AN ESSAY ON THE FOUNDING OF THE ASA SECTION ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY
Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge
Like the shoemaker’s children, the Section on the History of Sociology (HOS) has been too long without a history of its own genesis. The history of its founding that follows here is inspired by the efforts of Section Chair David Swartz (2017-2018) to remedy this defect and is intended to serve three purposes: (1) to give readers a basic chronology of key events, dates, people, and documents essential to that founding, (2) to interpret that chronology at the level of the meanings motivating the actors whose actions produced it and at the level of the structures that enabled, impelled, or impeded actions, and (3) in so doing to illustrate the significance of having a section devoted to the history of sociology as discipline and profession. The thesis that has emerged for us here is that the founding of the HOS was the product of conflict or at least tensions between these perennial two aspects of sociology (or any academic field)—its professional organization of rules and opportunity structures and its disciplinary core of distinctive ideas and beliefs. In the case of the founding of HOS, the precipitating factors were changes in the discipline regarding the place of women in its history, most especially, women’s role in the classical period, roughly 1830-1930; in the 1990s these changes in thinking, which we will term a feminist revision, encountered professional structures that seemed to the revisionist scholars to allow little place for their new insights. In this interpretation, then, HOS is an outgrowth of the principle articulated wittily by Charlotte Bunch as “You can’t just add women and stir”; though this principle could be applied to the experiences of other minority groups, our purpose here is the historian’s, explaining why this conflict and its resolution occurred in the form they did at the time they did—the perennial question of history, why here now?
Our presentation takes the form of a chronology and is interpolated with accounts that set that chronology in context, tracing two main themes—substantive disciplinary issues and professional organizational concerns. Further because our relation to this material is twofold, we distinguish between ourselves as professionals who specialize in the history of sociology and our role as actors in and key informants on the founding of HOS by reserving the first person “we” for ourselves as analysts writing in 2018 and using the third person “Lengermann and Niebrugge” to name us as actors in the narrative.
Chronology—and Contextuality and Synchrony
Building “a simple chronology” is a complex task, partly because one quickly confronts the problem of finding the beginning (as well, later, the end) of an event—Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say, “It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident.”—Agatha Christie (1967). It is also because of the enormous problem of rendering synchrony, that is, of accounting for all that overlaps and interferes with the chain of occurrence one is trying to describe. In what follows, we start with an event in the chronology, make a necessary detour to the context for the actions chronicled, and then return to the chronology.
May 1996: Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge (aka Jill Niebrugge-Brantley) made a direct outreach via a phone call to the ASA Executive Office in Washington, D.C., where they were put through to Elizabeth Czepiel, Governance Co-ordinator at ASA (1994 to 1998) saying they wished to form a Section on the History of Sociology and requesting instructions on how to do so.
Lengermann and Niebrugge (hereafter L&N) were living in Ithaca, New York; pursuing the ideal of being scholar-activists, they had left full-time teaching careers in Washington, D.C., where Lengermann retained the title of “Research Professor in Sociology at The George Washington University” (as shown in some of the appended documents), serving as visiting professors at Wells College and researching and writing what was to become The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830-1930 (1998). This research was one major element in the motivations prompting this phone call.
These motives grew directly out of the tensions, alluded to in our opening, between sociology as a discipline and sociology as a profession—tensions that both provided a context for the call and were synchronous with the events that followed, indeed, persisting beyond the dates in this chronology. These tensions occurred through a discourse that while usually civil was also passionate—people spoke and acted because to remain silent seemed “profane” given the sense participants’ shared sense that “history,” that is, the attempts to create an accurate record of what actually happened, was in some ways “sacred,” an expression of the core scholarly virtues of logic, coherence and validity. Indeed, the conflict over the establishment of a separate section on the History of Sociology may seem an almost too perfect illustration of Simmel’s dictum that conflict is interaction that resolves the tension among opposites. In terms of the discipline, this tension came to a head over the place of women in sociology’s history. In terms of the profession, it came to revolve around the creation of a section, because a major way ASA handled the relation between discipline and profession was through the mechanism of the sections. So, when L&N turned to the creation of a section as the logical way to get a hearing for the position they represented, they were following a path clearly charted by professional rules.
