Bifurcated Consciousness

In the 1970s, Dorothy E. Smith wrote about women's “bifurcated consciousness,” a distinctive subjectivity produced by women's household or reproductive work and the supporting and applied tasks assigned to them, historically, in the occupational division of labor. She argued that women's everyday activities—as paid or unpaid caregivers, support workers, volunteers, and so on—positioned them to engage with people where and as they actually live and, further, that women's activities often involved “working up” the particularities of individual lives so as to fit them to the more abstract frameworks that organize institutional activity— as when mothers prepare children for attendance at school or nurses prepare patients to be attended by physicians. Women who work in these locations, at the juncture of embodied specificity and ideological abstraction, hold in their consciousness both ways of seeing and thinking; as expert practitioners of these everyday tasks, they move from one to the other framework, usually without conscious thought. The disjuncture between the two modes of knowing provides an opening for analysis of objectified knowledge and its production in people's activities. Working from that disjuncture, Smith argued that “women's perspective” could provide “a radical critique of sociology.”

In a series of essays, later collected in The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987), Smith developed the implications of this idea. In this book, she sketched an experience and knowledge associated with single motherhood—the experience of sole responsibility for children combined with an awareness that she and her children were seen, institutionally, as a “defective” family. This example provides a basis for discovering how embodied knowing, grounded in people's activities, is set aside in favor of abstracted concepts or ideological codes, such as the “standard North American family.” While some critics have read the analysis as being limited because of the reliance on a particular experience of mothering, Smith explains that her aim is not to identify a determinate womanly “experience” with specific content, but rather to direct thought to actual sites of everyday living as “points of entry” for empirical inquiry, with the experiences of single mothers providing just one example.

Dorothy Smith was an immigrant to the United States from Britain and then Canada, where she taught in British Columbia and at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto, an important site for feminist scholarship. She was also a lifelong activist, in labor, antiwar, feminist, and environmental movements. Her early sociological writing dealt with the sociology of mental illness, family and class, and the social organization of knowledge. The new scholarly networks and constituencies that grew out of the women's movement of the 1970s provided a rich context for the development of her critique, along with a mode of inquiry designed to produce a “sociology for women” (rather [Page 66]than about them) that she labeled “institutional ethnography.” Since the 1980s, a growing network of scholars in North America and elsewhere has taken up her approach, which Smith now considers “a sociology for people” and which she views as neither method nor theory, but as “an alternative sociology.”

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