The making of William I. Thomas: women, work and urban inclusion

Giuseppina Cersosimo

Description

Le parcours du célèbre sociologue W.I. Thomas dans les Etats-Unis du début du XXe siècle, entre émancipation féminine et développement socio-économique (ouvrage en langue anglaise).

Sujets

• Sociologie

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782140126635
• Langue: Français
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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G IUSEPPINA C ERSOSIMO

THE MAKING OF WILLIAM I. THOMAS: WOMEN, WORK AND URBAN INCLUSION

A social history of rights and freedom th in the United States at the beginning of the 20 century

L’Harmattan 5-7 rue de L’École Polytechnique 75005 Paris

Mise en page réalisée par L’Harmattan Italia

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© pour cette édition en langue anglaise: L’Harmattan, Paris, 2019 ISBN ( FRANCE ) 978-2-336-31860-8

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword, Sara Delamont

Preface

Introduction. In Relation to Modern Times

Chapter 1. Life and Research in Chicago 1.1 A paradox in the Chicago Sociology Department 1.2 A Life in Research, a Research in Life 1.3 William Thomas’s Chicago 1.4 Opinions and Autonomy at the University

Chapter 2. William I. Thomas and the Commitment to Women’s Autonomy 2.1 Women’s Work 2.2 The End of the Victorian Age 2.3 The Reality of the Female Condition

Chapter 3. Control, Customs and Morals 3.1 Eugenics: Misunderstanding the Approach 3.2 Sex, Social Reproduction and Society

Conclusions. From Invisibility to Theoretical Affirmation

Notes

References

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«Nothing strenghtens the judgment and quickens the coscience like individual responsibility» E. C ADY S TANTON , 1892

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Foreword Sara Delamont

W.I. Thomas was a faculty member in the sociology depart- ment at the University of Chicago from 1895-1918. The department was founded in 1892, by Albion Small who was its head until 1926. Small also founded theAmerican Journal of Sociologythrough which Thomas published many articles. Thomas was fired from his post in 1918 explicitly for an offence against morality, but probably for his active involve- ment with trade unionists, labour disputes and radical political causes including the struggle for women’s suffrage. Political activity and support for feminism were regarded by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess − by 1918 the two most powerful people in the department − as entirely incompatible with, and therefore very damaging to, the scientific status of sociology. These men actively objected to applied research and writing, and removed social work, social policy and home economics experts from the department, thus removing all the female staff (Deegan, 1988). Thomas’s most famous publication was published with Znaniecki (1918-1920) and comprises five volumes onThe Polish Peasant in Europe and America. He was primarily, in contemporary terms, a social psychologist, most closely asso- ciated with G.H. Mead. There are two different origin myths about the Chicago School of Sociology. The dominant malestream story reports that after 1918 brave men correctly purify the discipline by removing staff who were active in social reform, political activism, and femi- nism, effectively erasing women and W.I. Thomas from the history of the department. In an alternative account, bravely introduced by Deegan, W.I. Thomas and the women, Jane Addams, Marian Talbot, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and others (see Delamont, 2003, p. 86) were removed by male chauvinists and subsequently vanish from the history of American sociology.

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Thomas and Mead however, along with their suffragist wives Helen Castle Mead, and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, deserve to be much more central to the history of sociology. Their ideas, and their research are much more central to the discipline today than other traditions from the 1918-1948 period, although they are not widely known. This volume sets out to rectify that.

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April 2019

Preface

The work presented in this book is the result of a consoli- dated focus on the work of William Isaac Thomas, which began in 2007 in relation to my study and presentation of his textsThe Relation of the Medicine Man to the Origin of the Professional Occupations, (1903) andThe Measurement of Social Influence, inThe Unadjusted Girl(1923), in Italian. In this volume, I specifically consider the first part of Thomas’s thought process, with particular reference to the studies on female reality published between 1897 and 1909, taking into account how these were also full of examples and reflections on the cultural condition and female roles in tribal societies; the result of ethnological studies that have partly characterized Thomas’s training in this period. One relevant factor in his path was how he, unlike other contemporary sociologists, brought attention to the ways that the female gender referenced a whole universe of women, outside the banality and occasionality that produce stereotypes. The assertion was not the ability to grasp the role of the female gender within the social construction and transformation of modern society; this had been identified and analyzed starting from the «human response to cultural stimulus and the exem- plification of the degree of adaptability of human organisms» (Thomas, 1937, p.V), as evidenced by the aforementioned ethnological studies. With evolutionism and Social Darwinism at the center of the discussion at the beginning of the 20th century, this approach eventually failed. Thomas published a long reflection on female reality between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen- tieth. It was considered a strange work, almost irregular in an academic sense, as sociology was thought of from the begin- ning as a masculine endeavor that finds it hard to accept the autonomy of the opposite sex. These founding fathers must have believed that only Eve should have been expelled from the Garden of Eden, and that Adam and his descendants, whom she deceived, should have remained there, in contact with the 9

divine graces. The invisibility of women, a social reproducer, has always been a concrete and symbolic step backwards with respect to man. We find the exclusion of women from the central activities of society everywhere. In economic and cultural spheres their role is often distilled to that of mother or wife, titles which for better or worse carry less power and recognition than the roles of their male counterparts. In all societies one can detect a male dominion and a corresponding feminine subordination. Not every inequality is the same size, but nonetheless they all highlight a sexual asymmetry at the base of society. Generations of men and alas, often also women, have been struck by the audacity of separatism, but few have tried to correlate, even on a cultural level, the distinct 1 relationship between separatism and segregation , and how sexual asymmetry between men and women is at the basis of the separation between the public and private spheres of exis- tence. That separation paired with the social invisibility of women has contributed to a very significant devaluation of women across cultures. Starting from these premises, the fascinating thing about reading Thomas’s texts, in which the narration of social history is intertwined with sociological theory and methodology, is no longer lost. The evident criticism is that the discipline of sociology, and in particular some of its long dominant guide- lines, have managed to forget and consequently we have forgotten it’s rich and complex elaboration. Thanks to the work of colleagues before me, who worked with conviction and punctuality to introduce Thomas’s work within the institution of Italian sociological thought (Gallino, 1968; Rauty, 1994; 1997) I was brought to a general reflection on the aforementioned texts. I identified a particular sphere within Thomas’s analytical path, marked by a collection of articles on the condition of women through the lens of an objective assessment in one phase of research which was a substantial premise for the great investigation ofThe Polish Peasant. Thomas’s observations and assertions were consistent with the development of female autonomy in the Progressive Age, 10