This organizational confrontation becomes more meaningful when seen in its societal context. U.S. sociology like other aspects of American life in the last half of the 20th century was marked by a restlessness expressed in multiple social movements of which three are most important here–the African American Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-(Vietnam) War Movement, and Women’s Movement of Second Wave Feminism. In ASA this restlessness first manifested itself in a growing proliferation of sections that was facilitated by a 1958 ASA Governing Council decision to make sections a more significant part of the Association by regularizing the relationship in ways defined in the resolution “Establishment of a Mechanism for Creating Sections.” That had borne more fruit than the Council had perhaps intended—1960s, seven new sections; 1970s, nine; 1980s 8; and the 1990s, 10. By 1995 there was a countering concern with what was characterized by some as “the balkanization of sociology,” (e.g. Firebaugh 1997). Anxiety began to build in the profession that the sheer number of sections was producing economic and material constraints on the Association. And there was also a concern that the increase in sections, intended to allow for more disciplinary inventiveness, were diluting the understanding of what constituted the discipline of sociology.
But for the founders of HOS, the concern about numbers of sections seemed a peripheral issue compared to the passionate drive for change fueled by Second Wave Feminism. Six years after Bette Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique, the effects of the Women’s Movement appeared in professional sociology with the creation of The Women’s Caucus (begun at the Annual ASA Meeting in San Francisco in 1969), Sociologists for Women in Society (1970), ASA’s Committee on the Status of Women (1970), the Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender (1973), and the journal Gender & Society (1987). This movement produced an explosion of publications on gender as a major stratificational practice. Within the field of the history of sociology, the most significant of these was Mary Jo Deegan’s 1988 study Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School. Deegan’s personal statement in her preface captures the experience that would repeatedly motivate feminist scholars in the history of sociology as they made their own discoveries—we quote it here to give some sense of the emotion undergirding the feminist project of revisioning sociology’s history.
This book started from a very modest wish. Once a decade ago [this would be about 1975], I wanted to write a popular paper, only eight to ten pages long, on an early woman sociologist. I believed there must have been at least one woman who worked in my discipline, and I wanted to remember and celebrate that work. To my utter amazement, when I examined the early sociology journals, I found not one but dozens of early women sociologists. The story of their lives and work has fascinated me over the ensuing years. I haunted archives, read musty organizational records, and pored over correspondence. These were unfamiliar tasks for a sociologist of our era and I fear that many friends and colleagues thought I was on a wild goose chase. This book is a partial answer to their many questions concerning the nature of my work and that of the early women sociologists. (Deegan 1988: xviii)
Deegan was part of a pioneering effort that included work of men like James Terry (1983), Terry Kandal (1988), and Michael R. Hill (1989); but the primary impact of Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, as well as Deegan’s over a dozen companion volumes—was to spark the interest of a generation of women scholars in the history of sociology: Kay Broschart, Vickie Demos, Susan Hoecker Drysdale, Patricia Lengermann, Lynn MacDonald, Vicky MacLean, Gillian Niebrugge, Shulamit Reinharz, Barbara Richardson, Linda Rynbrandt, Jan Thomas, Joyce E. Williams. These scholars formed a central group propelling the drive for a Section on the History of Sociology.
Deegan’s 1988 work had solved a major issue for revisionist historians of the discipline by addressing the perennial question of how to recover a lost founder. She had done so by applying to Addams, Dirk Käsler’s 1981 criteria for determining whether an earlier thinker could reasonably be classified as a sociologist: “occupy a chair of sociology and/or teach sociology; membership in the American Sociological Society; co-authorship of sociological articles or textbooks; self-definition as a ‘sociologist,’ and definition by others as a sociologist” (Deegan 1988:9). Using these criteria, feminist historians discovered an expanding community of early women, minority men and a few white men (like settlement residents) who had worked mightily to help shape the new discipline in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but who had been “erased” from its history. This insight led to the deeper question of what, then, was sociology’s history.. The prevailing answer, that it was the account of the intellectual creations that constituted the disciplinary canon of theorists and theories, now seemed to hide politics of gender, race, and knowledge that opened a vista of sociology as a politics of inclusion and exclusion—a social product. This was a heady idea that seemed to the original founders and supporters of the HOS to need ongoing research to be shared with the sociological community.
