Is There A Founding Mother Of Sociology? -By Hassan Idris

There’s surprisingly little agreement among sociologists about what theory is and what it is supposed to do for sociological analysis. For some, theory represents the way that science explains the empirical world. For others, it’s simply an orienting perspective that can be used to describe events. For still others, theory is to be normative, advocating social arrangements that reduce oppression and inequality. However, it’s true that the first sociology was macro and was concerned with industrialization and modernity with some of its assumptions gotten from the conservative reactions to the enlightenment period. It’s however termed as patriarchal and religiously inclined with the less attention it gives to the female sex in the making of the discipline.

The area of contradictions remain on the issue of the founding mothers of sociology and the overthrow of feminist sociologists. As an undergraduate student, we were taught about the founding fathers of sociology and never were we taught about the founding mothers of sociology. This awakens my inquisitiveness and critical thinking to ask if the discipline of sociology is advocating sexism and patriarchal hegemony?

According to Ritzer in 1995, they are women whose major works were on social reforms to improve the situation of women who were part of the pioneers or founding mothers of sociology and this classical sociologist included Jane Addams (1860-1935), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1862-1931), Marianne Webber (1870-1954), Anna Julia Cooper(1858-1931), Ida Wells-Barnet (1862-1931) and even Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943). 

These women contributed a lot to the discipline of sociology and the hallmark of their works centred around women’s experience, lives as equally important to men, partisan commitment to uplifting women, emphasis on the purpose of sociological thinking, social reforms to improve people’s lives viz knowledge and they insisted that inequality is the problem that needs reformation.

However, we can’t debunk the fact that women in Europe particularly Britain worked hard to create sociology from various parts and the discipline do not lay more emphasis on them. For instance,  Harriet Martineau who may be sociology’s founder, since her first publication, Illustration of Political Economy (1832-34) predate those of Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer was never recognized. Harriet Martineau translated Comte’s positivism from French into English that we read today and the work she wrote on Illustration of Political Economy was older than when Comte even coined sociology in 1839. 

On the other hand, Harriet Taylor Mills and the wife of George Simmel, Gertrud Simmel work with their husbands independently or collaboratively to create sociology but were never recognized.  Let us not forget Marriane Webber, the wife of Max Weber who published eleven books of her own on sociology and those books were never translated into English but her husband’s biography was translated into English. Let us not even go to Beatrice Potter Webb who was an activist, social reformer and social analyst.

The argument continues with one side of it seeing the institutionalisation of sexism in higher education and the male sociological figures in the discipline who over a hundred years period worked to create a male-dominated discipline and which happens to be seen as the reason for why female sociologists weren’t given attention or fixed in the mainstream sociology. The other side argued that Talcott Parsons, Comte, Weber were all conservative and came from a religious background that influenced them from welcoming the contribution of female sociologists. 

In addendum, some others argued that the works of the feminist sociologists like Dorothy Smith and other feminists were not as encompassing or grand to find their ways into mainstream sociology and the feminist sociologists don’t have a ‘created ideology’ of their own but borrowing ideas from dominant theories such as functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology. So, wherever we heard of liberal feminism, conservative feminism, conventional feminism, modernization feminism, radical feminism and socialist feminism, we get to know that these ideas were both borrowed from the consensus model and conflict model of epistemological theorising.

In all these arguments I can not forget Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1751-1797) disagreement with enlightenment scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau on equality, liberty and justice. She was the first female philosopher in the liberal tradition to which she pinpointed out the illogicality in the aforementioned scholars work on equality, justice and liberty and maintained that women are emotional because they have been taught to be creatures of emotions rather than reasoning by society. And in expanding this argument more, John Stuart Mills and his wife Harriet Taylor Mills supported Wollstonecraft that women ought to own property, vote, receive education and enter into any profession for which they are qualified.

When contemporary feminists such as Kanowitz, Mitchel, Eisenstein, Kelly, Okin, Alstott and Cudd came on board, they insisted that laws should not grant women fewer rights than men but they should be oppositional laws that allow women to be exempted from certain duties and laws that give husband more rights than wives within marriage. Their emphasis was on the promotion of laws that prohibit discrimination of various types against women.

In conclusion, the discipline of sociology was viewed as conservative and patriarchal from inception and do not give room for female sociologists to thrive. But on the other hand, the works of the female sociologists were deemed little and not grand enough to be fixed into the mainstream sociology. But whichever way, the discipline should maintain equality in all it does.