Spring 2005

In the first section of essays the authors discuss how and why feminist scholars do research is grappled with in each selection. The authors/feminist scholars discuss the importance of research and methodology.

Sandra Harding asserts in her essay, "Is There a Feminist Method?" Harding argues that it is "difficult to define a distinct feminist method because method and methodology have been intertwined with each other and with epistemological issues."(2) Moreover, it is, she argues difficult and potentially dangerous to identify anything as a distinctive methodÐ'--her argument is that " it is not by looking at research methods that one will be able to identify distinctive features of the best feminist research methods." In other words it is dangerous to mystify feminist research because it locks researchers, students, scholars and critics into rules and ideas that don't necessarily encompass all facets of feminist scholarship and the efforts that are made to understand it.

The idea of there being a single "feminist method" assumes that there is a single thing, or several concrete things/ideas feminist scholars must be searching for. Harding's argument is supported by author's Greene, Khan in "Feminist scholarship and the social construction of women". Greene/Khan assertÐ'--that "feminist scholarship undertakes the dual task of deconstructing predominately male cultural paradigms and reconstructing a female perspective and experience in an effort to change the tradition that has silenced and marginalized usÐ'...feminist scholars work to expose and the collusion between ideology and cultural practices." (1) She asserts that there are two premises about gender, the first is, "the inequality of the sexes is neither a biological given nor a divine mandate, but a cultural construct," and the second is, "the male perspective has dominated fields of knowledge shaping their paradigms and methods." Here the authors are illustrating the constraints ideology and methodology place on feminist research and substantiating the claim that ideology and methodology are emblems of constraint in the feminist discipline because of their universal assumptions and dependence on the paradigm for the purposes of legitimizing their claims. The authors, Greene, Khan, Harding, and Cannon all deal with the issue of being tied down to methodology and method that would define feminist work, and solidify its direction while at the same time not allowing it to be fluid enough to evolve as a legitimate academic discipline.

As it the issue is raised in "Race and Class Bias in Qualitative Research on Women" that it is far more difficult to do a comprehensive study of all women because poor women and women of color are almost always over-looked in research projects because of the

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