Contradictions of Feminist Methodology

Author(s): Sherry Gorelick

Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 459-477
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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 CONTRADICTIONS OF
FEMINIST METHODOLOG Y

SHERRY GORELICK
Rutgers University

Many feminists have argued that researchers must "give voice" to hitherto silenced women b
adopting "the view from below." Critically reviewing the literature on feminist methodology
the author argues that this perspective, while absolutely essential, is not sufficient. Confinin
research to induction-based methods ignores the limits to such research: Ideologies of oppre
sion are often internalized while the underlying structures of oppression are hidden. Marxi
approaches may help reveal hidden determinants of oppression, but they risk exacerbati
inequalities between researcher and researched Women's experience of a world shaped (a
often segregated) by structures of inequality produces contradictory relationships amon
researcher and researched and requires a methodology that deals with difference and th
blindness of privilege among women. Women's oppression is "a complex of many contrad
tions" and necessitates a new standpoint-based methodology, created by researchers an
participants of diverse race, class, and other oppressed groups, refocusing and re-visioni
knowledge based on theory, action, and experience.

Feminist methodology grows out of an important qualitative leap in the

feminist critique of the social sciences: the leap from a critique of t
invisibility of women, both as objects of study and as social scientists, to t
critique of the method and purpose of social science itself. This is the lea
from a sociology about women to a sociology for women, as Smith (1974

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article has gone through many metamorphoses since its original p
sentation at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 1988. Fo
reading and criticizing various versions, I am deeply grateful to Joan Acker, Lourdes Bener
Maarten de Kadt, Judith Gerson, Judith Lorber, Dalia Sachs, Judith Stacey, and the membe
of the Working Group on Political Consciousness: Lorraine Cohen, Berenice Fisher, and Cele
Krauss.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Sherry Gorelick Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, New

Brunswick NJ 08903.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 5 No. 4, December 1991 459-477

0 1991 Sociologists for Women in Society
459

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460 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

put it. Smith argued that male-dominated science objectifies, but som
very fundamental happens when both the knower and the known are w
When the pronoun applied to the knower is she, rather than the seem
impersonal he, the knower is changed immediately from The Scient
person with a gender. And when this scientist with a female personal p
studies women, she is apt to feel a different relationship with her su
because she is subject to finding herself mirrored in them, a fact wit
lutionary implications for the relationships among observer and obs
theory and experience, science, politics, race, and class.

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF THE

DOMINANT METHODOLOGICAL PARADIGMS'

Feminist methodological critiques have been made on several interre

levels: philosophical, moral, and practical. The philosophical leve
involved a critique of positivism: the pretense of value-free science and
presumption of objectivity conceived of as a set of procedures or an ach
ment, rather than a process (Gorelick 1989; Keller 1980). On a moral le
feminists have criticized the objectification of subjects and their exploita
by researchers using the dominant methods. Objectification rests on po
a radical difference between the roles of scientist and subject in which, i
most extreme positivist approaches, studying human beings is, in prin
no different from studying things. Lundberg wrote that there is, for the
scientist, no difference between a paper flying before the wind and a
flying before an angry crowd (1963, 45-46).
In contrast to this reduction of human beings to social facts, femin
building on the interpretive approach in sociology, emphasizes the hum
agency and subjectivity of the people studied. The production of scien
not an operation (or indeed an autopsy); it is a relationship. That relatio
is exploitative when a researcher studies people for the benefit of the
searcher's career or of the sponsors of the research, without regard t
positive or negative effect on the people being studied. Feminists have
criticized the entire structure of inequality in the conduct of research, es
cially the hierarchical structure of large-scale research projects.
This moral critique of research hierarchy is directly related to femin
practical critique of the dominant methodologies. The opposed interest
researcher and researched in the dominant, hierarchical methodologi
approaches lead to distortions, lying, even farcical results (Gorz 1972;

