Women and Time: The Historical Sociology of the Women Pioneers of Social Thought - 19th and 20th Centuries

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, authors like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Tocqueville understood that their research problems required historical investigation. By addressing themes such as capitalism, revolutions, industrialization, religions, democracy, among others, they mobilized the variable of time for the production of theories or empirical investigations. During this same period, various women theorized about the “woman question” from a simultaneously historical and sociological perspective, developing critiques and macro-sociological theories. Throughout the 20th century, sociology became more focused on the present, producing markedly ahistorical and non-comparative research. However, in the mid-1970s, historical sociology re-emerged through the works of authors like Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Barrington Moore, Reinhard Bendix, Michael Mann, and others. Nevertheless, in this revival of history by sociology, the pioneering efforts of women to produce a historical sociology of the relations between men and women were forgotten. Despite some initiatives by Françoise Delmotte, Julia Adams, Mourina Charrad, Julia O’Connor, Theda Skocpol, and others, the topic remains under-theorized in the field of historical sociology. This work recovers the models of analysis and historical interpretation of gender relations present in five pioneering female social scientists from different times and geographies: Olive Schreiner (South Africa, 1855-1920), Pandita Ramabai (India, 1858-1922), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (United States, 1860-1935), Marianne Weber (Germany, 1870-1954), and Alexandra Kollontai (Russia, 1872-1952). Their writings offer original and innovative proposals, such as comparativism, the focus on path dependency, the invention of traditions, and the long duration. What differentiates them, in this sense, from a significant part of contemporary sociological literature on women is the historical imagination: gender relations are treated as dynamic images, processes, trajectories, and crucial cases of social change.