Community Involvement and Activism

Dorothy Smith’s activism manifests itself in a few different ways. Dorothy Smith’s goal of finding a sociology for women is something that she feels is necessary to the understanding of sociology in a more general sense. One way Dr. Smith presents activism is in her writing. In addition to activist writing, there are other ways in which she has been involved in activism throughout her career. First, Dorothy Smith considers her first political action to be one that occurred while she was at Berkeley. Smith decided that female graduate students studying currently as well as in the future shouldn’t be as naïve as she was about the reality of women’s position in society. At the Berkeley academy she gathered lists of the entire faculty in various departments and exposed the minimal number of women faculty members.
Smith tells the story of a second defiant act of hers: “I remember, not long before I finished my thesis and not long before Bill left, being at a dinner party where the host made a sexist joke. I said what I remember as ‘I’m not going to put up with this kind of shit about women any more’ and walked out.”
Furthermore, Smith demonstrates another form of activism for a different cause. With her husband at the time, Bill Smith, Dr. Smith picketed to protest how the demonstrations outside the Un-American Activities Committee Meetings were handled. She remembers this as a peaceful demonstration.
Later on in her career she formed a women’s action group during her time at the University of British Columbia. Also at this time she researched topics that were relevant to action, and worked to connect this research with that of other women academics. The rest of her academic career was devoted to studying and writing sociology for women. Her sociology for women relies upon women’s actions and experiences.
Dorothy Smith writes about her academic activism: “I was very active in the women’s movement for several years first in the community in Vancouver (working with a variety of different women’s group including women in trade unions) and then when I moved to Toronto more with women’s organizing in institutional settings – public school teachers, academic women, women in postsecondary education in general, and women in trade unions). I was also active in menial fashion (putting up posters, selling buttons, and so on) in the Peace Movement. But in more recent years, as I’ve gotten old, I don’t have so much energy and the women’s movement isn’t so active at least not in ways close to my life, so I’ve put more into research writing.”
Dr. Smith formally belongs to the Green and Left political parties in Canada, and is active in a few other programs. Dr. Smith is very active in the Rural Women Making Change Program at the University of Guelph. Also, she explains her involvement in other programs: “the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada has a program called Community-University Research Alliances that funds this program among others. It includes several community organizations in southwestern Ontario, including a union local, a feminist community organization concerned with issues for women school leavers in a local community, the women’s caucus in the National Farmers’ Union, an organization concerned with women migrant workers, and a community organized concerned with skills training and job finding for women. The academics like myself work in relation to specific projects that are developed jointly but primarily to serve the needs of the community organizations.” Recently she has been “doing some research on organizing fair trade campaigns in municipalities which isn’t directly hooked into a specific organization but is designed to develop useful knowledge for activists working in municipal settings.”

References

Smith, Dorothy. “A Berkeley Education.” In Gender and the Academic Experience, edited by Kathryn P. Meadow Orlans and Ruth A. Wallace, 45-56. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Smith, Dorothy. “Email Interview by Sierra Powell,” April 2007.

Smith, Dorothy. “Dorothy Smith.” http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/mdevault/dorothy_smith.htm