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 461

1983, 91). A subject population does not tell the truth to those in po
only that, large-scale research projects generate two subject populat
people being studied and the people doing the routine labor invol
studying them. In "hired hand research" (Reinharz 1983, 171; Rot
low-level research staff may find myriad ways of cutting short th
constituting a "labor problem" in the truth factory. Between the
dissimulation of the objectified research subjects and the subversiv
ity of the research workers, both responding to their different m
exploitation, the results are often not science but science fiction.
Two feminist methodological alternatives emerged: the Marxist-
and the experiential-inductionist, often affiliated with ethnometho
and interactionist scholarly traditions and with the new social history
sizing "the view from the bottom." Some feminists have attempte
grate these two approaches (e.g., Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1983
1987). After reviewing this literature, I propose to explore some
dictions involved in the development of a Marxist-feminist-inter
methodology. These contradictions concern the role of theory and "
sciousness" in the relationship between researcher and participant,
plications of race, class, and other inequalities for feminist research
implications of the social biography of the researcher for the develop
a liberatory feminist standpoint. I argue that the feminist inductioni
take account of the hidden structure of oppression (the research pa
is not omniscient) and the hidden relations of oppression (the particip
be ignorant of her relative privilege over and difference from other
Women's oppression is a complex of many contradictions and requir
standpoint-based methodology, created by researchers and partic
diverse race, class, and other oppressed groups, refocusing and re-
knowledge based on theory, action, and experience.

EARLY FEMINIST METHODOLOGICAL MANIFESTOS

In 1978, Mies set forth methodological guidelines for feminist resea

that proposed that the hypocritical "postulate of value-free research
neutrality and indifference toward the research objects, has to be replace
consciouspartiality" toward the oppressed, engagement in their struggl
change, and the creation of a form of research that fosters conscientiz
of both the researcher and the researched (Mies 1983, 122-26, her emph
These guidelines set the dominant formula for research practice on its

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462 GENDER & SOCIET'Y / December 1991

The dogmas of positivism - its hands-off approach, its clinical fasti

ness about mutual contamination, its insistence that research must p
change, that indeed change is the business of politicians and not scien
were overturned. For feminist methodologists, as for the Marxist and
pretive sociologists on whose work they built, social science is much
profound than the mere collection of "facts." Said Mies:

Most empirical research on women has concentrated so far on the study o

superficial or surface phenomena such as women's attitudes toward hou
work, career, ... etc. Such attitude or opinion surveys give very little informa
tion about women's true consciousness. Only when there is a rupture in th
'normal' life of a woman, i.e. a crisis such as divorce, end of a relationship e
is there a chance for her to become conscious of her true conditions. (1983, 12

As Cook and Fonow put it much later:

Feminism is a vision of freedom as future intention and this vision must indicate
which facts from the present are necessary knowledge for liberation. Descr
tion without an eye for transformation is inherently conservative and portra
the subject as acted-upon rather than as an actor or potential actor. (1986, 1

The implication is quite clear: Merely collecting descriptive statistic

experiential data about women does not constitute feminist research.
nist research must be part of a process by which women's oppression
only described but challenged.
Similarly, beginning in 1974, Smith argued that sociology as curre
practiced expressed unreflectively the distortions of a male ruling-
standpoint. She urged that instead research must be done "from the stand
of women," taking "the everyday world as problematic" and beginning
women's ordinary, everyday experience (Smith 1974, 1979). Smith s
ically cautioned against confining the inquiry to the world of exper
(Smith 1974, 12; Smith 1979, 174). Some later feminist methodologis
however, have argued for a social science that is "inductive rather t
deductive" (Reinharz 1983, 172), that "focuses on processes rather th
structures" (p. 168), and is "interested in generating concepts in vivo,
field itself' rather than using "predefined concepts" (p. 168). Accordin
Reinharz, whereas the validity criteria of "conventional or patriarch
science are "proof, evidence, statistical significance [and] replicability
validity criteria of feminist science are "completeness, plausibility,. .
derstanding, [and] responsiveness to readers' or subjects' experience;
study cannot, however, be replicated" (Reinharz 1983, 171). The role o
researcher is to "give voice" to hitherto silenced groups and facilitate
own discoveries (Kasper 1986).