The Professional Context: To appreciate why an ASA section seemed so important, it is necessary to look at the status quo of the history of sociology in the 1990s. ASA typically placed the history of sociology in the annual meeting Call for Papers as a “Regular Session” titled “History of Sociology/Social Thought.” This listing meant that any scholar with a paper on the history of sociology could submit there, but “there” typically comprised slots for only four papers—and the after-slash qualifier pointed to a particular way of understanding that history.i The Theory Section also offered opportunities for papers on the history of sociological thought but these tended to be either interpretations of established classical theorists or the “rediscovery” of a forgotten theorist, almost inevitably a white male academic. (A notable exception was the 1995 meeting when the Theory Section offered two sessions, organized by Charles Camic, on “Reclaiming the Argument of the Founders” in which Lynn McDonald, of the University of Guelph, presented on “Classical Social Theory with the Women Founders Included”— a precursor of the momentum for change which would spark the drive for the HOS section in 1996. While McDonald was not the only woman presenter, she was the only presenter who made women sociologists her subject.)
Members of the Theory Section and others whose professional interests were in sociological theory were not unaware of the nascent feminist mobilization, its critique of a theory curriculum that focused exclusively on the work of white men, and, by 1996, its project of establishing a section on the history of sociology. For the “old guard” this last seemed merely to be a “rival theory group,” and while some of these scholars would support the idea of HOS, and many more would accommodate with it, others held to their opposition to the revisionist challenge, answering it typically with two arguments: (1) women and minority men were not in the canon because they had been denied the social opportunities for public life and advanced education and thus had no chance to engage in sociological theory; (2) even if women had been writing things that might be considered sociology, those writings had fallen outside the mainstream canon and had not influenced the direction of sociology. Ashley and Orenstein (1998: 30) argued, for instance: “In selecting our ‘classical sociological theorists,’ we did not, of course, take a decision to exclude factory workers, peasants, women, or nonwhites from consideration. Rather, we acknowledged that such types of people were from the very
beginning prevented from participating in the formation of ‘classical sociological theory.’ To pretend otherwise would be a gross distortion and would also serve to conceal the very significant role that prejudice and discrimination have played in the formation of modern sociology.” Or Collins and Markowsky (1998: 297) argued that women did not produce “the theoretical schemes [which] tend to be more permanent, since they are more easily passed along to subsequent generations through intellectual networks” (Collins and Makowsky, 1998: 297). But feminist scholars, men as well as women, answered that their own research was showing that these generalizations were mistaken: women had been present at and active participators in the creation of sociology (and had produced “theoretical schemes” if that was to be the key measure) and their absence was due to the complex workings of a politics of gender and a politics of knowledge that was still in play.
These same researches had also generally shown feminists that it was not women alone who were marginalized, that the history of sociology constituted as the history of its theories neglected a vast realm of other practices, products and people that were part of sociology, and that there were currently no organizational spaces devoted to topics on the history of sociology as a profession, such as sociology in places outside the white academy, such as the settlement houses, women’s colleges, historically black colleges and universities, government, and social movement organizations; the emergence of multiple sections within ASA or the parallel organizations like the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) or the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS); the rise of regional associations; the development and influence of journals; and the political dynamics of exclusionary practices that shaped all these. Many historians of the profession whose interests lay in these and similar topics supported the prospect of a section on sociology’s history, even if they had little interest in the claims of the feminists driving the project.
