What was the listener a reaction to the woman's
concern?
Answers
Answer:
The research generated by academic feminism—involving a new and careful attention to
women's experiences—is beginning to "bring women in" to theorizing. But this research also
demonstrates how traditional paradigms have been shaped by the concerns and relevances of
a relatively small group of powerful men. The dilemma for the feminist scholar, always, is to
find ways of working within some disciplinary tradition while aiming at an intellectual
revolution that will transform that tradition (Stacey and Thome 1985). In order to transform
sociology—to write women and their diverse experiences into the discipline—we need to
move toward new methods for writing about women's lives and activities without leaving
sociology altogether. But the routine procedures of the discipline pull us insistently toward
conventional understandings that distort women's experiences (Smith 1987, 1989).
Feminist methodology should provide strategies for managing this central contradic-
tion—strategies that will help us with the "balancing act" demanded of any scholar who at-
tempts innovative research within a scholarly tradition. I use the term "strategies" to suggest
that feminist methodology will not prescribe a single model or formula. Rather, I think of
feminist methods as distinctive approaches to subverting the established procedures of disci-
plinary practice tied to the agendas of the powerful (Smith 1974). In the discussion that fol-
lows, I pursue some implications of feminism for the production and use of interview data. I
do not treat questions about the ethics of interviewing or relations with informants, which
have been discussed extensively by feminist researchers (e.g., Mies 1983; Oakley 1981;
Reinharz 1983; Stacey 1988). In many ways, my approach is solidly grounded in a tradition of
qualitative sociological inquiry and in relatively conventional methods for conducting inter-
views. But I will suggest that feminism gives us distinctive ways of extending the methods of
this qualitative tradition.
Answer:
women's are more likely to be people-oriented listeners. They connect with the emotional message and undertones of a conversation and more concerned