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 463

GIVING VOICE IS NOT ENOUGH:

THE LIMITS OF FEMINIST EMPIRICISM

"Giving voice" was a progressive development in the history

theory. It went beyond criticism of the use of "mainstream" soc
a tool of oppression and began the quest for a liberatory social
the more radically empiricist forms of the feminist critique hav
limitations, which threaten to encapsulate feminist social science
specific milieu being studied and even preclude understanding
milieu being examined. For example, use of such techniques as
participant observation, and oral history helps to describe the
perceived by the persons studied, but it may remain confined w
perceptions and thus not be able to provide them with much that
already know.
The agonizing and cumulative process of feminist discovery
years has revealed how much of sexism is deeply internalized an
buried beneath the conscious level (MacKinnon 1987). Conscious
ing as a technique of research and political action may enable wo
voice to knowledge that they did not know they had. But this
too, is limited to what each group of women is able to discover
emphasis on the importance of crises or ruptures in the pattern of
so that the pathology of the normal may be perceived, is of cru
tance. Even so, giving voice is not enough. Women know much
learn more about their own pain, but some of the underlying ca
pain may be very well hidden from them (cf. Maguire 1987, 37

THE HIDDEN DETERMINANTS OF OPPRESSION

In Capital, Marx ([1867] 1967) showed that the most fundamenta

relations occur "behind the backs" of the actors. That is, much of
derlying structure of oppression is hidden, not only by means of ideo
also by means of a contradictory daily life. Appearance contradicts
Workers feel dependent on capitalists for employment and wages
reality they produce daily, in surplus value, the wages with which
paid and the wealth that permits their continued subjugation. The "
ing" world appears dependent on the "First World" for technology
investment, yet in reality the imperial world is dependent on the c
world for raw materials, markets, and cheap labor. Wives appe

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464 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

dependent on husbands for support and protection, yet in reality it is h

who are dependent on wives for their unpaid labor, emotion-manag
and much else. Namjoshi's amusing but chilling fable, "The Monkey
Crocodiles" (1981, 26), shows women's need for male physical prot
to be little more than a protection racket. In reality, each of these dep
cies is substantially reversed, yet none of these realities is immed
apparent to those most oppressed by them.
In "A Sociology for Women," Smith (1979) described the dependen
professional and managerial men practicing "the abstracted conceptu
of ruling" on the concrete invisible labor of women as computer spe
secretaries, administrative assistants, wives, and so on. Their own
determinants are invisible to the men (Smith 1974, 10; Smith 1979, 1
the importance of their own role may be invisible to the women the
for two reasons. First, the dominant ideology obscures their role: "i
social forms of consciousness may originate outside experience, co
from an external source and becoming a forced set of categories int
we must stuff the awkward and resistant actualities of our worlds"
1979, 141); and second, women's vision of their own oppression is
by the development of corporate capitalism, in which local eve
determined by social forces far from the site (1979, 161). In short, a
oppression can only be understood from the standpoint and experience
oppressed, the very organization of the everyday world of oppres
modern capitalism obscures the structure of oppression. "The everyday
is not fully understandable within its own scope. It is organized b
relations not fully apparent in it nor contained in it" (Smith 1979, 1
In contrast to the reified conceptualizations of social structure pr
by functionalist (and radical functionalist) social scientists (Gorelick
the feminist concept of social relations does not connote a rigid and
social structure impervious to human action. Rather, social relatio
relatively enduring relationships among people, relationships that e
contradiction and change (Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1983, 425
Some of the methodological implications of the structure of social r
were developed in Hartsock's pivotal "The Feminist Standpoint: Deve
the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism"
According to Hartsock, "If material life is structured in fundamen
opposing ways for two different groups,... the vision of each will re
an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision a
to the rulers will be both partial and perverse" (p. 232). It is perverse
it enforces and justifies oppression, even including murder. Both the

