The first difficulty is that how sociology isthought-its methods, conceptual schemes andtheories-has been based on and built up within,the male social universe (even when women haveparticipated in its doing). It has taken for grantednot just that scheme of relevances as a n itemizedinventory of issues or subject matters (industrialsociology, political sociology, social stratifica-tion, etc.) but the fundamental social and politicalstructures under which these become relevant andare ordered. There is a difficulty first then of adisjunction between how women find and experi-ence the world beginning (though not necessarilyending up) from their place and the concepts andtheoretical schemes available to think about it in.Thus in a graduate seminar last year, we discussedon one occasion the possibility of a women’ssociology and two graduate students told us thatin their view and their experience of functioningin experimental group situations, theories of theemergence of leadership in small groups, etc. justdid not apply to what was happening as theyexperienced it. They could not find the correlatesof the theory in their experiences

The place of women then in relation to thismode of action is that where the work is done tocreate conditions which facilitate his occupationof the conceptual mode of consciousness. Themeeting of a man’s physical needs, the organiza-tion of his daily life, even the consistency ofexpressive background, are made maximally con-gruent with his commitment. A similar relationexists for women who work in and around theprofessional and managerial scene. They d othose things which give concrete form to theconceptual activities. They d o the clerical work,the computer programming, the interviewing forthe survey, the nursing, the secretarial work. A talmost every point women mediate for men therelation between the conceptual mode of actionand the actual concrete forms in which it is andmust be rcalized, and the actual material con-ditions upon which it depends.Marx’s concept of alienation is applicablehere in a modified form. The simplest formula-tion of alienation posits a relation between thework an individual does and an external orderwhich oppresses her, such that the harder sheworks the more she strengthens the order whichoppresses her. This is the situation of women inthis relation. The more successful women are inmediating the world of concrete particulars sothat men do not have to become engaged with(and therefore conscious of) that world as a con-dition to their abstract activities, the more com-plete man’s absorption in it, the more effectivethe authority of that world and the more totalwomen’s subservience to it. And also the morecomplete the dichotomy between the two worlds,and the estrangement between them.