All this was the context for L&N’s May 1996 call to ASA headquarters during which Czepiel explained that it was possible to get some meeting space at the 1996 Annual Meeting for groups seeking to formulate proposals for future ASA action and suggested the placement of an announcement in Footnotes Volume 24: 6 (July/August 1996) which featured part of what was to become a standard statement about the importance of history to the discipline’s sense of itself and publicized a meeting for interested persons for August 17, 1996 at 8:30 a.m. at the Annual Meeting in New York City. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: HOS makes its first public appearance as an idea (form Footnotes July/August 1996 Vol.24 Number 6)
Somewhere between May and August 1996, L&N discovered that the path to section status moved through a multi-stage process specified by ASA’s Section Manual. This movement in the case of HOS ran for over three years, from May 1996 to October 1, 1999, when the History of Sociology was transferred from “section-in-formation” status to full section status. The 1996 Manual required seven stages of action: (1) inform the ASA Executive of the wish to form a new section; (2) recruit supporters for this project; (3) manifest this intention and support by presenting a proposal outlining the value of the new session to the discipline and the association; (4) present that proposal to the ASA Executive along with a petition signed by fifty members in good standing of ASA; (5) upon the validation of the petition by the ASA Executive, present a proposal for the new section to the Committee on Sections which makes a judgment whether to approve and pass on the proposal to the ASA Governing Council for section-in-formation status or to return the proposal for more work to the organizers; (6) upon the approval as a “section-in-formation,” recruit 200 ASA members-in-good-standing to join the Section, paying section dues at a reduced rate for the first two years; (7) once membership numbers are achieved and bylaws drafted and accepted, the new Section holds its first elections and presents an annual report. Much of the rest of this chronology reflects the dictates of that document—as well as the missteps that occurred.
August 17, 1996: At what we now designate “the working group” meeting, a statement prepared of the reasons for proposing a Section on the History of Sociology by L&N was endorsed and the first petitions supporting formation of the Section were signed. A list of names of potentially interested persons was generated by those in attendance and an interim committee established to help oversee the work of achieving section status: Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Concordia University; Ken Kusterer, American University; Patricia Lengermann, The George Washington University; Helena Z. Lopata, Loyola University of Chicago; Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, Wells College; Harold Orbach, Kansas State University; Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University; Kathleen Slobin, North Dakota State; Stephen Turner, University of South Florida, and Susan Wright, Wayne State. Other allies from this early period included: Mel Barber, Florida A&M University; Kay Broschart, Rollins College; Terry Nichols Clark, University of Chicago; Donald Cunnigen, University of Rhode Island; Mary Jo Deegan, University of Nebraska; John Drysdale, Concordia University; Michael R. Hill, University of Nebraska; Brenda Hoke, Agnes Scott College; Herbert Hunter, Pennsylvania State University—Indiana; Mike Keen, University of Notre Dame; Larry Nichols, West Virginia University; Jack Nusan Porter, University of Massachusetts—Lowell; Reuben Rumbaut, Michigan State University; Edward Tiryakian, Duke University, and Eleanor Townsley, Mount Holyoke College.
L&N’s leadership in this effort was based in a perhaps idiosyncratic combination of enthusiasm and naiveté—and when those failed, as they did frequently, just plain doggedness. Though they knew about the debates on fragmentation, they did not connect those debates with their project. They had only a scant appreciation of the extreme modesty of the base from which they began (living in Ithaca, without a prestigious academic affiliation, with only a modest scholarly record, and with no real departmental base of administrative support and supplies). They had not a clue to the amount of work they were about to undertake navigating the “mechanism for creating new sections” in a time when that project was out of favor at ASA. Nor did they for some time grasp the tone of seriousness with which ASA dealt with such requests. Finally, as overloaded teaching faculty, they ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting simply because they couldn’t get enough spare time to set up a system of delegation.
In the Fall of 1996, following the trail of names suggested at the working group meeting, L&N mailed out by regular or e-mail about 100 letters with petitions (and SASEs for the regular mail people); this effort culminated in their being able to send the ASA Office a total of 107 signed petitions; of these 12 were disqualified because ASA records suggested that the signers’ membership was not in effect. This completed Step 4 of the ASA mechanism for creating a new section.
