Women who influenced sociology

Hannah Arendt was a philosopher, political theorist and sociologist. Arendt was one of the most important theoric writer of the XX century. She was German with Jewish origin and for this reason at 1933 she escaped from the nazism to Paris. Since that moment she started to work in different organizations related with the historical context. Years later she move on to New York where she become gradually a theoric related with politic and philosophy. In this country she worked on her most important investigations. Her teacher, in Germany, was Martin Heidegger. Her principal topics of searching during her academic life were totalitarianism related with the historical context that she lived during her youth and politic theories. Also she made theories about human behavior related with power dynamics.Her most important studies are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as mentioned earlier, this searchings were born at U...

Harriet Martineau was a british sociologist,  economist, writer and a social activist. She is very important for the history of women in the social science, it was a hard time to women in the academic world. She written more than fifty books and articles, and even with of all her achievements she was forgotten by the classic theory (made by men). She was one of the first journalists, in 1821 she started to write to Monthly Repository anonymously, there she started to touch topics about women and their rights.  Her circle of friends when she moved to London were a lot of intellectuals, like Darwin, the two of them were interested in equality and emancipation of all humans (they were against slavery).  Is between 1832 and 1833 that she started to be interested in social theory, is at this time that she published two books, Illustrations of Political Economy, and Illustrations of Taxation, is in these publications that she reveals her passion for social reform, ...

Wollstonecraft was born in England, she was a philosopher and a writer. She was a notorious woman in the modern period, she wrote novels, stories, essays, treatises, trip stories, and a children’s book. She established as an independent and professional writer in London, something unusual for that period.  She contributed to Sociology because she suggested that the women are not lower than men, they look lower because they don´t get the same education from the beginning of their lives.  Mary imagined a word based on reason, we can observe that she was part of the intellectual movement “Ilustration”, also she included women in that movement.  In her writing “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1972) she established the base of the modern feminism and she became one of the more popular women of that period in Europe.    In that writing she was looking to vindicate the destiny of women, trying that they participate at the public things. She pr...

Rosa Luxemburgo was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, activist and revolutionary socialist from Poland. She was an antimilitarist, defender of democracy, considered the most important Marxist woman leader in history. Rosa studied although the difficulties and prejudices against women in that time and despite the anti-Semitic discrimination in Europe. She obtained a doctorate in legal sciences in a period when very few women even went to university, and her thesis later was useful as a basis for the program of the Social Democratic party of Poland. During the First World War, she adopted a pacifist position and sent a message, to the workers around the world, to stay away from the dispute based in her beliefs that the war was a confrontation between imperialists. Luxemburgo founded, along with Clara Zetkin and Karl Libnecht, the anti-war Spartacus League in 1914, which later became the Communist Party of Germany. In 1919, she participated in the Berlin Revolutio...

She was an important chilean sociologist and feminist activist, she was one of the first women that introduced the study of the genders in her country and one of the foundress of the feminist movement in 1980. Her importance lies in the introduction of the latin american feminism and the expansion of the genders studies in Chile.  Julieta says that ‘democratic practice cannot be conceived without the participation of the woman, there is no democracy without feminism’. Back then women have just gotten the right to vote so the approaches of her were revolutionary in the chilean politics and people; She promoted a feminism theory that talk about the right of social equality in all the fields that women unwrap: ‘Democracy in the country, in the house and in the bed’ becomes the slogan of the articulation of the movement of women in Chile and the entire Latin American. After the rise of the dictatorship in 1973 Julieta played a fundamental role in the feminist resistance a...

Margaret Archer is a british professor of sociologist who had change the history of sociology because she criticized an important author in this area: Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most relevant authors of the XX century. Also she developed her ‘Morphogenetic Approach’ to social theory.  She was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association at the 12th World Congress of Sociology. She think that it is fundamental to be concerned with the "problem of structure and agency", that is with justifying these as irreducible entities with their own emergent properties and powers. From that follows the question of how to theorise the interplay between society, culture, structure and its human agents and to explain how their interaction leads to an elaboration of all three elements. Pierre Bourdieu, in his work about “habitus”,  gives an explanation about why we do what we do, he is very paternalistic because he takes all the reflex...