Feminist Geographies

Where are the Women in Geography?

Feminist geographers have drawn attention to the paltry numbers of women in the profession of academic human geography, especially in comparison with some other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. They suggest that the overwhelmingly male composition of human geography, especially in the past but also continuing to the present, has influenced what has been studied in geography. Many claim that this has meant that women's particular issues and the study of gender relations more broadly have been neglected in geographic scholarship. The research and writing in human geography may profess to be universally appropriate, but under scrutiny feminists find that seemingly universal claims about how the world works really refer to men's worlds. Furthermore, feminists claim that male dominance in geography and its scarce scholastic attention to[Page 158] women's lives and issues only further discourage women from entering the field.

Feminist geographers carry out their critique of the profession in part by exposing its masculinism. This refers to how the discipline has primarily served the interests of men and worked within masculine paradigms that emphasize objectivity over situated accounts of the world, that engage only certain methodologies, that observe an ideal of professional distance over political activism, and that call for a separation between personal life and public life. Feminists suggest that these have dissuaded women from becoming professional geographers and have restricted scholarship and geographic theory. Therefore, feminist geographers tie the doing of geography—that is, the practices of academics—with knowledges produced. They want to ensure that such bias cannot happen in the future.

Feminist geographers have been successful in their attempts. Nowadays it is more difficult to ignore feminists' arguments and disregard their contributions. Unfortunately, their successes do not equal a complete triumph over masculinism, and feminist geographers continue to struggle to remold geography so that women will be drawn to the discipline. Feminist geographers advocate good mentoring of female students and colleagues to help them succeed. Feminist educators also insist that teaching feminist topics will show all students, both male and female, how important it is to consider their approaches—and, hopefully, to inspire more inclusive disciplinary practices in the future.

The Work of Women

The research that feminist geographers conduct has been influenced by wider trends in feminist and social theory, so it is important to place feminist geographies in a context of feminisms' development over time. Feminist geographers have, however, made significant contributions through their unique geographic perspective on gender and women's lives. In particular, feminist geographies have investigated the different material worlds of women and men. Their motivation is to show that women live in, produce, and negotiate very different spaces than do men. They also argue that women's identities are made through gendered social meanings of space and environment.

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