IN SEARCH OF POLITICAL WOMAN

Abstract

say about women's part in life. This paper has two purposes: to show hoto American science has dealt with women as an object of study, and to explain why the discipline has dealt with women as it has.2 We conclude that much of the ignoring of women or their facile dismissal as non-political beings stems not exclusively from male prejudice3 but from deeper roots - from the nature of the questions asked, from assumptions concerning what sorts of phenomena are political, from kinds of methodologies adopted for research. This was true of the discipline before, during, and after the behavioral revolution of the 1950's. To demonstrate this, we look at the discipline both before and after the advent of behaviorism, attempting to show how the questions asked, the phenomena considered deserving of analysis, and the tools of the trade led to considerable, although not complete, ignoring of women as beings. Finally, we attempt to assess the effect of the contemporary woman's movement on the discipline. The woman's movement seems to have introduced possibilities for profound changes both in the way in which the discipline studies women and in the way in which it defines activity. Ironically, the contemporary woman's movement appears to have affected the discipline far more than did the earlier woman's suffrage movement, which was to all appearances the more clearly political movement. An examination of science and the study of women, then, is of interest both to those who want to learn more about women,

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