This week, your post should focus on the theoretical ideas of Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, or the CWS.
Your posts are NOT SUMMARIES OF THE READINGS. Instead, you should focus on one concept (or perhaps two interrelated concepts) or ideas expressed in the reading materials for this week. Which concept/idea did you find most intriguing or powerful? The gist of the assignment is for you to engage—in an analytically sound way—with the theories (the explanations) we cover in the course. In order to engage with the theories, you need to:
1.Clearly identify and define the specific concept(s) used by the theorist (a couple sentences),
2.Explain what the concept(s) helps us to understand about the social world.
3.Apply the concept/theory provided by the theorist to a contemporary example, being clear to explain why the example you provide is an example of the concept/theory (a paragraph). Another good strategy here is to compare/contrast this concept with a concept from another theorist we’ve read in class or with another theorist you’ve read in another class (or elsewhere).
4.Note that I’ve numbered these criteria, but please don’t number them in your discussion post–instead, write your ideas in complete sentences and in a clear, conversational tone so that it’s readable for your peers. In total, your initial post should be 300-500 words. Finally, be sure to cite properly (using ASA style) throughout, including providing a list of references (1 entry in your reference list is fine if you’re focusing on 1 theorist).
Anna Julia Cooper & Ida B. Wells-Barnett
This Module’s Topic is:
The sociological theories of Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Introduction
Welcome to the module on Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Cooper & Wells-Barnett were prominent African American women in their day, as our course text explains. Although they were different in their means of engagement, their work shares common underlying ideas, so much so that our course text editors group them together. It is important that we understand the importance of Cooper and Wells-Barnett as founding theorists of what we would today call Black feminism. Understanding this link is important since Black feminism is one of the prominent contemporary theoretical paradigms.
Cooper and Wells-Barnett lay out some of the central tenets of Black feminism. For example, they are very much aware that multiple systems of domination/privilege operate simultaneously in the world, so that race, class, gender, etc. all create what contemporary theorist Patricia Hill Collins calls a “matrix of domination.” This means that they were theorizing what contemporary theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” a long time ago. Additionally, Cooper and Wells-Barnett’s commitments to justice offer an important contribution to classical social theory by arguing that difference and conflict is inevitable in social life, but difference and conflict are not the problem. For them, the problem relates in how difference and conflict relate to systems of power. Difference, as embodied in people occupying different social locations and having different experiences, produces conflict because people have such different experiences. The problem, by their account, lies in how resources get allocated unequally across categories of difference. When this occurs, we see the emergence of domination. But things don’t have to be this way. These theorists argued that resources should be allocated equally across people from different backgrounds, and even when this is done, the differences will still produce disagreements (conflict). But because resources are equally (justly) allocated, no particular groups can dominate decision-making so as to further advance their interests against others’. They refer to this equal-distribution scenario as “equilibrium.” Thus, we see their theoretical attention to difference, domination, and equilibrium.
In addition to the above, Cooper & Wells-Barnett develop an important Black feminist methodological strategy: using the metaphor of a courtroom, they seek to “cross-examine” data and interpret it from their unique social location as Black women. In so doing, they “bear witness” (a central idea in Black feminism) to the social injustices visited upon African Americans men, African American women, women, and other oppressed people. By making Black women’s lives and experiences central to their analysis, they are producing another core element of Black feminism: the “Black feminist standpoint.” What this means is that they are arguing that Black women, because of their unique social location have access to a uniquely insightful understanding of the way the world works. When theorists argue that oppressed people have unique insights into the social world, we call this a “standpoint epistemology.” Epistemology is a philosophical term that relates to the study of knowledge and what can be known. Standpoint epistemology is the study of how people’s group-based social location produces unique understandings of the world. Thus, for example, W.E.B. DuBois’ claim that African Americans have a “second sight,” a “double consciousness” that is borne of pain and suffering but which also provides African Americans insights into race relations in the U.S. that White people don’t have and struggle to understand. Cooper and Wells-Barnett are centering Black women’s experiences and associated knowledge in their theories.
