Women and the Birth of Sociology

The fact that women have been “written out” of sociology’s history is directly connected to the world’s history as a whole. For centuries women had been treated as slaves. They had no civil rights. In the USA they even couldn’t vote till 1919! Why such a social  inequality? Why did men let themselves to act in such a “mannish” way? Men felt their supremacy against women. Lucretia Mott, who was an active figure in the nineteenth-century reform movements, wrote in her speech (“Why should not woman seek to be a reformer? “) that “while man assumed that the situation they had was the original state designed for woman, that the existing “differences were  not arbitrary nor the result of accident,” but grounded in nature; she would not make the necessary effort to obtain her just rights, lest it should subject her to kind of scorn and contemptuous manner in which she had been spoken of”. And she was right, a woman was the mere plaything or the toy of society, content with her outward adorning. I think it concerns the sociology history as well. All those women working in this domain were very smart and talented, well-known public figures. They interpreted works of Marx, Engels, Durkheim, Max Weber. They made scientific researches focusing on such issues as gender, class, race, ethnicity, age. They also took up economic and political problems. They all published their works, translated works of outstanding sociologists. They had different point of view, they looked at things differently than men did and they succeeded in it. But you won’t still find a lot of proofs that they really made a great contribution to the sociology as we know it today. It’s important to know first of all to a woman and then to the whole society that she had been created not just to be the shadow of her husband but someone who can improve and change the world and whose voice will be heard.