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 465

ity and perversity of this view undermine the claims of objectivity

those who practice establishment science.
Yet although the standpoint of the ruling group is perverse an
serving, it cannot be dismissed as simply false, because "the visio
ruling class (or gender) structures the material relations in which a
are forced to participate" (Hartsock 1985, 232). If the ruling class a
has the power to structure ideology, reality, and perception, then
material reality will obscure the causes of oppression. "In conseque
vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and r
an achievement which requires both science to see beneath the surf
social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the educat
can only grow from struggle to change those relations" (Hartsock 1
To some extent these hidden relationships can be discovered (an
discovered) by the oppressed themselves as they begin to interac
lectivize their experience (for example, through consciousness ra
start to change their situation. For the very act of trying to change the
tends to bring the nature of the system of oppression into bolder rel
1983). To some extent, the hidden structure of oppression must be d
anew by each group of women because of the great educative power
experience and because each concrete situation of oppression has
historical specificity, its own specific lessons.
Direct experience has its limitations, however. Besides the lack o
lative knowledge, there are some hidden aspects of oppression that no
of direct struggle will reveal. In view of these limitations, the researc
play a role that is quite different from that of the participants. For
in their study of industrial homework in Mexico City, Beneria and
(1987) not only interviewed homeworkers, they traced the subco
links from those homeworkers on up through major corporations.
of managers to employ women rather than men and to employ them
in factories or to subcontract out the work had a major impact on the
the women who were assembling parts, polishing plastics, sorting p
finishing textiles in their homes. Yet the women themselves would ne
been privy to these decisions if Beneria and Roldan had not had th
tional resources giving them access to these managers and the theor
them to seek that access. Because the structure of oppression is ofte
a feminist standpoint "is achieved rather than obvious, a mediated rat
immediate understanding" (Hartsock 1985, 234).
Hartsock was not proposing an abstract, ivory tower science; s
insist, however, on the necessity of scientific analysis. It would be e

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466 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

difficult, if not impossible, to derive that analysis purely inductively. In h

study of lacemakers in India, Mies (1982, 2-3) criticized the androcent
conceptualizations of Marxism: Labor, productive labor, and other conce
have been defined with inappropriate biologistic assumptions. She forcef
rejected abandoning those concepts altogether, however. It would be foo
she said, not to reclaim, reform, and use them. The concepts-which a
after all, the essential links between theory and method-must be redef
from below. The social scientist can, in collaboration with research part
pants, provide, question, and test theoretical understandings that reveal
hidden underlying structure of oppression.

FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS AND

THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF RESEARCH

The notion of hidden determinants-the determination of wome

pression by factors beyond their immediate experience -raises the i
false consciousness, an idea that exposes some of the contradict
Marxism. If social relations occur "behind the backs of the actors," h
the researcher know them, unless she claims a source of knowl
understanding beyond that of her respondents? If she makes that
doesn't she run the risk of elitism? But if she does not attempt to
social relations and structures of oppression that may be hidden fro
respondents' view, is she not limiting her contribution to them and to
science and political practice? If we reject the solipsism of feminist
cism, from what standpoint does the scientist know the "reality" ma
appearances? If structural conflict produces opposing worldviews, t
social biography of Marxist theorists becomes problematic. In conce
ing the false consciousness of a group, their imperfect comprehension
own interests, what is the theorist's relation to the multifaceted struc
oppression?
In her excellent study of Life and Health in Three Palestinian V
Giacaman describes how her team of health scientists discovered their own
class and urban bias and the limitations of their attempt to apply an unalloyed
Marxist-feminist analysis:

The women interviewed had their own agendas, and we were incessantly
grilled with such questions as "How many children do you have?" "Why aren't
you married?" "Where are your parents?" As we were being interviewed we
would try to slip in a question or two in the midst of the confusion. The expe-

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 467

rience slowly led us away from the stereotyped images we had of "poor, we
and obedient" peasant women.... We had begun by looking at the wome
condescendingly: We were there to help them, to "raise their consciousnes
But these women did not necessarily need their consciousness raised. Th
knew what was going on and . . . how to solve their problems. What the
needed was the power and authority to change their lives. (1988, 37)

The concept of false consciousness has been passionately criticized

many feminists, most notably, Stanley and Wise (1983a):