But this effort was not received with enthusiasm by the ASA administration. The direct contacts with the Association went through three representatives of the Executive Office (Executive Director Felice Levine, Associate Director Phoebe Stevenson, and Czepiel, who all gave competent advice but were essentially opposed to adding more sections in general and especially to adding more potentially “small sections.” Contacts were often made by phone and there were problems, sometimes never resolved, getting hardcopies of memos and minutes. In a first call, in Fall 1996, following Lengermann and Niebrugge’s submission of petition signatures, Levine, with Czepiel also on the call, suggested that they consider doing an outreach to an already existent section that could incorporate the concerns and goals that seemed to underlie the impulse to form a section in the History of Sociology. L&N, after conferring with members of the Interim Organizing Committee, decided to proceed on the course of establishing a separate section for the study of the history of sociology, believing that the subject genuinely merited its own section.
L&N, in what we see today to have been a singularly obtuse reading of the administrative headwinds, proceeded on December 16, 1996 to forward the proposal and petition signatures for Section-in-Formation status to the Committee on Sections (COS), an elected body of ASA members, —meeting Step 5 of the ASA procedure. This first attempt failed: COS returned it with the objection first broached by Levine: how would this affect other sections?
After a series of exchanges, mediated by the Executive Office, it was agreed in a call of February 12, 1997 among Lengermann, Niebrugge, Felice Levine and Stevenson that the aspiring HOS group would elicit the response to the prospect of a new section on the History of Sociology with Science, Knowledge and Technology (SKAT) and the Theory Section, as the two sections Felice Levine felt might be most impacted and also seemed most likely as a possible home for a history of sociology without constituting a new section. On May 30, 1997, L&N turned to the Interim Coordinating Committee for advice on correspondence with SKAT, chaired by Karin Knorr Cetina; with the Theory Section, chaired by Donald Levine, and on preparation of a second or revised request to COS for Section-in-formation status (Appendix IV). In preparation for answering the major objection to the new section, the effects on already existent sections, L&N charted what SKAT and Theory had offered at the last four Annual Meetings in terms of contributions to the history of sociology as well as what had been offered generally in the history of sociology at the Annual Meeting (Appendix VI).
L&N’s communication with SKAT and the Theory Section brought responses of reservation from both, based in the concern that multiplication of sections would weaken those already in place; but both also stressed that they did not think it appropriate for existing sections to thwart the formation of new sections on these grounds. On June 14, 1997, acting for the Interim Coordinating Committee, L&N sent a “Revised Proposal for a Section on the History of Sociology” to the Committee on Sections (see Appendix V). What we now see as remarkable about this proposal was the growth in the collective understanding of HOS supporters of where the Section could and should go. The proposal suggests plans for the new history section to work with existing sections to produce a more balanced history of sociology than was currently offered by the Association. It contains a direct but nuanced discussion of the effects on existing sections. It reports on the responses of the Theory and SKAT sections as not wishing to stand in the way of the creation of a new section. At the same time, the proposal maintains its belief in the importance of history in the creation and maintenance of a common identity.
The Governing Council granted the status of Section-in-Formation at its August 1997 in Toronto (the site of that year’s Annual Meeting).
As representatives of a section-in-formation, L&N, with the help of the Interim Organizing Committee and its allies, now had to get 200 supporters to become members of HOS, which would require being willing to pay dues, at a reduced rate, for two years. This effort was challenged by the added complication of doing this in the midst of a revision to the Section Manual that changed the requirement for Section status from 200 supporting members to 300. L&N appealed to Executive Director Felice Levine who ruled that the Section could continue under the old 1996 rules in regard to this criterion.
