Smith, Dorothy

Dorothy E. Smith (b. 1926) a Canadian sociologist, is one of the most prominent feminist theorists of the twentieth century. Educated at the University of London School of Economics (BSc), the University of British Columbia (LLD), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD), she was one of the founders of an influential theoretical framework called feminist standpoint epistemology. Smith asserts that certain standpoints can provide a more reliable vantage point from which to assess how power is woven into institutions that contour women's daily activities. Smith's approach situates women's experiences within the local institutional practices that organize their lives. By using this “everyday world” perspective, researchers remain sensitive to women's experiences while also exploring how varying institutional practices such as welfare policy and higher education differentially organize their lives.

Smith's theoretical approach draws on a variety of traditions, including phenomenology and ethnomethodology as well as Marx's historical materialism and poststructuralism. She was on the faculty of the University of Essex, the University of British Columbia, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She also served as head of OISE's Centre for Women's Studies in Education. She was recipient of the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology from the American Sociological Association, the Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship in Sweden, and the Lansdowne Professorship at the University of Victoria. She was also awarded the Degré Prize Lecturership at the University of Waterloo and the John Porter Lecturership of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 1963, was titled Power and the Front-Line: Social Controls in a State Mental Hospital.

In her highly acclaimed book The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, Smith (1987) argues for a sociology that will reveal the everyday practices of people that abstractions typically developed by sociologists both “express and conceal” (p. 213). Theorizing from her own experience as a single mother of two young children, Smith developed the concept of “bifurcated consciousness” to capture the tensions women in particular experience when they enter the textually organized world of academia [Page 713]that is independent of the everyday world of preschool schedules, visits to doctors, and trips to the parks. As a mode of consciousness, the practice of sociology, requires distancing from the everyday world of child care and meal preparation, among other particularities. Smith argues that these different modes of consciousness are gendered and that women are constructed as the “Other” in the academic world. As a result of consciousness-raising strategies developed by the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, women collectively articulated new issues and concerns that called into question the presumed genderless organization of the knowledge production enterprise.

Smith first published her critique of the dominant methods of sociology in a 1974 article titled “The Ideological Practice of Sociology.” As a corrective to the abstractions developed by sociologists, Smith created a methodological approach to social research called “institutional ethnography” that is designed to explore links between everyday life experiences and broad-based social structural processes. Smith's methodological goal is to examine the social relations that shape everyday life experiences, revealing how local experiences are organized by relations of ruling. Smith (1987) defines relations of ruling as a term “that brings into view the intersection of the institutions organizing and regulating society with their gender subtext and their basis in a gender division of labor” (p. 2). The term ruling is used to identify organizational practices of government, law, financial management, professional associations, and other institutions that shape everyday life. Smith argues that bureaucratic procedures and textual forms that rationalize the organizational practices create a screen of neutrality that masks the gender, racial, and class subtexts of institutional activities and discourse.

...