Dorothy Edith Smith (née Place; 6 July 1926 – 3 June 2022) was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
Smith was born on 6 July 1926 in Northallerton, North Riding of Yorkshire, England, to Dorothy F. Place and Tom Place, who had her and three sons. Her mother was a university-trained chemist who had been engaged in the women's suffrage movement as a young woman, and her father was a timber merchant. One of her brothers, Ullin Place, was known for his work on consciousness as a process of the brain, and another was poet Milner Place.
At the age of twenty-five, Smith entered the work force as a secretary in the book publishing industry, but this left her wanting more. After this realization, Smith completed her undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics, earning her B.Sc. in sociology with a major in social anthropology in 1955. She then married William Reid Smith, whom she had met while attending LSE, and they moved to the United States. They both attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. in sociology in 1963, nine months after the birth of their second child. Not long afterward she and her husband were divorced; she retained custody of the children. She then taught as a lecturer at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1966. Smith started teaching sociology and was the only female teacher in a faculty of 44.
Following the divorce, Smith was lacking in day care and family support while trying to raise her two children alone. As a result, she decided to move back to England in the late 60s. While she was there, she gave lectures on sociology at the University of Essex, Colchester. In 1968, Smith moved with her two sons to Vancouver, British Columbia to teach at the University of British Columbia, where she helped to establish a Women's Studies Program. In 1977 Smith moved to Toronto, Ontario to work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where she lived until she retired. In 1994 she became an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, where she continued her work in institutional ethnography. Smith served on the international advisory board for the feminist journal Signs.
Smith died of complications due to a fall at her home in Vancouver on 3 June 2022, at the age of 95.
Dorothy Smith came from a long line of feminist activists. Each of these familial figures had an impact on Smith's sociological theories and ideas. Most notably were Margaret Fox, Lucy Ellison Abraham, and Dorothy Foster Place.
Margaret Fox née Fell was the feminist leader of the 17th century Quaker movement. Often referred to as the "mother of Quakerism" she opened her home to be used as one of the first headquarters for the Quaker religious Society of Friends. Lucy Ellison Abraham and Dorothy Foster Place were Dorothy Smith's grandmother and mother respectively. Both were members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and engaged in militant suffrage activism. Abraham participated mostly in the organizational and office work, while Place was more active, even getting arrested once during a window breaking campaign.
Smith's own identity as a Marxist-feminist developed during the 1970s, when her life history and the ongoing women's movement merged to contribute to her life and sociological practices. The Vancouver Women's Movement from 1968 to 1977 proved to be a key moment in the development of Smith's identity. The combination of Smith's feminist ancestry and her own experiences in women's movements went on to shape her standpoint theory. Taking into account how the influential female figures in her life addressed feminism and gender inequality, Smith was able to compile her experiences into a theory. Smith's standpoint theory argues that the origin of standpoint came from women's experiences as housewives. Each of her three ancestors were housewives and that added to and shaped their approach to feminism and activism.
Smith had influential ties to theorists such as Karl Marx and Alfred Schütz. Building on top of Marxist theory, Smith evolved alienation into gender-stratified capitalism, explaining in her work Feminism and Marxism how "objective social, economic and political relations ... shape and determine women's oppression". From Schutz, Smith explains, "Individuals are experienced as 'types'", developing upon his concept of umwelt and mitwelt relations. In The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology, Smith explains mitwelt and umwelt relations of male dominance claiming, "women's work conceals from men the actual concrete forms on which their work depends". Smith was also influenced by George Herbert Mead after taking one of his classes, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, after stumbling upon one of his books.
Smith took on a similar mindset as Karl Marx, founder of Marxism. She took a similar approach of Marxism and applied it to feminism. One of the papers written by Smith, draws upon Marx's ideologies. In the paper, "The Ideological Practice of Sociology", Smith explains the distinction between ideology and social science, taking upon some of Marx's ideas. Furthermore, Smith gave a talk relating to "feminism and Marxism". In the talk, she spoke about how her feminist distinctiveness developed through Marxism. The idea that not all standpoints are viewed equally shows how Smith's take on standpoint theory also draws direct connections with Marxism. This inequality in standpoints and how they are perceived in society reflects Marxist ideas of the impact of social, economic, and political relations on shaping and determining oppression. Before Smith, American feminist theorist Sandra Harding conducted the 1986 study, The Science Question in Feminism, which created the concept of standpoint theory in order to emphasize the knowledge of women, arguing that hierarchies naturally created ignorance about social reality and critical questions among those whom the hierarchies favored. However, those at the bottom of these ladders had a perspective that made it easier to explain social problems.
Bifurcation is defined as dividing or separating into two parts or branches. Smith argued that there is a split between the world that an individual actually experiences and the dominant view that one is supposed to adapt, in this case being the male-dominated view. In the case of the bifurcation of consciousness, specifically related to standpoint theory, this refers to the separation of the two modes of being for women. Since sociology is a male-dominated field, women must fight to push past their expected roles as housewives and mothers, moving from the local realm of the home to the "extra local" realm of society. Women, therefore, split their consciousness in two in order to establish themselves as knowledgeable and competent beings within society and the field of sociology.
Umwelt can be described as the world around us. It is on a more intimate level like such as a husband and wife. Mitwelt is the with-world for instance Mitwelt relations refer more to a type of relation, such as an individual and their mail carrier. Alfred Schütz describes mitwelt relationships as less intimate than umwelt relationships. Smith extends these concepts by demonstrating how umwelt is more "central in women's lives, and men relegate their umwelt relations to women". Meaning, women tend to have more intimate relationships that men.
Standpoint theory is rooted in the idea that what one knows is impacted by their position in society. It also contains three main beliefs: no one can have complete and objective knowledge, no two people can have exactly the same standpoint, and we must not take for granted our own standpoint. Smith emphasized the importance of recognizing our standpoint and utilizing it as the entry point to our investigation. Her overall goal with standpoint theory was to fully account for the perspectives of different genders and their effects on our reality.