Dorothy Smith - on Socialist Feminism and Bifurcation - Essay Example

Mead taught me that the self is a product of social forces, institutions, conditions, and interactions (Gardiner 180). I also believe in Mead’s idea of a “generalized other” wherein people determine their behaviors about their referent groups. We are who we are because of who we are constantly with. Our social interactions do not only influence us for they can completely define us in ways that are so unconscious we think that we have 100% autonomy over our lives, but we do not.

Marx talked about the rise of the public or social sphere that will integrate the private sphere so that public and private inequalities would both vanish (Delamont 107). In reality, such vanishing is not occurring at all. Instead, what we see is a continued sexual division of labor that produces the bifurcation of our experiences. Bifurcation refers to the split between the world as it is and the world as the prevailing viewpoint says it is (Appelrouth and Edles 542).

My concept of bifurcation has its roots in Alfred Schutz. Schutz argues that our personalities have different levels based on different aspects of our reality (Appelrouth and Edles 542). He coins the word “mitwelt relations” to refer to relations that are considered as “types” or that between us and the mailman, for instance, and the word “umwelt relations” for face-to-face interactions (Appelrouth and Edles 542). I am extending his concepts by asserting that if men want to become full participants of the real world, they must not only focus on the jobs that they see as concrete, or, in essence, stop delegating umwelt relations to women (Appelrouth and Edles 542). Women’s work experience devaluation and delegitimization because they are categorized as mere umwelt (Appelrouth and Edles 542).

I find it particularly disconcerting that sociology promotes gender oppression because it studies society away from its everyday gendered social life (Sprague 44). Men, in line with Schultz’s mitwelt-umwelt relations, live and dominate the abstract world without living and seeing their bodily existence, since women serve these bodily needs (Sprague 44). The result is that they are controlling sociology by studying it from their male standpoint. What we need then is a female standpoint that comes from living with and sharing experiences with women. Indeed I advocate immersion as a sociologist. Sociologists are not truly objective people. We must then acknowledge our subjectivities and the subjectivities of the people we are studying. We must approach society in a way that frees women from their oppression through what I call standpoint theory.