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Frauen in der Soziologie: Neun Portraits (Women in Sociology: Nine Portraits), edited by Claudia Honegger and Theresa Wobbe. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998. 389 pp. NPL paper. ISBN: 3406-39298-9.
This book opens a hidden window into "a forgotten tradition." It includes a diverse group of nine thinkers, researchers, reformers, and practitioners who actively helped create and institutionalize sociology. This volume extends efforts made by other scholars to document the fundamental contributions made by women to articulate and establish the field. Offering a glimpse at the life and work of early sociologists, the book also reflects the historical and cultural context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany, Great Britain, France, Austria, and the United States. The biographical sketches and the work of these women are divided into three periods, recording their "thought about the relationships between modernity and femininity, theory and praxis, social structure and culture" (P. 10).
Representing the first generation of sociologists, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and jenny P. d'Hericourt (1809-1875) lived and worked in the first half of the nineteenth century, when women were not formally educated. Unhindered by any discipline, both moved freely between different branches of scholarship, which is reflected in their keen observations, social commentary, and social criticism of the conceptualization of how societies organize and function.
Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), Marianne Weber (1870-1954), and Jane Addams (1860-1935) belonged to the second generation of sociologists. They were co-founders of the empirical approach to social research. Although unable to receive a formal education, they were among the first women who were...