Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years

(Paperback)

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This collection of essays provides a systematic and multidisciplinary analysis of the role of gender in the formation and dissemination of the American social sciences in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It draws attention to the ways in which changing gender relations shaped the development and organization of the new social knowledge. And it challenges the privileged position that academic - and mostly male - social science has been granted in traditional history by showing how women produced and popularized new forms of social knowledge in such places as settlement houses and the Russell Sage Foundation. The book's varied perspectives, building on work in history and feminist theory, break from the traditional view of the social sciences as objective bodies of expert knowledge. Contributors examine new forms of social knowledge, rather, as discourses about gender relations and as methods of cultural critique. The book should create a framework for understanding the development of both social science and the history of gender relations in the United States. The contributors are: Guy Alchon, Nancy Berlage, Desley Deacon, Mary Dietz, James Farr, Nancy Folbre, Kathryn Kish Sk

Author Bio

Helene Silverberg is currently a student at Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. She previously taught in the political science departments at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.