Dorothy E. Smith

Smith died of complications of a fall at her home in Vancouver on 3 June 2022, at the age of 95.

This lecture was hosted at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health on November 5, 2018.

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.

In recognition of her contributions in the "transformation of sociology", and for extending the boundaries of "feminist standpoint theory" to "include race, class, and gender", Smith received numerous awards from the American Sociological Association, including the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993). In recognition of her scholarship, she also received two awards from the Canadian Sociological Association and the Canadian Anthropological Association; the Outstanding Contribution Award (1990) and the John Porter Award for her book The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1990). In 2019 she was named as a member of the Order of Canada.

Smith wrote chapters two and three of The Everyday World as a Problematic: A Feminist Sociology between 1977 and 1981. Her concept of the line of fault is the notion of recognizing the male biases as a society and being conscious from a woman's perspective and noticing the inequality between male and female. In Toronto, while teaching at Ontario Institute of Studies, Smith published her paper about everyday lives as a woman, and the sociology behind the everyday housewife and mother.

Smith’s own identity as a Marxist-feminist developed during the 1970s, when her life history and the on going women’s movement merged to contribute to her life and sociological practices. The Vancouver Women’s Movement from 1968-1977 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. Through watching and learning about her familial history and how each of the three women previously mentioned addressed feminism and the inequality of women through their roles as women Smith transformed these actions 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.

Following the divorce, Smith was lacking in day care and family support while trying to raise her two children alone and as a result 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 she 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.

It was during her time as a graduate student in the 1960s that Smith developed her notion of standpoint, shaping Harding's theory. During this time, Smith recognized that she herself was experiencing "two subjectivities, home and university", and that these two worlds could not be blended. In recognition of her own standpoint, Smith shed light on the fact that sociology was lacking in the acknowledgment of standpoint. At this point, the methods and theories of sociology had been formed upon and built in a male-dominated social world, unintentionally ignoring the women's world of sexual reproduction, children, and household affairs. Women's duties are seen as natural parts of society, rather than as an addition to culture. Smith believed that asking questions from a female's perspective could provide insight into social institutions. Smith determined that for minority groups, the constant separation between the world as they experience it versus continually having to adapt to the view of the dominant group creates oppression, which can lead to members of the marginalized group feeling alienated from their "true" selves.

Smith did her undergraduate work 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.

Dorothy Edith Smith CM (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, including women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies, as well as in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. Smith 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 also had 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.