Dorothy E. Smith

Agora

Dorothy E. Smith

1926–2022

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Sociology should start from people’s actual everyday lives, especially women’s, and trace how distant institutions and paperwork organise them.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · Northern Europe · Society & History, Gender & Feminism, Epistemology

Founder of a sociology “for people”: starting from women’s everyday experience, she showed how texts and institutions organise our lives from afar – the “relations of ruling”.

Key ideas

Women’s standpoint
Bifurcation of consciousness
Relations of ruling
Institutional ethnography

Open in the star map

Influence

Influenced by 2

Karl Marx

influenced by
Smith took from The German Ideology the method of beginning from actual people and their activities, treating knowledge as part of the ‘relations of ruling’ (1987, 1990). D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (1987); The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990); K. Marx and F. Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie (written 1845–46, printed 1932)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Alfred Schutz

influenced by
Smith built on Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world but held that its order is organised extra-locally, by texts and relations of ruling (1987). D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987); “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology”, Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974)
Evidence: AI draft
Alfred Schutz › 1899–1959

Influenced 2

Sandra Harding

influenced
Harding drew on Dorothy Smith’s sociology from women’s standpoint in developing feminist standpoint epistemology for the sciences (The Science Question in Feminism, 1986; Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, 1991). S. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (1986); Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991); S. Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (2004); D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (1987); SEP “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science”
Evidence: AI draft
Sandra Harding › 1935–2025
Patricia Hill Collins

influenced
Collins related her Black feminist standpoint to Smith’s sociology from the standpoint of women, which begins from everyday experience rather than abstract categories (Black Feminist Thought, 1990). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987)
Evidence: AI draft
Patricia Hill Collins › b. 1948

Works

1987The Everyday World as Problematic
A feminist sociology that starts from women’s everyday experience and traces how texts and institutions organise it from outside.

Position

Smith began from what she called the bifurcation of consciousness. As a sociologist she was trained to think in the abstract categories of a discipline made by men and for the institutions they ran; as a mother she lived in a world of bodies, children and particular tasks that those categories could not see. In “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology” (1974) and The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) she argued that sociology should begin not from theory but from the standpoint of people in their actual everyday lives, and treat that world as a problem to be explained. What explains it are the “relations of ruling”: the organisation of modern society through texts – forms, files, statistics, laws and professional knowledge – which coordinate what people do in many places at once. From this came institutional ethnography, a method of tracing how such texts organise, for instance, a mother’s work around her child’s schooling or a patient’s passage through a hospital. Smith is counted among the founders of feminist standpoint theory, though she insisted that a standpoint is a place to begin inquiry, not a privileged access to truth.

Life & context

Dorothy Edith Smith was born in 1926 in Northallerton in Yorkshire. She worked as a secretary in publishing before studying at the London School of Economics, where she graduated in sociology in 1955. She went to the University of California, Berkeley, with her husband and took her doctorate there in 1963. After the marriage ended she raised two young sons alone while teaching – and the split between her life as a mother and her life as an academic became the starting point of her thought. In 1968 she moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she helped to establish women’s studies, and in 1977 to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. She kept publishing until the year of her death and died in Vancouver in 2022, aged 95.