As you might suspect, the field of sociology–and academia more generally–erased Cooper and Wells-Barnett so that few scholars outside of Black feminists today have read them or know about them. The erasure of these two women’s ideas is not only unjust; it’s a travesty for sociological theory. Let me put it this way. In my training at both the University of Florida for my master’s degree and at NYU for my PhD, I never read the work of Anna Julia Cooper or Ida B. Wells-Barnett. This is particularly odd since I had taken no less than 6 courses across both universities that dealt with social theory, including a course on feminist theory. Additionally, my focus in terms of topical content was on gender and inequalities. I therefore emerged as a very highly trained gender scholar, someone quite familiar with contemporary Black feminism, but had never read the work of these thinkers. Once I read our course Women Founders text, I felt like I had been robbed of important theoretical insights by not having been assigned Cooper and Wells-Barnett during my graduate training, since I had been taught that the ideas associated with Black feminism came about in the 1960s-1970’s and grew more fully developed in the ’80s and beyond. This means my “expert” knowledge was off by 60-70 years! Imagine how much further along our conceptual/theoretical development would be if we had taken these two theorists’ ideas seriously throughout the 20th century!
Finally, it is important to see the links between Black feminist theory and a commitment to social justice. This is most apparent in Wells-Barnett’s life and work. Many people have heard of Wells-Barnett, but, honestly, few really appreciate just how brilliant and courageous she was. She was basically Black Power and Black Lives Matter long before these movements came into existence. Consider that in her work The Red Record, she had the audacity to argue that Black men were being lynched for having consensual relationships with White women, and to support her claims, she “cross examined” data presented in newspaper accounts and official statistics. In another example of her immense courage, Wells-Barnett was Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks–as your text points out, she refused to give up her seat on a train, an act that could have easily resulted in her own death! A commitment to social justice is one of the central tenets of Black feminism.
As you work through this week’s materials, keep in mind the materials we covered in Week 1’s module, specifically how theorists’ social location shapes 1) their ideas/theories and 2) the reception of those ideas. Also, we’ll be reading different theorists all semester long. As you read those theorists, it’s important that you do so strategically. I recommend taking notes as you read and structuring those notes along the following points:
1.What aspects of the social world does the theorist address? What topics/issues are the focus of their work? This question helps you highlight the purview of the theorist and thereby understand the domains of the social world to which the theorists’ ideas apply.
2.What specific concepts does the theorist develop to help us understand the topics they focus on? Specifically, what is the definition of the concepts, as provided by the theorist? Always use the theorists’ own words to define concepts (avoid going online and using dictionaries, wikipedia, etc. for your definitions!). This question helps you develop your skills to coherently explain specific concepts and base those explanations within the theoretical writings themselves (rather than websites that summarize the work for you).
3.Given #’s 1 & 2, what is the contribution that the theorist makes to the topics/issues that is their focus? Put another way, what does the theorist help to explain (recall my discussion of the importance of explanations to social theory)? What does a given theorist help us to see or understand? And what role do the theorist’s concept(s) play in their explanation? This question gets at developing your ability to identify and explain the contributions of theorists to given topics/issues.
4.What is the contribution that the theorist makes to one or more of the three main theoretical paradigms in sociology? How do the specific concepts they use and explanations they provide relate to the major paradigms? This question helps you develop your skills in situating the theorists’ ideas in a “big picture” way, understanding where and how they fit in the terrain of social theory.
5.How do the concepts and explanations provided by the theorists relate to one contemporary example? Why is the example you select an example of the specific concept/explanation? It’s important to be very clear and specific when discussing examples. This question gets at developing your ability to apply concepts or explanations to the contemporary world.
6.How do the concepts and explanations relate to others we’ve read? How are they similar to another theorist we’ve read or which you’ve covered in another course? How are they different from another theorist we’ve read or which you’ve covered in another class. This question gets at developing your ability to compare/contrast theorists’ concepts/explanations.