We reject the idea that scientists, or feminists, can become experts in oth
people's lives.... [F]eminism's present renaissance has come about precise
because many women have rejected other people's (men's) interpretations
our lives. Feminism insists that women should define and interpret our ow
experiences.... [F]eminists must attempt to reject the scientist/person dich
omy and, in doing so, must endeavor to dismantle the power relationship whic
exists between researcher and researched. (Pp. 194-95)

Stanley and Wise took pains to state that they were "in no way oppos
theorizing as such": Instead they espoused symbolic interactionism, be
it "adopts a non-deterministic attitude towards social life and intera
. . . [and] insists that structures are to be found within [the] proces
interaction]" (1983a, 201-2). They also embraced ethnomethodolog
cause it "accords well with the egalitarian ethos of feminism" (p. 204)

The Struggle For Egalitarian

Feminist Methodologies

If it is true that women's oppression is created entirely within the pro

of social interaction, then they can come to understand their oppre
themselves, through ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist
niques. The researcher's role would be limited to facilitating that proc
discovery "from the ground up." In Street Corner Society, one of the ori
paradigm-founding exemplars of symbolic interactionism, Whyte (1
showed that the "corner boys" in a Boston slum created, through th
patterns of interaction, the social and symbolic hierarchies in their g
their religion, and their politics. The structure he analyzed could have
made visible by the "members," since to a great extent, it was already k
by them. But why were thirty-year-old men hanging out like "boys" on
corners? Because it was the Great Depression, and they were unempl
The depression was certainly not a result of their patterns of intera
Looking at their own patterns of interaction, they would only have bee
to blame themselves, each other, and the people they knew.

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468 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

If women make their own history, they can uncover the roots o
oppression in the patterns of their own making. But if women "ma
own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing" (Mar
1963;2 Personal Narratives Group 1989, 13), then women must be
examine those conditions as well as their own patterns of interac
understanding. While it may be more egalitarian to reject the notion o
determination, that does not stop the president of Ingersoll Rand from
decisions in his New Jersey office that affect the work lives, choi
susceptibility to cancer of women in Singapore (Fuentes and Ehre
1984). Nor does it prevent those decisions from being influenced
investment climate in Brazil. Understanding the implications for
pore women of those international investment patterns and capit
and understanding the location of Mexican homeworkers in the lab
cess (Beneria and Roldan 1987) require theories that generalize from
ties outside the immediate experiential frame of the Singapore an
ican women, theories more derived from Marxist-feminism than
ethnomethodology.
The difficulty with the concept of false consciousness is not, in my
that it asserts that people may have an imperfect understanding of th
conditions. Nor does the solution lie in asserting that their understa
perfectly valid, as if the nature of the world were merely a matter o
(cf. Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1983; Fisher 1984, on relativis
difficulty with the concept of false consciousness lies in the implicati
(a) there is a true consciousness that is known and complete, and
researcher-activist knows it, and the participant does not.
Beginning their research on women going out to work at midlife
commitment to egalitarian relations, Acker, Barry, and Esseveld
discovered that their respondents demanded a more complex under
of their respective roles:

What they wanted, they said, was more of our own sociological analysis.
wanted us, the researchers, to interpret their experience to them.... If we w
to fulfill the emancipatory aim for the people we were studying, we had to
beyond the faithful representation of their experience, beyond "letting
talk for themselves" and put those experiences into the theoretical frame
with which we started the study, a framework that links women's oppre
to the structure of Western capitalist society. (Pp. 429- 30)

Exploring the "incompatibilities between various components of our

approach to social research," they conclude with a commitment to
structing women's experience in a way that accounts for both their

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 469

explanations of that experience and the relation between the two"

