Barrie Thorne

The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology

Feminists have made important contributions to sociology, but we have yet to transform the basic conceptual frameworks of the field. A comparison of sociology with anthropology, history, and literature–disciplines which have been more deeply transformed–suggests factors that may facilitate or inhibit feminist paradigm shifts. The traditional subject matter of sociology fell into a co-optable middle ground, neither as thoroughly male centered as in history or literature, nor as deeply gendered as in anthropology. In addition, feminist perspectives have been contained in sociology by functionalist conceptualizations of gender, by the inclusion of gender as a variable rather than as a theoretical category, and by being ghettoized, especially in Marxist sociology. Feminist rethinking is also affected by underlying epistemologies (proceeding more rapidly in fields based on interpretive rather than positivist understanding), and by the status and nature of theory within a discipline.

SEXUALITY AND GENDER IN CHILDREN'S DAILY WORLDS*

This paper analyzes relationships between sexuality and gender in the experiences of nine to eleven year-old children, based on participant observation in four different elementary schools. Childrens gender arrangements help lay the foundation for the more overtly sexual scripts of adolescence and adulthood. Extensive segregation between girls and boys, and distinctive social relations within their separate groups, provide gender-differentiated contexts for learning. Groups of boys experience shared excitement and bonding focused on public rule transgression. Girls are organized in friendship pairs linked in shifting coalitions and bond more through mutual self-disclosure; they teach and learn strategies for maintaining and ending intimacy. Heterosexual teasing (“like”; “goin with”) and rituals like “chase and kiss” heighten gender boundaries. Separate gender groups – which sustain somewhat different meanings of the sexual – and ritualized and asymmetric relations between girls and boys, prepare the way for the sexual scripts of early adolescence.

RE-VISIONING WOMEN AND SOCIAL CHANGE: Where Are the Children?

Feminists have re-visioned women as active subjects in knowledge by granting them agency and diversity and by challenging divisions like public versus private. But both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply adult centered. Adult perspectives infuse three contemporary images of children: as threats to adult society, as victims of adults, and as learners of adult culture (“socialization”). We can bring children more fully into knowledge by clarifying ideological constructions, with attention to the diversity of childrens actual lives and circumstances; by emphasizing childrens agency as well as their subordination; and by challenging their conceptual privatization. The re-visioning of children involves complex issues of gender, generation, autonomy, and relatedness.

Women in the draft resistance movement

Why has the position of the sexes become an issue in some social movements and not in others? Under what conditions has feminism emerged out of movements devoted to other causes? Starting with these general questions, this case study, based on participant observation, explores the factors which led women in the draft resistance movement in Boston in the late 1960s to turn toward, and help found, a Womens Liberation group. The strategies and tactics of the Resistance (more explicitly than other New Left movements) differentiated male from female participants. The segregation and subordination of women within the Resistance drew them into awareness of themselves as a distinct group; the Resistance ideology, which had strong egalitarian themes, contradicted their subordination and could be extended to define sexual inequality as a political issue. Contact with outside feminists helped precipitate the shift from draft resistance to Womens Liberation.

Protest and the problem of credibility: Uses of Knowledge and Risk-Taking in the Draft Resistance Movement of the 1960's

In order to expand their base in society, protest movements must establish credibility with potential recruits and allies. This dimension of protest strategies is explored through a case study drawn from participant observation in the draft resistance movement in Boston in 1968-69. The strategies of two different Resistance groups are compared: draft counseling, or the offering of expert knowledge to outsiders; and non-cooperation with the draft, a strategy based on risk-taking. These strategies involved different methods of gaining access to and credibility with outsiders; overall, they embodied contrasting styles of persuasion. The service aspect of draft counseling involved minimizing differences between movement members and outsiders, while non-cooperation was tied to a more polarizing approach to persuasion. Comparison of these two strategies and their implicit strains highlights a dilemma many protest movements have experienced: to gain legitimacy involved the risk of compromising the movements political goals, but staying true to the groups differences with the existing culture may limit the movements effectiveness.

Contradictions, and a glimpse of utopia: Daily life in a university women's studies program

Synopsis Drawing on the experiences of the Michigan State University Womens Studies Program, this essay analyzes contradictions resulting from efforts by womens studies (as a social movement committed to social change, equality, collectivity, and valuing women) to make headway in a bureaucracy, the university, founded on hierarchy, competition, and the devaluation of women. Within womens studies programs there are conflicts between hierarchy and collectivity; individual faculty members often feel caught between the demands of feminism and of academic careers; and within the larger university, there are conflicts as womens studies programs struggle for legitimacy while also seeking institutional and social change.

RESISTING THE DRAFT: An Ethnography of the Draft Resistance Movement, Barrie Thorne. Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1971 (available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan)

interests and interest groups; and that they in this sense create political alignments and political power. In Brill’s work, the limiting conditions of this argument are suggested. Brill points out (although his concern is not with the symbolic conception argument), that the conditions under which organizing (the development of political power) fails are (a) when leaders fail to do the hard, disciplined political work of contacting, rallying, and making cohesive a political group; (b) when the potential audience to which the group employing the symbols by which they hope to rise to