor's discourse in the form of popular literature and historical records.
But Cooper was a theorist first.
She described patterns of social life and situated herself in that theoretical creation.
Born too early! Would have fit in with third wave feminists to write about unique standpoints that create our realities
What do most people want in society? (Marianne Schnitger Weber)
An individual who wants to control his or her own destiny and to become all he or she is created capable of becoming.
Security, stability, and recognition.
Social order is maintained by balancing authority and personal agency.
What is legitimate authority and coercion? (Marianne Schnitger Weber)
For women, she argued, in their experiences of masculine domination within marriage, the key distinction is not between legitimate power (authority) and illegitimate power (coercion).
Because all societies have framed marriage relations with law, all legal power relations between husband and wife are culturally legitimate.
But over the long course of Western history, which she chronicles in detail, men have transformed law and culture in the direction of greater individual autonomy for themselves, greater possibilities for freedom in self-definition.
The tension then may be construed not as one between coercion and authority but as one between autonomy and domination
What is the “Middle Ground of Daily Life”
She suggested that women’s work in the home constitutes a third realm of culture production, which she called the “middle ground of immediate daily life,” in which the individual person is constructed and reproduced as a social being capable of sympathetic and intelligent responses to others.
She questioned Simmel’s claim that only men can create objective culture and that claim’s underlying assumption of distinctively male and female natures, arguing that it is more useful to think of a common nature and of typical maleness and femaleness as circles intersecting within the common space.
This idea allows one to think of women developing their autonomy more fully, men their capacities for caring, and individuals of each gender moving as freely between public and private culture as they individually choose.
What is the best way to study the economic system? (Beatrice Potter Webb)
Empirical research and statistical analysis.
Fieldwork and data collection over abstract theory.
Her experiences led her to the insight that the best way to understand how to reform the capitalist economic system was not to study the desperately poor but to find examples of working class people successfully organizing to create alternative economic systems. She argued that in real social life, “experiments” of this type were taking place all the time in businesses, collectives, and local government.
What is fabian sociology and permeation?
Gradual social reform rather than revolution.
Change happens through influencing institutions and policies over time.
The Fabian Socialists, a relatively small party, sought to influence the course of reform in Britain by a process of “permeation,” that is, by supplying information and platform planks to any political party that would champion any aspect of the reform of inequality.
The Webbs as Fabians were guided by three main principles: (1) that Marx is wrong in his prediction of the “withering away of the state”; rather the state must intervene in order to control—or socialize—basic elements of the economy; (2) inequality has advanced to such a point of social crisis that such intervention is inevitable; and (3) therefore, it is possible for socialists to advocate gradual rather than revolutionary reforms because gradualism is inevitable.
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