and asserts “no age was left entirely without a witness of the equality of the
sexes in function, duty, and hope.” She also calls for an end to sexual stereo-
typing and the sexual double standard.
Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) was the most important African
American intellectual of the nineteenth century. He lived 20 years as a slave
and nearly 9 as a fugitive slave, and then achieved international fame as an
abolitionist, editor, orator, and the author of three autobiographies. These
gave a look into the world of oppression, resistance, and subterfuge within
which the slaves lived.
Sociologically, Douglass’s work stands as an impassioned testament to
the cruelty and illogic of slavery, claiming that allhuman beings were equally
capable of being full individuals. His work also reveals much about the psy-
chological world of slaves: its sheer terror but also its complexities. Its por-
traits of slave owners range from parody to denunciation and, in one case,
even respect, and all serve Douglass’s principal theme: that slaveholding,
no less than the slave’s own condition, is learned behavior and presumably
can be unlearned.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the most articulate, original, and widely read
spokesman for the civil rights of black people for a period of over 30 years. A social
scientist, political militant, essayist, and poet, he wrote nineteen books and hundreds
of articles, edited four periodicals, and was a founder of the NAACP and
the Pan-African movement. His work forms a bridge between the nine-
teenth century and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Today he is
recognized as one of the greatest sociologists in our history, and the Amer-
ican Sociological Association recently voted to name the annual award
for the most influential book after him.
Du Bois believed that race was the defining feature of American
society, that, as he put it, “the problem of the twentieth century was the
problem of the color line,” and that, therefore, the most significant con-
tribution he could make toward achieving racial justice would be a series
of scientific studies of the Negro. In 1899, he published The Philadelphia
Negro, the first study ever of Black people in the United States; he planned an ambi-
tious set of volumes that would together finally understand the experiences of the
American Negro (Du Bois, [1903] 1999).
Du Bois also explored the psychological effects of racism, a lingering inner con-
flict. “One feels ever his two-ness—an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” His work defines a “moment in his-
tory when the American Negro began to reject the idea of the world belonging to white
people.” Gradually disillusioned with White people’s resistance to integration,
Du Bois eventually called for an increase in power and especially economic
autonomy, the building of separate Black businesses and institutions.
Most readers who know Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) at all know
her for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1899), or for her novel, Herland
(1915). But sociologists know her for her groundbreaking Women and Economics
(1898), a book in which she explores the origin of women’s subordination and
its function in evolution. Woman makes a living by marriage, not by the work
she does, and so man becomes her economic environment. As a consequence
her female qualities dominate her human ones, because it is the female traits
through which she earns her living. Women are raised to market their feeble-
ness, their docility, and so on, and these qualities are then called “feminine.”
Gilman was one of the first to see the need for innovations in child rearing and
home maintenance that would ease the burdens of working women. She envisaged22 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?JW. E. B. Du Bois identified
racism as the most pressing
social problem in America—
and the world.
W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African
American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard
University (1895). It was, at the time, only
the fifth Ph.D. ever awarded to an African
American in the United States.Didyouknow
?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
argued that defining women
solely by their reproductive
role is harmful to women—as
well as to men, children, and
society. n