Addams envisioned society as a vast network of individuals coming together to realize their material and ethical interests in the name of social democracy. Like Simmel and Mead, she was more interested in micro-level social interaction than in social structures and institutions. Addams viewed the individual as an embodied subject with a mind capable of reason and emotion in a body that materially experiences the social world. She was particularly concerned with the emotion of kindness and with how individuals desired sociality. Her understanding of social change encompassed her belief that emotions, not just material conditions, could determine the evolution of society. Addams recognized that transforming social democracy from a political creed to a way of life faced two tensions: overcoming the belief in individualism and the difficulty of people collectively to understand one another's vantage point. She offered three strategies to solve these tensions: formally educating people to recognize the legitimacy of social democracy; informally encouraging people to interact with those outside of their own class, gender, and ethnicity; and using the historical memories of individuals to help them to re-discover their relationship with society.
Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) and Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)
The work of Cooper and Wells-Barnett focused on the role power plays in social life, particularly in terms of understanding sexism and racism in American society. According to Cooper and Wells-Barnett, power can range in form from physical oppression to emotional manipulation, including coercion, ideology, material advantage, interactional norms, and communication. Unlike the other feminist theorists discussed so far, Cooper and Wells-Barnett gave little purchase to the themes of evolution and progress, and argued that domination and stratification are structurally pervasive in modern society. For example, Cooper viewed society as a system of institutions, stratified groups, and cultural aspirations. She believed that order in society could take two forms, domination and equilibrium; however, regardless of whether a society is characterized by domination or equilibrium, it is never free of conflict.
Marianne Schnitger Weber (1870-1954)
The wife of Max Weber, Marianne's work on sociological theory had been forgotten until recently. During her lifetime Marianne Weber achieved recognition not only for her academic work but also for her political work. She became the first female member of parliament for Baden, in 1920, and the president of the Federation of German Women's Organizations.
Marianne Weber's central theoretical project was creating a sociology from the standpoint of women. Three issues informed her sociological theory: the need for female autonomy, the significance of women's work in the production of culture, and the situated and unique standpoint of women. She was particularly concerned with how well social institutions enabled or constrained women to realize these three issues. For example, Marianne Weber's study of marriage found that while men achieve greater autonomy and self-fulfillment through conventional marriage, women do not. She also critiqued Simmel's notion that men and women occupied different culture spheres: the objective male world of public achievement and the personal female world of inner self-development. Marianne Weber argued that this distinction failed to explain women's work in the household, and suggested that the home constituted a third dimension of cultural production — what she called the "middle ground of immediate daily life." She also debated Gilman's position that the only path to gender equality was through women leaving the household and becoming wage earners. Gilman's solution, according to Weber, did not take into account the various standpoints of females, whether they be homemakers or factory workers. Weber believed that the patriarchal household rather than the capitalist workplace needed to be reformed.
Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943)
A student and lifelong friend of Herbert Spencer, Webb became a leading Fabian socialist in Great Britain and a theorist overwhelmingly concerned with the problem of "poverty among riches." Webb first became a charity worker in order to study poverty, but she quickly realized that she was not so much interested in good works, but in understanding. After working with the poor, she came to believe that attempts to reform the capitalist economic system could be better understood by studying segments of the working class that were actively engaged in creating alternative economic practices, such as co-operatives. In her work, Webb was most concerned with the relationship between the state, the economy, and social classes. Unlike Marx, Webb viewed state intervention as necessary to control the economy, and she advocated gradual rather than revolutionary change.
References
I. S. Kon, A History of Classical Sociology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989.
R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (I and II), Transaction Publishers, 1998.
A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
G. Ritzer and D.J. Goodman, Sociological Theory, McGraw-Hill, 2003.
E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, Macmillan, 1982.
M. Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, 1949.
K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I., Progress Publishers, 1967.
T. Parsons, On Institutions and Social Evolution: Selected Writings (Heritage of Sociology Series), University of Chicago Press, 1985.
R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 1970.
A. Giddens and J.H. Turner (Eds.), Social Theory Today, Stanford University Press, 1988.