This reconstruction must include both the active voice of the subjec
researchers' own dialectical analysis (p. 431). Similarly, the Persona
tives Group (1989) concluded that the social context of the wome
studied "had to be considered from the standpoint of the subject
personal narrative, as well as from the standpoint of the interpreter'
of a particular cultural and social system" (p. 12).
Paradoxically, the ideology of complete equality between researc
researched reintroduced the notion of value-free science in n
because it obscured the differences of their roles and the power com
of their relationship (Personal Narratives Group 1989, 13; Stacey 1
researcher is not a mere vessel of consciousness raising or social ac
more than a psychotherapist is a merely neutral facilitator of person
The newer notion of research as a sort of dialogue or contrapuntal du
recognizing that the viewpoints of researcher and participants are n
sarily compatible (Personal Narratives Group 1989,264), remains s
problematic, however, as long as the vast majority of researchers (o
preters") remains predominantly white and privileged (Riessman 198
To her interaction with the participants, the researcher brings h
location, culture, motivations, limitations, ignorances, skills, educa
sources, familiarity with theory and methodology, the trained inca
socialization in dominant institutions, and an outside perspective t
be useful as well as troublesome (Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1983;
1989; Riessman 1987; Stanley and Wise 1983a). The researcher
formed in the process of research - influenced and taught by her res
participants as she influences them. Theory and practice emerge f
interaction. The researcher is ultimately responsible for the final
however. She cannot avoid this responsibility (Acker, Barry, and
1983, 428-29; Beneria and Roldan 1987, 27-28; Gorelick 1989, 352;
Mbilinyi 1989, 224-25; Sacks 1989; Stacey 1988).
Stanley and Wise's critique of the researcher-respondent relationship was
similar to the critiques many of us made, during the 1960s and 1970s, of the
elitism involved in teacher-student, psychologist-patient relationships. In no
way do I wish to associate myself with the reactionary arrogance, the
suffocating smugness, with which social pundits of the 1980s look back (and
down) on the radical and creative spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. We have
learned from our experience of living and struggling in a backlash era,
however, that these relationships are a set of contradictory interactions, and
our successes and limitations in resolving them are historically determined.

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470 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

Teachers cannot alone undermine their own oppressive power over st

nor can researchers in relation to respondents. Even the possibility o
working together to overcome these oppressive relations is shaped by
forces (Sacks 1989).
Even in the worst of times, however, we must not simply succumb t
institutional forces recreating hierarchy. We must always push at th
gins, push at the limits, push at ourselves. In the worst of times, we m
most on guard against the hierarch within ourselves. But we must, c
tively, try to understand the times and how they frame our possibil
transcendence.

THE HIDDEN RELATIONS OF OPPRESSION

A purely inductive research project such as that advocated by the f

empiricists can generate only those progressive understandings ava
the women studied. If the participants are white, heterosexual, mid
or North American, they are likely to generate a standpoint that
wrong side of racial, sexual, class, and imperial oppression. If
Christian, they may not be able to find within their milieu the
understanding their own anti-Semitism. Hartsock's observation regard
ruling class and gender applies here: "There are some perspectives o
from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relat
humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible
232). If generalizations are not to be made from one field situation to
none of these groups of women can learn from each other, and all mus
mired in the ignorance of their various privileges.
Combining interviews, participant observation, and an extensive
cal analysis of domestic work, Rollins found that maids and their em
had very different views of themselves, each other, domestic work
and their relationship:

Domestics were able to describe in precise detail the personalities, ha

moods, and tastes of the women they had worked for. (The description
ployers gave were, by comparison, less complex and insightful - not, it see
to me, because employers were any less capable of analyzing personalitie
rather because they had less need to study the nuances of their domest
The domestics I interviewed knew the importance of knowledge of the
erful to those without power. (1985, 213, 216)

Rollins, a Black sociologist doing participant observation as a dome

able to reveal contradictions her white respondents could not see:

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 471

The middle-class women I interviewed were not demanding that their hu

play a greater role in housekeeping; they accepted the fact that responsi
for domestic maintenance was theirs, and they solved the problem of their
responsibilities by hiring other women to assist. (p. 104)

