A few laced genes: Sociology, the women's movement and the work of Dorothy E. Smith

This dissertation examines the productive forces which gave rise to a sociological method called the Social Organization of Knowledge (SOK), formulated by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith. The method is used to study the organizing power of objectified knowledge found in textually-mediated forms of discourse. It was created as a subversive response to the traditional canon of the sociology of knowledge. Smith has a feminist ancestry, in that her direct foremother is Margaret Fell. The thesis begins with Fell's life from her conversion to Quakerism in 1652, and continues with the militant Suffragette experience of Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy Foster Abraham, Smith's mother and grandmother. It then proceeds with Smith's early life in England and the development of the SOK is traced through her doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, the Vancouver Women's Movement, 1968--1977, and the Toronto Women's Movement from 1977 to the present.;A central argument in this dissertation is that the women's movement, in its ongoing historical manifestations acts as a productive force for change. Women's movements are represented in a way as to reflect the empirical reality of Smith's feminist lineage, lived life, and her lifework. Historical materialism is used to reproduce women's lives, employing the term, appropriated from Marx's The German Ideology, of 'productive forces', defined as the innovative ways which women, over time, have used household labour to advance their work for women's equality. I argue that through the qualities that were offered to Smith in an intergenerational experience of feminism, and the imaginative use of the historical moment in the Vancouver Women's Movement, she created an identity for herself as a feminist sociologist, shaping, over her sociological career, a new contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the SOK method. The dissertation is categorized as interpretive historical sociology. Data were collected by: (1) indepth interviews; (2) participant observation; and (3) library, archival, and database research.