PROGRESSIVE WOMEN IN SOCIOLOGY TODAY

BARBARA H. CHASIN

the Honorable Life of a Progressive Sociologist

I grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 50s. My household was an anti-religious, ethnically Jewish one. My parents were cynical toward the government but were not overtly political, although my mother was proud of having done some depression-era union organizing. During my early adolescence, people were paying attention to the horrors of German fascism and I found myself wondering why the Nazis had been able to become powerful and what people could have done to prevent this. Thinking about these issues eventually became relevant to the kind of sociologist I became.

I became a sociologist by default. No other major seemed appropriate to me as an undergraduate at City College in the late 1950s. Although I had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1957, I had no aptitude for the natural sciences and was terrified by math. But somewhere I developed a hunger for rationality, for trying to understand why people behave as they do. Influenced by Anthony Leeds, who was teaching at City College then, I became fascinated by anthropology, but assumed (Margaret Mead and company to the contrary) that as a woman I would get married: how could I leave my husband to study exotic peoples? Sociology seemed to similar to anthropology and I ended up a sociology major.

In 1961 I started graduate work at the University of Iowa where I had received a teaching assistantship. The Sociology Department there stressed quantitative studies while the dominant theoretical orientation was symbolic interactionism. I loved teaching undergraduates but felt alienated from my courses. I chose to do my dissertation on attitudes toward death because that seemed interesting to me and because the Sociology Department encouraged its graduate students to do survey research. It did not occur to me then that scholarship should be directed towards creating a more humane and just society, and not just be undertaken because it was "interesting."

In the background of my life was the beginning of the Vietnam War. I had never been politically involved. The Civil Rights Movement (I am now ashamed to say) seemed far away, and while I supported its aims, I took no steps in the efforts to fight racism. But as news of the war came trickling through the media, I felt my country was acting like Nazi Germany and I felt compelled to resist the war in some way.

At about the time I became aware of the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, a Marxist anthropologist named Donald Barnett came to the University. He had written a book called Mau-Mau from Within, a sympathetic account of the guerrilla movement that led the anti-colonial struggle against British domination in Kenya. An outspoken anti-war activist, he led a protest against the war at the local post office, our only federal building, with a very small number of participants, including myself.

Barnett organized a Marxist study group which I joined. We read classical and contemporary Marxist works, the (now defunct) Guardian newspaper, Monthly Review, and other left periodicals. A whole new way of understanding social reality opened up for me. I began eagerly reading books on the history of the cold war, started learning about the workings of capitalism and the importance of class analysis, and also learned that intellectuals had a social responsibility. Somewhere along the way I read, and was influenced by, the writings of C. Wright Mills. Our study group put out a newsletter, wrote leaflets, and helped organized teach-ins and other anti-war actions. The activism strengthened my writing and speaking skills and gave me greater confidence about arguing a political position. It also showed me concretely the importance of working with other people and the joy and transformation of one's self that can come with that. During this time, I became committed to teaching sociology in a way that would, I hoped, give students the tools to critically understand their own society.

My first teaching job was in 1966 at the Detroit Institute of Technology where I found students interested in a critical perspective and eager to debate the issues I was raising. The administration, however, did not like my politics, told me so explicitly, and fired me. I found out later through the Freedom of Information Act that one of my students was an FBI informer who gave detailed information about my classroom discussions to the FBI. The file, with other FOIA documents, has become a useful illustration in some of my courses.

In my last weeks in Detroit, in 1967, I witnessed the uprising in that city's ghetto, saw the tanks rumble down the streets, the helicopters fly overhead and TV coverage of the National Guard shooting unarmed people as they stood by their windows. My intellectual understandings were strengthened by being a witness to this racist repressive violence.

I next spent a year teaching in Nova Scotia, then in 1968 got a job at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. I was having difficulty finding sociology texts that presented the radical perspective I used in my teaching so I, and my then husband, began writing our own book, Power and Ideology: A Marxist Approach to Political Sociology, published in 1974 and one of the first contemporary sociology texts presenting Marxism as a valid and useful theoretical perspective.

U-Mass was an exciting place to be and there was lots of political activity in Boston and neighboring Cambridge. The students, many from working-class backgrounds, some returning veterans, were eager to read, to discuss, to debate and to act. Besides teaching and participating in anti-war demonstrations, and feminist marches, I was involved in a peaceful rent-control demonstration in Cambridge, Mass. where a number of us were arrested.

Once again, and in a more personal way, I experienced the U.S. justice system being used to deny people rights as we were found guilty of disturbing the peace and unlawful assembly. All the men, but none of the women, were charged with assault and battery, for allegedly attacking the police. The men spent 6 months in the Cambridge city jail. Watching the police lie about what had happened and seeing the judge believe them furthered my education.

After a year of teaching at U-Mass, I was told I would not be rehired once my second year was finished. The reasons seemed to me, a number of students, and some of my colleagues, political. The students sat in for two weeks in the Chancellor's office demanding my re-instatement. Shortly after this, in May 1970, National Guard troops killed 4 students at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi. Colleges and Universities around the country, including U-Mass, went on strike.

During the strike, U-Mass students created alternative courses and some of then (including several sociology majors) researched the political economy of the University of Massachusetts, producing a booklet which analyzed the economic and political linkages of the U-Mass Board of Trustees. They were making the connections it had taken me years to discover.

The sit-in resulted in a public hearing into my firing. The administration decided I had been unfairly fired, but not for political reasons, and offered me a third and terminal year. By then I had accepted a job at Montclair State College (now University) in New Jersey. I have been teaching there since 1970, still infusing my courses with the themes of my earlier teaching. I met a radical anthropologist there, Richard Franke. He had done an important critique of the green revolution in Indonesia and helped deepen my understanding of the Third World.

We collaborated on a study of the 1968-1973 famine in West Africa. The result was Seeds of Famine: Ecological Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the West African Sahel (1980) which emphasized the colonial roots of the disaster and critiqued the aid programs. The famine to us was a form of structural violence and we became interested in how violence could be better understood. We created a course on the Anthropology and Sociology of Conflict and Violence. I continue to teach the sociology of violence and I recently wrote a text, Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism (Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus, 1998) whose title summarizes my approach to this subject. I am currently writing a book tentatively titled Perspectives on Violence where I plan to compare sociological, psychological and anthropological approaches.

I continue to be a political activist. I feel a need for my personal life to be at least somewhat consistent with my sociological ideas about the causes of and solutions for social problems. Lately, in our part of New Jersey, progressive forces have protested he bombings in Yugoslavia and police racism. I am also active in our local branch of the American Federation of Teachers.

Besides teaching the sociology of conflict and violence, I teach courses on development, stratification, theory, and racial/ethnic relations. I still feel enthusiastic about helping students develop a sociological imagination but their levels of pessimism and cynicism seem higher than 30 years ago, when I began my teaching career. That is worrisome. Nevertheless, it is also exciting and rewarding to be teaching more ethnically diverse students, many of whom already have an intuitive understanding of the links between the economic and the political. They are also aware of issues that I barely thought of in the late 1960s: the environment, reproductive rights, gay rights, and the need for universal health care. I continue to hope that sociology will help them better understand what needs to be done to solve these and other social problems.

Barbara H. Chasin, Department of Sociology, Montclair State University

Upper Montclair, NJ 07043

973 655-7224

e-mail: chasinb@mail.montclair.edu

T. R. Young, Director
The Red Feather Institute

WINTER, 1999