From March 1998 to September 30, 1999, L&N led the work of recruiting members for the new section (Appendix VII). The responses at this point—when people had not only to signal support for the idea of a history section but to pledge that they would fiscally support such a section–ultimately did not auger well for the new Section. First, the responses were never overwhelming—goals were met with a few members over the required quota but not with a flood of memberships. A number of people replied that they would offer support for the first two years to help the Section move from “in formation” to full status—but no more. Some people expressed hostility to the idea of the Association turning to its history, arguing that this should be left to the historians. For the organizers, who truly loved the idea of a history of the discipline and saw it as part of the work of shaping the identity of sociology, these responses were disheartening. On the other hand, L&N also reached out with some success to current supporters and to every friend they had among ASA members to ask for the purchase of gift memberships. And they tried to seize every opportunity to promote the Section.
For instance, at the 1998 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, as a section-in-formation, HOS was allowed one business session of an hour and 45 minutes. But L&N, believing they were in the home stretch of member recruitment, tried to use the meeting to promote the Section and push its membership count over the bar. They shortened the business meeting to 45 minutes, ran a paper session on regional sociology in the first hour, and requested a Special Session from ASA President Jill Quadagno focused on a topic germane to their situation: “History of Sociology: Issues of Inclusivity.” But in the midst of this very successful show of activity, ASA affirmed its new policy of 300 members for Section status—going forward; it would not dis-establish already existing sections and would not apply to the HOS Section-in-formation; but sections with less than 300 members would become subject to recurring “audits” of section viability. (This action led to the formation of a loosely structured but vocal “coalition of small sections.”) All this made the future murky and part of the Section-in-Formation Business meeting was devoted to explaining what ASA policy meant for HOS.
L&N chose to cover every eventuality, first availing the section-in-formation of the “grandfathered” exemption by sending on September 29, 1998 to Jim Morrill, then in charge of ASA membership, a membership list for 212 members for HOS, pointing out that “this now qualifies HOS for Section status.”
Between September 1998 and October 1999, L&N, in consultation with the HOS Interim Coordinating Committee, submitted the section by-laws for approval by COS so they could then go to the membership for a vote—all of which was accomplished in September 1999.
L&N and other supporters spent the time between the 1999 Annual Meeting and September 30, the close of the ASA membership year, in one last desperate push to get everyone they had ever known to become a member or buy a gift membership for another ASA member to move HOS to full Section Status with over 300 members. Amidst the now usual rejections, L&N were also cheered by help from people that they didn’t know. One magnificent response was from new section member Ruben Rumbaut (Michigan State University) who sent a mass email outreach saying, “these women are sending these emails at 2 a.m. in the morning; help them!” and including his delightful sense of the significance of the history of sociology:
I think what’s past is prologue, that origins shape destinies, that an unexamined sociology is not worth living, and that an ahistorical sociology is blind (like the pilot flying a 747 at full speed through an electrical storm, which causes the plane’s instruments to go haywire, so the pilot gets on the PA system and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re lost, but you’ll be glad to know we’re making excellent time”).
That concern with our roots as a discipline — and the conviction that no sociology worth its salt is ignorant of its social origins–underlies the . . . effort . . . to form a “History of Sociology” Section within the American Sociological Association.
On October 1, 1999, the History of Sociology emerged from the administrative gauntlet as a full section—news that was announced in the first newsletter, which Lengermann christened “Time Lines” (Appendix ix). With a membership of 312 for the 1999-2000 year, the Section held its first elections, choosing Helena Znaniecki Lopata as first President, Michael R. Hill, President-elect; Kathleen Slobin, Secretary-Treasurer; Mary Jo Deegan, Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Terry Nichols Clark, Edward Tiryakian, Brenda Hoke, and Eleanor Townsley, Council Members, and Robert Woodberry, Student Representative. The Section was entitled to one paper session and a business meeting and chose to combine its business meeting with a roundtable session. The program presented by the new Section fulfilled the aspirations of many of the Section organizers: with papers on the social settlements, academics in the US government in the 1960s, and the ecofeminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; the roundtable session featured titled like “The Intellectual and Social Organization of ASA 1990-97,” “Attention Deficit Disorder: The Sociological History of a Disease,” and “Consequences of State Censorship: Western Migration of Polish Sociologists.” And Joe Feagin in the 2000 Presidential Address gave significant attention to the importance of the history of sociology in his call for a return to sociology’s social justice tradition.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of white women, black men, and black women sociologists as well as a few white male sociologists did much innovative sociological research and at the same time took strong informed positions in regard to ending the oppression of women, black Americans, the poor, and immigrants. Among the now forgotten women and black male sociologists were Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Emily Greene Balch, Ida B.Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and W. E. B. Du Bois. All were practicing sociologists, and all developed important sociological ideas and research projects. Most were members of the American Sociological Society (Deegan 1988).