Important Concepts/Ideas
As a student in the course, you should be able to define and explain the following concepts/ideas. You should also understand the relationship between the concepts, where relevant:
Black feminism
Relation of Difference & Power: difference, domination, & equilibrium
Standpoint epistemology
Black feminist standpoint
Intersectionality
Matrix of Domination
Learning Objectives
Through completing this module, you will demonstrate your ability to:
Identify the main concepts/ideas and explanations of the theorist and to which arenas of social life they apply;
Situate and evaluate the theorists’ ideas relative to the the main paradigms in social theory;
Apply theorists’ concept to contemporary examples; and
Compare and contrast theorists’ concepts and explanations to other theorists’ ideas.
Assignments Overview
In order to complete this module, you will complete the following:
Required Reading/Viewing
(L&N) “Chap 5: Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)—The Foundations of Black Feminist Sociology” (149-192)
(Lemert) Anna Julia Cooper—“The Colored Woman’s Office” (139-142). A note on the usage of “colored” to refer to Black people. Simply put, if you’re not Black, don’t use it. Here’s an article that explains why (Links to an external site.).
View “Thank a Black Feminist” video by Kimberly Foster (captions available in video). I’ve included this video because Foster does a very good job of laying out the unique social location of Black women and how their location can help produce uniquely insightful perspectives and theories with regard to domination. This video is quite recent, and I think viewing it after reading the Cooper and Wells-Barnett’s work will help illuminate the connections between Black feminism today and the foundational ideas offered by Cooper & Wells-Barnett. The video seems to be geared in particular toward Black men. It is important that all of us listen to Black feminist ideas and read Black feminist theory–and the feminst theories of other women of color–because they help us to understand the social world better. What I mean here is that Black feminist theory is not just for Black women, although clearly it is very important for Black women. All of us can learn a lot by sincerely trying to understand and engage with the ideas/theories provided by Black feminists.
Jane Addams & the Chicago Women’s School
This Module’s Topic is:
The sociological theories of Jane Addams and the Chicago Women’s School.
Introduction
Welcome to the module on Jane Addams and the Chicago Women’s School (CWS) of Sociology. As our L&N text makes clear, Jane Addams was the central theorist in the group and her peers in the CWS generally followed her theoretical lead. Addams and her peers are generally understood as the founders of the field of social work, which is true, but this story obscures their training and practice as sociologists. Moreover, the story of these women founding social work obscures the gendered and scientific politics that produced their expulsion from the field of sociology.
Addams and the CWS were very prominent and prolific in their day. They were engaged in the settlement house movement, which was a movement that sought to establish community-based centers in poor, typically immigrant-communities in order to “help” poor folks. The settlement house movement has been criticized, since it was generally elite White women who participated in the movement and they often did so with the goal of imparting proper (White, middle-class) values onto poor, immigrant women. I point out the critique of the settlement movement because, as the editors of our course text point out, Addams and the CWS seemed to believe in this ethnocentric, classist, and racist approach, but soon came to see that this goal was misguided. I think it’s important to understand that the method employed by Addams and the CWS allowed them to pierce through this problematic worldview and, ultimately, to work for justice for the communities with whom they engaged.
The method employed by Addams and the CWS was “living as a neighbor.” Of course, this meant living alongside those that they studied, but it was much deeper than this. There have been plenty of social scientists who have lived alongside those that they’ve studied and who have still produced racist, classist, sexist, & ethnocentric social science research. So “living like a neighbor” implies something more rigorous; it requires taking the experiences and knowledge of those that they studied seriously. In a sense, it means to “bear witness,” as Cooper and Wells-Barnett might put it. This is an important methodological approach that values the insights provided by those studied by Addams and the CWS. Consider, for example, that initially, Addams and the CWS subscribed to the classist, ethnocentric, and racist assumption that what poor immigrant communities lacked was “culture.” And here, “culture” meant middle-class, White culture. The thinking here is that the plight of immigrants was due to their flawed cultural orientation (this line of thinking persists today in “culture of poverty” arguments, which are also often laced with racist undertones). Our text goes on to explain that Addams and the CWS women made a number of mistakes when they initially went into the community, but eventually had a breakthrough where they came to realize that the community already had a rich culture; what the community needed was resources and services. This realization prompted Addams and the CWS women to shift their focus to advocating for the community to receive the material resources and services they needed. The women were also decidedly Marxist in their theorizing of class relations under capitalism, and this informed their work. Additionally, they were very much feminists. Therefore, their work embodied a socialist-feminist perspective–linking the plight of the community that they studied to the plight of workers under global capitalism and the plight of women within the capitalist system. At the same time, they were quite sensitive to the injustices of race and racism in the U.S. For example, they welcomed Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Hull House and took her work seriously.
