Standpoint feminism

Standpoint feminism is a theory that feminist social science should be practiced from the standpoint of women or particular groups of women, as some scholars (e.g. Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Smith) say that they are better equipped to understand some aspects of the world. A feminist or women's standpoint epistemology proposes to make women's experiences the point of departure, in addition to, and sometimes instead of men's.

Dorothy Smith, teaching at University of California at Berkeley when the women's movement was in its early stages, looked at the experience of female academics and began to ask about life stories of these women. As a feminist inspired by Karl Marx, Smith turned her attention to the development of "a sociology for women". She founded feminist standpoint theory which looked at the social world from the perspectives of women in their everyday worlds and the ways in which women socially construct their worlds. As theorized by Nancy Hartsock in 1983, standpoint feminism is founded in Marxist ideology. Hartsock argued that a feminist standpoint could be built out of Marx's understanding of experience and used to criticize patriarchal theories. Hence, a feminist standpoint is essential to examining the systemic oppressions in a society that standpoint feminists say devalues women's knowledge. Standpoint feminism makes the case that because women's lives and roles in almost all societies are significantly different from men's; women hold a different type of knowledge. Their location as a subordinated group allows women to see and understand the world in ways that are different and challenging to the existing male-biased conventional wisdom.

Standpoint feminism unites several feminist epistemologies. Standpoint feminist theorists attempt to criticize dominant conventional epistemologies in the social and natural sciences, as well as defend the coherence of feminist knowledge.

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