Her work reveals the white employer as caught in a contradictory

oppressed as a woman, oppressing another woman as her employe
the particular conditions of race, gender, and political economy in
twentieth century (cf. Fisher 1988, 223-24). It is for this reas
methodology based purely on induction and on the conclusions th
participants are able to generate for themselves cannot even help
understand their own milieu completely. As Stanley and Wise (1990
discussing Frye (1983), "Maleness, heterosexuality and whiteness a
... by being states of unawareness in which the key privilege of th
leged group is not to notice that they are such" (1990, 33). "Feelin
useless without facts," said Rich, "[and] all privilege is ignorant at
(1986, 226).
To understand both the domestics and their employers, therefore, and for
them to understand themselves, Rollins needed both perspectives, but they
were not equal. The maids' perspective had primacy. Consistent with the
insights of all of the feminist methodologists, theirs is the view from below.
This idea goes beyond "different perspectives" and "difference" to the nature
of oppression as a multifaceted structure of unequal social relations.
In this sense, Interpreting Women's Lives (Personal Narratives Group
1989) is a way station along the road "from feminist empiricism to feminist
standpoint epistemologies" (Harding 1986). Its authors recognize the neces-
sity and inevitability of interpretation and theory and the likelihood that the
perspectives and motivations of "narrator" and "interpreter" may differ
(Personal Narratives Group 1989, 4-6). Yet the Personal Narratives Group
does not adequately analyze the consequences of the interpreter's social bi-
ography (her race, class, nationality, sexuality) for her interpretation. Al-
though the authors are excruciatingly, fascinatingly honest about their diffi-
culties, ideological commitments, errors, and contradictions, they generally
do not mention their own social characteristics, even when exploring race
and class differences among their narrators. As Acker, Barry, and Esseveld
pointed out in 1983, "The interpretation must locate the researcher in the
social structure and also provide a reconstruction of the social relations that
produce the research itself' (p. 431; also see Riessman 1987).
The Personal Narrative Group's solution to the problem of different
perspectives (between narrator and interpreter, and among women of differ-
ent race, class, and nationality) is limited to invoking the necessity of sub-

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472 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

stituting "truths" for "Truth," and urging "a reconstruction of knowledge t

admits the fact and value of difference into its definition" (1989, 263
Understanding the necessity and problematics of interpretation, they h
moved from giving voice to hearing voices. That is, they dissolve
structure of inequality into a cognitive pluralism supplanting standpoint
Stanley 1986). To solve the problem of different conditions of oppression
focusing on different truths, however, is to equalize what is not equal,
spread a patina of equivalence over brutal realities and their inverse insig

STANDPOINT AND MOVEMENT:

A COMPLEX OF MANY DETERMINATIONS

In Feminism and Methodology, Harding (1987) considers whethe

critiques of science by both the "post-modernists" and by women o
mean that no unitary science is possible:

For instance, Bell Hooks insists that what makes feminism possible is not
women share certain kinds of experiences, for women's experiences of p
archal oppression differ by race, class, and culture. Instead, feminism n
the fact that women can federate around their common resistance to all the
different forms of male domination. Thus there could not be "a" feminist
standpoint as the generator of true stories about social life. There could, pre-
sumably, only be feminist oppositions, and criticisms of false stories. (p. 188;
she is referring to Hooks 1984)

I believe that this is a misreading of Hooks and of the implications of the

works by women of color for the creation of a feminist standpoint (in contrast
see Fisher 1989; Hartsock 1987; Smith 1987, 121-22, 134). Hooks did not
call her book Another Country or A Different Voice. She called it Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center. She argued that as a result of the dominance
of feminism by relatively privileged women, "feminist theory lacks whole-
ness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a wide variety of human
experiences" (1984, end of preface). To create such an analysis, the perspec-
tives of women of color must move to the center of feminist theory and the
feminist movement. White feminists' definitions of feminism must be over-
turned by the view from below, or from "the margin."
The notion that there must be "many stories," that is, a fragmentary
science, is similar to men's assumptions that the study of gender is only about
women's worlds. On the contrary, difference of condition does not mean
absence of relationship. Black women's experiences are relevant not only to

