SOCIOLOGY II

“Is there a notion of society operative that capable of encompass g all ex t g human be gs?”

- Established and lived in Hull house, a ‘settlement house’ in the middle of a poor immigrant working-class neighbourhood. Though ‘settlement house’ conventionally indicated charity, she had a different philosophy: “not ... a sense of duty of the ... ‘haves’ to the ‘have nots,’” (Trustee mentality) but rather a space that took up the feminist challenge of ‘how to give voice to multiple positions without falling back on hierarchies.’

- Hull house hosted lectures by philosophers (John Dewey, Herbert Mead), college extension courses, English language courses, and social clubs for anyone. It affirmed that anyone could attend, learn and speak as an equal.

- Some of the brightest feminist minds lived here for years. Every encounter was also a chance to allow others to change oneself.

- Conceptualised ‘sympathetic knowledge’ : knowing others better to reinforce our common connection.

- Wrote philosophical reflections on juvenile delinquents, garbage collection, immigrant folk stories, and prostitution through conversations with people. Her sociological writing on domestic help 'A Belated Industry' (1896) conceptualised why they were powerless labourers since as isolated individuals, they were treated as servants to a household blocking the ability to organize.

- Conceptualised ‘lateral progress’ - social progress not as the work of great intellectuals or entrepreneurs, but as the work of those who have the courage to change with others, like Abraham Lincoln.

Alone

- Was hired to study the black populations in the Philadelphia ghettoes. The university expected he would quantify how the “atmosphere of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime” of the ghettoes “were features of the black populations”.

- He presented a meta-theoretical reflection on Sociology itself to the American Association of Social & Political Science (’Study of the Negro Problem’, 1898) (Should we begin our sociological studies assuming the blacks are a problem, when black Americans were “forced to take extraordinary measures to live ordinary lives”?)

- Gathering positive knowledge is not enough. What about the "sacred" history of my own society that colours the data? Rewrote history of America as a segregated social totality.

‘Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880’ . (1935) “Lincoln learned”. Although he was part of the liberal culture which consumed Minstrel shows (travelling plays mocking 'colored' peoples) and respected “capital invested in slaves”, Lincoln was moved by how black workers fought, bravely, efficiently and with honour for his side in the CIvil War. Against all his advisors he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, fought for a Constitutional Amendment for equal rights, and posted troops in the conservative Southern States to defend blacks’ fresh constitutional rights. He was assassinated.