The Missing Childist Revolution in Feminist Sociology: Re-Revisioning Women and Social Change

• In Event: 50251 - Open Topic Paper Session on Sex and Gender

Abstract

In Chicago in 1986, Barrie Thorne delivered her Cheryl Miller Lecture for Sociologists for Women in Society, titled “Re-Visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?” Published the following year in the first ever issue of Gender & Society, this was not only the first Distinguished Feminist Lecture to appear in this journal, but also one of the first major statements to consider the place of children in feminist sociology. In returning to Thorne’s lecture on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Gender & Society, our paper asks: Amidst the advances in feminist sociology, are children still missing? Drawing on unique primary source material including Thorne’s own personal correspondence, we undertake an historical analysis of feminist sociology from the 1980s to the present. As our analysis will demonstrate, while the expansion of the field was marked with momentous achievements, these developments have tended to remain adult-centric and continue to sideline children. We therefore set an agenda motivated by Thorne’s early queries and adapt them for important evolutions in the field of the social scientific and feminist study of gender over the past 40 years, bracketed by the founding of Gender & Society in 1987 and the present day. We argue that a childist revolution in feminist sociology has the potential to transform all of sociology as we know it.

Authors

• Yuchen Yang, University of Birmingham

• Freeden Blume Oeur, Tufts University