Barbara Laslett

Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology

The theoretical concern of this paper is with the relationship of gender, personal life, and emotion to the social construction of sicentific knowledge. I examine this question through biographical research into the life and work of William Fielding Ogburn (1886–1959), a major figure in the history of American sociology. Ogburn believed that emotion was inimical to science and that statistics could help control what he considered to be its distorting effects. My analysis suggests that there was a personal component, reflecting Ogburns search for masculinity, to the development of his ideas about how scientific sociology should be defined and practiced. I also suggest that Ogburns ideas were favorably received by his mostly male audience because they spoke to broad cultural and historical currents. My analysis shows the need for a view of scientific knowledge that takes into account the effects of gender relations and emotion on intellectual activity.

GENDER, SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, AND WOMEN'S SELF-ORGANIZATION: Considering the U.S. Welfare State

This article argues that changes in the organization of social reproduction, defined to include the activities, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, responsibilities, and relationships involved in maintaining daily life, can explain historical differences in womens political self-organization. Examining the Progressive period, the 1930s, and the 1960s and 1970s, the authors suggest that the conditions of social reproduction provide the organizational resources for and legitimation of womens collective action.

Biography as historical sociology

ConclusionWilliam Fielding Ogburn was located on and helped to create the “cutting edge” of developments in twentieth-century American sociology — particularly its increasing emphasis on statistics and objectivist methodology. His life, which spanned the period within which the changes he advocated were institutionalized, can be seen as having significance as a marker of a transition. From this perspective, studying well-chosen individual lives has the same heuristic value as studying particular historical events. They can, to quote Philip Abrams, “mark decisive conjunctions of action and structure;... moments of structuring at which human agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly as simultaneously determined and determining.”Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, 199. My analysis of Ogburns advocacy of scientific sociology — one that differentiated science from both emotion and politics — reflected and reinforced his solutions to problematics in his personal life. His “response” to the separate spheres that defined gender relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, helped to construct a reflection of them in twentieth-century American sociology. It is in this way — through concrete social action within specific historical conditions — that personal life and gender shaped the intellectual and professional culture within which he lived and worked.Ogburns life story suggests that action, particularly advocacy, is grounded, at least in part, in a personal agenda, but that personal agendas, just like any others, need to be understood sociologically. Ogburns “problem” was not idiosyncratic. Indeed, it is because it was shaped by social conditions, rather than uniquely individual ones, that his solutions were more likely to be recognized, accepted, and institutionalized by his mostly male audiences. Tracing these connections within a concrete historical case, within a single biography, demonstrates how personal life is connected to action and, thus, needs to be included in any sociological theory of human agency.Ogburns life coincided with a set of opportunities that made it possible for sociologists to gain a more prominent place in national affairs and to develop sociological knowledge in a particular direction. This development was, in turn, accompanied by the creation of a language and practice in which the scientific authority of sociology became associated with it being devoid of an appearance of politics and emotion. The emergence of this language and practice, and the beliefs on which they were based, however, cannot be explained solely by the circumstances that fostered them or the career opportunities that they made available. They reflect the practical actions of human agents within historically specific settings. But these agents must be recognized as gendered and the problematic of gendering must be incorporated into the history of American sociology.As Steinmetz has argued, the stories that we tell are important for what we do — and what we do not do — because they structure social consciousness and social action.George Steinmetz, “Chronicles and Narratives in German Working class formation,” paper presented at the 1989 meetings of the Social Science History Association. For a version of the history of sociology in Europe that has some similarity to the story told in this paper, see Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), especially chapter 3. But Lepenies also does not make the connection between the history about which he is writing and gender relations, despite their relevance. As long as we write the history of American sociology as an ungendered narrative, we will not only misrepresent that history but we will also limit our capacity to understand and affect changes in it. Differentiation was (and is) a strategy more available to men than women and the norms and organization of professional life that embody that strategy need to be understood not as general but rather as gendered.There is a gender dimension to the history of American sociology to which more attention could usefully be given. Although the impact of political and professional interests has been widely recognized in this history, the impact of personal life in general and gender relations in particular have not been systematically incorporated into accounts of this process. Yet gender relations — and the meanings and actions that are shaped by them — are an important part of the story being told here and an important source of the energy that institutionalizing social change entails. Biography provides access to these personal and gendered dimensions of our professional history in ways that can more adequately acknowledge the complexities of the structuring process.

The decline of fertility in Los Angeles, California, 1880-1900.

Data from the 1900 U.S. Census of Population show that fertility in Los Angeles California, declined by more than 50 per cent between 1880 and 1900. Womens mean age at first marriage, which rose by approximately three years, contributed to the decline, but change in marital fertility was more important than change in nuptiality. Although the fertility of in-migrating U.S.-born women was lower than that of California-born women, the decline was not explained by in-migration. The emergence of a class differential in fertility, with couples of higher status having fewer children than those of lower status, and the simultaneous weakening of class differentials in secondary-school attendance, together suggest that the rise of universal secondary schooling probably did not account for the marital fertility decline experienced in middle- and upper-status families.

Feminism, families, and family sociology

In the mid-1980s, in Silicon Valley just south of San Francisco, and, a coast away, in the Boston area, and, halfway in between, in the city and suburbs of Chicago, three major studies of the American family were being conducted by three generations of American sociologists: Of Human Bonding: Parent-Child Relations Across the Life Course (Aldine deGruyter, 1990) by Alice S. and Peter H. Rossi, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (Basic Books, 1990) by Judith Stacey, and Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (University of Chicago Press, 1991) by Marjorie L. DeVault. Alice and Peter Rossi, the oldest generation among the authors of these books, learned sociology in post-World War II Columbia University. There Robert Merton, who shaped post-Parsonian, American functionalism, and Paul Lazarsfeld, who developed and disseminated the potential of survey research, dominated the sociological scene. Judith Stacey, a member of the second generation being discussed here, was taught in the sociological ambience of Brandeis University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There the sociological atmosphere was oppositional-oppositional, perhaps, to the Columbia model of middle-range theory, functionalism, and survey research as well as to the politics of race, class, war and gender of the time. It was a department supportive of qualitative methods, of currents in European social thought, of radical politics, and of feminism as a social movement and intellectual agenda (Thorne, 1987). The third generation of sociologists, as represented here by Marorie DeVault, got her training as a sociologist in the 1980s in an atmosphere different from either of the preceding two generations. At Northwestern University, where DeVault re-