How She Became an Academic

Dorothy Smith received her B.Sc(Soc) in 1955 from the University of London, UK, London School of Economics. She received her Ph D in 1963 from the University of California at Berkeley, Department of Sociology.
Throughout her academic career Dr. Smith felt the blunt of sexual discrimination, as it wasn’t until after her graduate degree was complete that she was able to get a job. She was told that women’s place was to be in the home, yet she fought these social norms and persisted to get her degree and was successful. In her first position as a lecturer at the University of Berkeley she realized how few women were pursuing what she was. She describes the sociology department as a caste system. In this caste system there were 44 men and 2 maybe 3 women, and all the secretaries at the time were women.
While she was teaching at Berkeley Dr. Smith attended a conference in San Francisco focusing on the potential of women. Here she recognized that there were other women experiences the same things she was. Also around this time she was inspired by one of her first influences in women’s sociology; Jessie Bernard. Dorothy Smith was so inspired at this time that she decided to inform graduate students at Berkeley of the reality of the women’s situation. She posted a list of all the departments and the numbers of both males and females. Smith had noticed that the numbers mentioned above describing the sociology department weren’t unique to that department. Smith took this opportunity to expose these numbers as an act of defiance. The reason this act of Smith’s is viewed as an act in the underground women’s movement, as she calls it, is that it was very rare during this time period (mid to late 1960’s) that facts like that were exposed and nevertheless discussed. Smith describes her experience in the department of Sociology quite accurately: “I was a woman trying to pee in a men’s john. And having got my pants down, I was going to go ahead and pee anyway.”
During all of these experiences in the Sociology department, she was having troubles with her marriage. Dr. Smith explains that her relationship was trapped in a mode of constantly trying to a achieve perfection in the home, with their marriage, and with their children. These experiences led her to commit to her battle against the “institutional imaginary” and study institutional order because she felt unwillingly bound to the social norms of her time.
At this time she explored John Clausen and R. D. Laing’s writings on mental illness, and applied her own experiences to them. Further delving into the term symptomatology which involves having symptoms, but not acting nor refusing to act to change. Dorothy Smith describes other influences in her work at this time as a class on George Herbert Mead and being taught mathematical sociology. A supporter of Dorothy Smith throughout her path in graduate school was John Clausen in the Sociology department at Berkeley. She wrote about the institutional imaginary and was further influenced by Noam Chompsky and his desire for intellectuals to tell the truth about the way things are. Furthermore, her writing was also influenced by feminist poetry that showed her women’s experiences. Her goal in her sociology career became to tell the truth about women using their experiences. Dr. Smith saw a gap between what sociologists said about society and what was going on in the lives of women, and has worked to develop sociology for women.
Dr. Smith was effective in filling the gap of women’s experiences in sociology. She also was an especially important influence on sociology through her recognition of the complex relationship between gender and political structures. A summary of her major works as well as various critiques of it can be found in the Research section.

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

Smith, Dorothy. “Sociology from Women’s Experience: A Reaffirmation,” Sociology Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Spring, 1992): 88-98.

Smith, Dorothy. “Curriculum Vitae.”