Feminist Anthropology and Sociology: Issues for Social Science

There are a variety of ways that one could examine feminist contributions to anthropology and sociology within the context of a handbook on philosophy of science. The first and most obvious is to simply catalogue the various contributions that feminism has made to each of these disciplines, in part through the increasing presence of women in these fields. Sandra Harding refers to this approach as the “women worthies” or the “women’s contributions” projects in a feminist science [1986]. These projects are respectively, rediscovering and honoring women who were forgotten contributors and cataloguing their efforts. As Harding notes, these projects, while worthwhile, do not fundamentally alter the nature of the disciplines in question and do not offer much from the perspective of philosophy of social science. A second possibility would be to note the changes in content that feminism has worked in these two fields, and, indeed, there have been many such changes. Again using Harding’s terminology, the “victimology” project of chronicling the various forms of neglect caused by androcentric science falls into this category. This approach is more germane to the question of how feminism affected the development of anthropology and sociology. Feminism filled gaps both in what was studied and the categories with which the disciplines organized the objects of study.1 While interesting and transformative of these disciplines in many ways, the fundamental nature of the scientific enterprise in these fields was nonetheless not challenged through these critiques either. These two approaches to the role of feminism in shaping anthropology and sociology deal only with the addition of women and women’s concerns to an existing discipline, both when women are the scientists and when they and their lives become the object of study. Feminism offers something unique, revolutionary, or transforming for these social sciences only if it tackles the theoretical frameworks and methodologies that define these sciences. Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne offer the following analysis in their “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology”. “The initial period is one of filling in gaps – correcting sexist biases and creating