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 473

other Black women but to understanding the situation of white wo

indeed of Black and white men. It is only because Black wome
bedpans that white men can run hospitals. It is only because Native
women are poor that ruling class men and women are rich. It is on
Guatemalan peasant women are oppressed that North American bu
have power. And it is not only lesbians, but all women, who are
by the compulsory heterosexuality that lies at the heart of sexism (R
Theory making, therefore, cannot be ghettoized, because reality
come in separate boxes. We must uncover not only the different ex
of diverse groups of women but the processes creating these differ
must trace how these processes -of racism, imperialism, class, and
religious and sexual oppression - are connected to each other and de
in very different patterns, the lives of all and each of us.
Within a feminist approach, we need an analysis of racism fro
standpoint of women of color, national oppression from the stand
oppressed minorities, Christian chauvinism from the standpoint of
other ethnoreligious minorities, class from the standpoint of wor
women, and heterosexism from the standpoint of lesbians. All of
systems (or axes) of oppression intersect and implicate virtually ev
least in U.S. society), since everyone stands on one or the other side
axes of oppression and privilege. Therefore, every piece of resear
include an analysis of the specific social location of the women inv
the study with respect to these various systems of oppression.
Such an analysis requires that someone be able to step back and
analysis, or facilitate its emergence among the participants, raising
questions of the segregation of milieus, the social biography of re
the researcher-participant relationship, and so on. Ultimately, wha
build toward is an understanding of the "complex of many determ
as a set of dynamic interrelations (Marx [1859] 1970, 206).
The notion of a complex of many determinations goes beyond "a
feminist pluralism" (Stanley and Wise 1990, 47) and beyond both t
of a fragmentary science and of a simple hierarchy of standpoints
1986; Stanley and Wise 1990, 28). Rather, a methodology based on
plex of many determinations implies a cumulative social science th
merely additive. The visions of each subgroup of women must re
re-vision the knowledge of all. The field is continually decompos
reconceptualized at deeper and more complex levels of understandin
1987, 215-16, 222-23), always giving primacy to the vision of the o

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474 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1991

Such a science may imply an amazing goodwill, transcending opp

interests, for example, between white employers and "their" maids. T
the idea of such a cumulative social science may seem to ignore confli
conflicts are real, however. The problem of creating a women's social
encompassing the consciousness and diverse conditions of different
is similar to and related to the problem of creating a nonoppressive w
movement. Are there any material supports for unity? Are there at
creative contradictions to counter the differences in material interests? Can
we begin to analyze our present situation as a complex of many contradic-
tions? And will "we" all want to do so?
We have learned this much: The old top-down methods of politics and
science will no longer do. To end the oppression of women we need a political
movement and a social science that gives voice to women. But because of
the multifaceted structure of oppression, giving voice is not enough. To
understand the different milieus in which women experience their oppression
and to trace their connections with each other, we need a social science
produced by women of various social conditions (race, class, sexual prefer-
ence, nationality, or ethnicity), a social science that reveals the commonalities
and structured conflicts of the hidden structures of oppression, both as they
are felt and as they are obscured. The quest for such a science confronts and
comprises a dynamic tension among the researcher and the researched,
struggle and science, action, experience, method, and theory.

NOTES

1. I use the term dominant methodology rather than traditional or mainstream,

traditional connotes a benign antiquity that modern-day social science does not
mainstream, a rather bucolic metaphor, seems to imply that alternative methodologie
tributaries, rivulets of the main stream, rather than real alternatives with opposing assu
and consequences. The term mainstream also washes over the power structure that m
the dominant methodologies in place and relegates alternative methodologies to the p
2. Of course, Marx and Engels said, "Men make their own history, but ... they do
it under circumstances chosen by themselves" ([1851] 1963, 15, emphasis added).

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 Gorelick / FEMINIST METHODOLOGY 477

Sherry Gorelick is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. She has

obsessed with the study of contradictions since her early work on City College and
Jewish Poor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981). The present a
and an earlier one grew out of the need to address problems of objectivity, bias, an
researcher-participant relationship in her current research, an interview and oral hist
study of the political development of Jewish feminists, with particular focus on t
relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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