The overarching perspective of Addams and the CWS women was that capitalism produced pernicious effects within society and among the poor, including poor immigrants. Capitalism produced a problematic “ethic” which promoted commitment to individual self-interest. Addams and her colleagues argued that the only way to offset these effects was to promote a “social ethic,” where we should foster a commitment to each other, to our communities such that we align our interests with each other rather than with individual self-interest. Pragmatically, Addams and the CWS women thought that the only institution capable of combating and mediating the power of capitalist institutions was the state (the government), so they advocated for state policies that embodied a social ethic, what we today might think of as social “safety net” programs. They were quite successful in the city of Chicago, where they were located, as well as nationally, as a number of the women helped create many of the programs that ultimately became part of the “welfare state” that emerged in the 1930s.
As you work through this week’s materials, keep in mind the materials we covered in Week 1’s module, specifically how theorists’ social location shapes 1) their ideas/theories and 2) the reception of those ideas. Also, we’ll be reading different theorists all semester long. As you read those theorists, it’s important that you do so strategically. I recommend taking notes as you read and structuring those notes along the following points:
1.What aspects of the social world does the theorist address? What topics/issues are the focus of their work? This question helps you highlight the purview of the theorist and thereby understand the domains of the social world to which the theorists’ ideas apply.
2.What specific concepts does the theorist develop to help us understand the topics they focus on? Specifically, what is the definition of the concepts, as provided by the theorist? Always use the theorists’ own words to define concepts (avoid going online and using dictionaries, wikipedia, etc. for your definitions!). This question helps you develop your skills to coherently explain specific concepts and base those explanations within the theoretical writings themselves (rather than websites that summarize the work for you).
3.Given #’s 1 & 2, what is the contribution that the theorist makes to the topics/issues that is their focus? Put another way, what does the theorist help to explain (recall my discussion of the importance of explanations to social theory)? What does a given theorist help us to see or understand? And what role do the theorist’s concept(s) play in their explanation? This question gets at developing your ability to identify and explain the contributions of theorists to given topics/issues.
4.What is the contribution that the theorist makes to one or more of the three main theoretical paradigms in sociology? How do the specific concepts they use and explanations they provide relate to the major paradigms? This question helps you develop your skills in situating the theorists’ ideas in a “big picture” way, understanding where and how they fit in the terrain of social theory.
5.How do the concepts and explanations provided by the theorists relate to one contemporary example? Why is the example you select an example of the specific concept/explanation? It’s important to be very clear and specific when discussing examples. This question gets at developing your ability to apply concepts or explanations to the contemporary world.
6.How do the concepts and explanations relate to others we’ve read? How are they similar to another theorist we’ve read or which you’ve covered in another course? How are they different from another theorist we’ve read or which you’ve covered in another class. This question gets at developing your ability to compare/contrast theorists’ concepts/explanations.
Important Concepts/Ideas
As a student in the course, you should be able to define and explain the following concepts/ideas. You should also understand the relationship between the concepts, where relevant:
Living as a neighbor
Settlement house movement
Hull House
The social ethic
Addams’ & CWS view of the state (relative to capitalism)
Learning Objectives
Through completing this module, you will demonstrate your ability to:
Identify the main concepts/ideas and explanations of the theorist and to which arenas of social life they apply;
Situate and evaluate the theorists’ ideas relative to the the main paradigms in social theory;
Apply theorists’ concept to contemporary examples; and
Compare and contrast theorists’ concepts and explanations to other theorists’ ideas.
Assignments Overview
In order to complete this module, you will complete the following:
Required Reading
(L&N) “Chap 3: Jane Addams (1860-1935)—Ethics and Society” (65-104); “Chap 7: The Chicago Women’s School of Sociology (1890-1920)—Research as Advocacy” (229-277)
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