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The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830-1930, by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 330 pp. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-07-037169-5.
This "text/reader" is much more than it appears to be. It is not what some might imagine-an unearthing of women's never-recognized writings that only now can be seen to have some relevance for sociology. Instead, this volume presents a stunning illumination of the active erasure of women's sociological writings from the history of the discipline-writings that were widely noted as important by the authors' contemporaries. Thus Lengermann and Niebrugge-- Brantley demonstrate that the history of sociology is a social construction thoroughly shaped by the politics of gender, while they offer a vital, initial effort to rewrite that history.
The social theorists highlighted in this collection include Harriet Martineau, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marianne Weber, Beatrice Potter Webb, and eight members of what is called "the Chicago Women's School of Sociology." Each set of writings is placed...