What is the distinctiveness of the feminist method of social research? Comment

What makes the method distinct

• Dorothy Smith argued that sociology had been written from a ruling standpoint and that research must start from women’s everyday work of care, not from official categories alone.
• Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock treated standpoint as a claim that those who live subordination can see relations that the dominant group treats as natural.
• Ann Oakley showed that the textbook interview, which pretends to be a one-way extraction of facts, hides the interviewer’s power and silences talk of housework, violence, and the body.
• Patricia Hill Collins added that race, class, and gender intersect, so a method that samples only middle-class women still misses Black and Dalit standpoints.
• The method therefore prefers reflexivity, the naming of the researcher’s location, and methods that let respondents speak as knowers, not only as cases.

Contrast with older research rules

• Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method asked the sociologist to treat social facts as things and to keep the observer outside the fact.
• Max Weber allowed verstehen, but his ideal types still often centred the public career of the male actor.
• Feminist work keeps systematic comparison and evidence. It rejects the claim that value-freedom is achieved by ignoring gender in the design of the study.

Comment

• Distinctiveness lies in the research question, the ethics of voice, and the reading of private labour as public structure.
• Indian illustrations include studies of unpaid care, dowry violence, and the double day of employed women, which survey items on occupation often miss.
• The method is not a licence to invent data. It is a demand that sampling, coding, and theory name gender instead of burying it in the household residual.