. . . [I]t is time for the discipline to fully recover and celebrate its historical roots in a sociology committed to social justice in ideals and practice. In recent decades no sociologist has published even one substantial article in a major sociology journal (e.g., the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Sociological Theory) on the sociological ideas of the women sociologists in the founding generation (Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 2001). It is time for us sociologists to remedy this neglect and help to reclaim the important ideas of those women sociologists and sociologists of color who are among the founders of our discipline. (2001: 6-7, 10)
References
Ashley, David and David Orenstein. 1998. Sociological Theory: Classical Statements. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Collins, Randall and Michael Makowsky. 1998. The Discovery of Society. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School 1892-1913. New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Books.
Feagin, Joe R. 2001. Social Justice and Sociology: Agendas for the Twenty-First Century: Presidential Address. ASR 66: 1: 1-20.
Käsler, Dirk. 1981. “Methodological Problems of a Sociological History of Early German Sociology.” Paper presented at the Department of Education, University of Chicago, November 5.
Lengermann, Patricia and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley. 1998. The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830-1930. New York: McGraw-Hill.
McDonald, Lynn. 1995. “Classical Social Theory with the Women Founders Included.” Paper presented at the Theory Section Session “Reclaiming the Argument of the Founders” Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August, Washington, D.C.
Cumulative Listing of Section Officers for the History of Sociology Section of the ASA
2017-2018
Chair: David L. Swartz
Chair-Elect: John W. Mohr
Sect/Treas: Daniel R. Huebner
Council:
John W. Mohr
George Steinmetz
Laura R. Ford
Chad Alan Goldberg
J. I. Hans Bakker
Christian Daye
Student Reps:
Christine Bucior
Brandon Sepulvado
2016-2017
Chair: Peter Kivisto
Chair-Elect: David L. Swartz
Sect/Treas: Christian Dayé
Council:
Erik Schneiderhan
Eleanor Townsley
Chad Alan Goldberg
John W. Mohr
J.I. (Hans) Bakker
George Steinmetz
Student Reps:
Christine Bucior
Brandon Sepulvado
2015-2016
Chair: Martin Bulmer
Chair-Elect: Peter Kivisto
Sect/Treas: Christian Dayé
Council:
Peter Kivisto
Erik Schneiderhan
Eleanor Townsley
Chad Alan Goldberg
John W. Mohr
Student Reps:
Mathieu H. Desan
Brandon Sepulvado
2014-2015
Chair: Neil Gross
Chair-Elect: Martin Bulmer
Sect/Treas: Christian Dayé
Council:
Norbert Wiley
Mustafa Emirbayer
Peter Kivisto
Erik Schneiderhan
Eleanor Townsley
Student Reps:
Amanda Maull
Mathieu H. Desan
2013-2014
Chair: Alan Sica
Chair-Elect: Neil Gross
Sect/Treas: Erik Schneiderhan
Council:
Marcel Fournier
Jeffery Olick
Norbert Wiley
Mustafa Emirbayer
Peter Kivisto
Student Reps:
Laura Ford
Amanda Maull
2012-2013
Chair: Richard Swedberg
Chair-Elect: Alan Sica
Sect/Treas: Erik Schneiderhan
Council:
Neil McLaughlin
Vera Zolberg
Marcel Fournier
Jeffery Olick
Neil Gross
Norbert Wiley
Student Reps:
Marcus Hunter
Michael Bare
Laura Ford
2011-2012
Chair: Gary Alan Fine
Chair-Elect: Craig Calhoun
Sect/Treas: Anne Frances Eisenberg
Council:
Kevin B. Anderson
Matteo Bortolini
Anthony J. Blasi
Student Rep: Kristin Haltinner
2010-2011
Chair: Gary Alan Fine
Chair-Elect: George Ritzer
Sect/Treas: Anne Eisenberg
Council:
Kevin Anderson
Matteo Bortolini
Anthony Blasi
Kay Broschart
Vera Zolberg
Marcus Hunter
Student Rep: Kristin Haltinner
2009-2010
Chair: Craig Calhoun
Chair-Elect: Gary Alan Fine
Sect/Treas: Anne Eisenberg
Council:
Kevin Anderson
Matteo Bortolini
Anthony Blasi
Kay Broschart
Richard Swedberg
Student Reps:
Michelle Christian
Kristin Haltinner
2008-2009
Chair: Charles Camic
Chair-Elect: Craig Calhoun
Sect/Treas: Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur
Council:
Anthony Blasi
Kay Broschart
Richard Swedberg
Silvia Pedraza
Alford A. Young Jr.
