Hartsock, Nancy

Political theorist and activist Nancy C. M. Hartsock is renowned for her development and ongoing elaboration of feminist standpoint theory and her theoretical articulations concerning power and epistemology in Western culture. At the foundation of Hartsock's social theory are the beliefs that theory plays an important part in political action for social change and that social theorists must respond to and concentrate their energies on problems of political action as they arise in the context of social change. Her social theory works the tensions between theory and praxis, arguing that feminist theory must guide and participate in real-world social, political, and economic change. Her theoretical work examines relationships between theory and praxis, feminism and Marxism, and postmodernism and politics.

Hartsock's theorizing examines how we construct and are constructed by social relations of power and how to intervene in these relations. She thus pays close attention to relations of domination: How are these constructed, maintained, resisted, and transformed, particularly along race, class, and sexuality lines? Questions of power are inseparable from questions of epistemology. That is, how one conceptualizes power always includes specific theoretical assumptions. Therefore, she focuses attention on such questions as how knowledge is constructed, which methods are best for social research, how to create alternative epistemologies and ontologies, and how to understand the relationship of theories of knowledge to lived experience.

Hartsock was born into a lower middle-class family in Utah on February 13, 1943. She earned a BAfrom Wellesley College, a women's college in Massachusetts, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in political science. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Politics, Ideology, and Ordinary Language: The Political Thought of Black Community Leaders, combined her academic and activist work to argue that black community leaders were as much political thinkers and theorists as Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and others. This work launched a career based around the belief that feminist theory is social praxis. Beginning in the 1970s, Hartsock worked as a social activist in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements in the United States.

Also during the 1970s, Hartsock became involved in the feminist movement emerging both on and off university campuses. She started a consciousness-raising group—a bedrock of second-wave feminism—in 1970. At this time she was hired as the first woman assistant professor at the [Page 358]University of Michigan in the Department of Political Science. She and her colleagues there began a subfield in political economy with a stated purpose of educating black and women scholars. While on leave in 1973 in Paris, Hartsock taught herself Marxist theory by reading original works by Marx and members of the Frankfurt school. She then moved to Washington, D.C., where she was first exposed to feminist theory in a seminar taught by Charlotte Bunch, a founder of the Furies, a lesbian separatist group. In 1973, with Charlotte Bunch and others, Hartsock founded Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, to both connect theory with activism and to explore questions of power and leadership in the context of divisions along lines of race, class, and sexuality. She is the author of Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (1983b), The Feminist Standpoint Revisited (1998), and coeditor of Building Feminist Theory (1981). She is currently professor of political science and women's studies at the University of Washington.

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