Student Rep: Michelle Christian
2007-2008
Chair: Jennifer Platt
Chair-Elect: Charles Camic
Sect/Treas: Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur
Council:
Richard Swedberg
Uta Gerhardt
Betsy Lucal
Silvia Pedraza
Alford A. Young Jr.
Student Rep: None
2006-2007
Chair: Eleanor Townsley
Chair-Elect: Jennifer Platt
Sect/Treas: Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur
Council:
Lawrence T. Nichols
Jack Nusan Porter
Uta Gerhardt
Betsy Lucal
Silvia Pedraza
Alford A. Young Jr.
Student Rep: None
2005-2006
Chair: Edward A. Tirakian
Chair-Elect: Eleanor Townsley
Sect/Treas: Jill M. Niebrugge-Brantley
Council:
Donald Cunnigen
Doris Wilkinson
Lawrence T. Nichols
Jack Nusan Porter
Uta Gerhardt
Betsy Lucal
Student Rep: Yolanda Yvette Johnson
2004-2005
Chair:Susan Hoecker-Drysdale
Chair-Elect: Edward A. Tirakian
Sect/Treas: Jill M. Niebrugge-Brantley
Council:
Robert Antonio
Edward A. Tiryakian
Donald Cunnigen
Doris Wilkinson
Lawrence T. Nichols
Jack Nusan Porter
Student Rep: Yolanda Yvette Johnson
2003-2004
Chair: Patricia Madoo Lengermann
Chair-Elect: Susan Hoecker-Drysdale
Sect/Treas: Jill M. Niebrugge-Brantley
Council:
Kay Richards Broschart
Larry T. Reynolds
Robert Antonio
Edward A. Tiryakian
Donald Cunnigen
Doris Wilkinson
Student Rep: Connie D. Frey
2002-2003
Chair: Mike F. Keen
Chair-Elect: Patrician Madoo Lengermann
Sect/Treas: Kathleen Slobin
Council:
Mary Jo Deegan
Susan Hoecker-Drysdale
Kay Richards Broschart
Larry T. Reynolds
Robert Antonio
Edward A. Tiryakian
Student Rep: Connie D. Fray
2001-2002
Chair: Michael R. Hill
Chair-Elect: Mike F. Keen
Sect/Treas: Kathleen Slobin
Council:
Edward A. Tiryakian
Terry Nichols Clark
Mary Jo Deegan
Susan Hoecker-Drysdale
Kay Richards Broschart
Larry T. Reynolds
Student Rep: Robert D. Woodberry
2000-2001
Chair: Helena Znaniecki Lopata
Chair-Elect: Michael R. Hill
Sect/Treas: Kathleen Slobin
Council:
Eleanor Townsley
Brenda A. Hoke
Edward A. Tiryakian
Mary Jo Deegan
Susan Hoecker-Drysdale
Student Rep: Robert D. Woodberry
***Became a full section in Fall 1999
1997-1999
Section- in-Formation
Acting Chairs:
Jill Niebrugge Brantley
Patricia Madoo Lengermann
