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In general, disfranchised Americans are becoming increasingly aware of their social restrictions and limitations on opportunities. As a result there are now minority groups who have identified their shared problems only within the last twenty years,and these groups are rapidly changing the nature of minority relations. In particular, people with newly defined multiple minority statuses are beginning to articulate their specialized interests and establish new relations with both the dominant majority and the minority groups to which they belong. Physically disabled women are one such group. As women and as disabled people, they are members of two separate minority groups. Their relations to disabled males and able-bodied females shed light on the theoretical complexities of this recent social phenomenon. They also reveal how understanding their specific problems can lead to a redefinition of how to generate a more liberated and liberating society.

Often known as cynical, contentious, and exhibiting a complicated approach to objectivity, Erving Goffman could also be generous, civil, insightful, open to feminist ideas, and surprisingly political. A 1977 collective feminist writing project led to my conversation with Goffman in 1980 about his ideas on gender, sexism, and feminism. A summary of that conversation is presented, together with my formal reflections then (1980) and now (2013). While documenting the sociological practice of an earlier era, this paper concludes that feminist sociological theory must move beyond its locations in the past and the present into the liberating knowledge of the future.

Annie Marion MacLean was a major Chicago sociologist and methodologist. She was profoundly influenced by the gendered division of labor in sociology during her era. MacLean combined her work with the men and women of the early Chicago school of sociology and the women of Hull-House, an early social settlement. As a feminist pragmatist, MacLean was both a theorist and practitioner who used qualitative and quantitative methods. She set precedents in the Chicago school of ethnography, participant observation, and critical methodology. MacLean, however, was not the “mother” of ethnography. Harriet Martineau holds a far stronger claim to be a founding contributor to the origin and development of ethnographic methodologies in the social sciences.

Textbooks increasingly reflect changes in our sociological stock of knowledge about the founders of the discipline. Richard Hamilton is unaware of this research and its documentation of the flaws in earlier accounts of the history of the profession. In an effort to expand his disciplinary understanding, I briefly review the extensive scholarship on the sociology of Harriet Martineau which has been published over the last quarter of a century.

Many early sociologists, particularly in Chicago and both inside and outside of the academy, focused on the relation between human society, social justice, and the natural environment. Caroline Bartlett Crane (1858-1935), applied sociologist and noted Progressive Era reformer, was an eminent figure in this work. She linked healthy individuals and social justice to a robust and balanced environment. In addition to her national leadership in municipal sanitation, Crane labored to protect the natural environment from the rapid degradation caused by increased industrialization, population growth, and changes in land use and exploitation during the Progressive Era. As one of the forerunners of the ecology and ecofeminism movements of today, Crane is part of women’s hidden heritage and her life exemplifies the theory of “ecofeminist pragmatism.”

The history of women in sociology is explored here through the correspondence written by Sophonisba P. Breckinridge to Marion Talbot in the summer of 1936. Their loving letters reveal the ideas and practices of feminist pragmatism and the female world of love and ritual located in Chicago in the twentieth century. This world of professional women flourished around the social settlement Hull House and the University of Chicago during the founding years of sociology. Their lives and social thought challenge our understanding of the emergence of sociology at the University of Chicago, and their ideas remain a rich resource for analyzing society today.

Physical disability functions in modern society as a status betwixt and between everyday assumptions about "normal" physical strength and functioning. This creates a situation of permanent liminality, or a failure to be incorporated, in hypermodern society especially in the economic marketplace and architectural construction of everyday life and movement. Turning to more traditional societies to interpret liminality and rites of passage helps contemporary people with disabilities interpret their social status and its problematic, powerful construction.

The sociology dissertation process is a liminaljourney, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world ofpower, authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoreticalperspectives ofVictor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the "liminal self' who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unreflexively adopt "technicalformulas" for success and thus deny the possibility ofliminal transformation.

G. H. Mead, the eminent social psychologist, had an active civic life. His work in social reform was directly influenced by and derived from his philosophy of man and society. This facet of his life is relatively unexamined today, although most of his publications during his lifetime were concerned with the application of science for the good of the community.

Football is a major sport in the United States because of its dramatic enact ment of social values of violence, bureaucracy, sexism, and commercialism. The spec tators of this game are particularly enthralled in the state of Nebraska. Here, a state with a large geographical area and a small, predominanty rural population, the fans have elevated Nebraska fottball to a significant ritual and source for iden tification. As avid supporters they dress in the team colors, red and white; partici pate in pre- and postgame celebrations; travel great distances; and emotionally express their loyalty and dedication to "Big Red.''By combining the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman with Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas, we have a theoretical framework for analyzing and evaluating cultural dramas in modern society. Nebraska football as a dramatic ritual, then, reveals its creative and destructive roots in American society.

An important aspect of W.E.B. Du Bois’s professional socialization is documented; specifically, Du Bois’s professional interactions with women sociologists who practiced in social settlements, notably Jane Addams, Katherine Bement Davis, Florence Kelley, and Isabel Eaton. These women, and their research in Hull-House Maps and Papers, were facilitators and role models for Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, in which Isabel Eaton was a significant collaborator. Addams, Kelley, and their friends joined Du Bois to cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an exemplar of applied sociology and Du Bois’s shared interests with the early Hull-House women. These early sociologists changed American thought and social policy and today provide a rich heritage for contemporary professionals in sociology.

(1978). Comment on Perinbanayagam's “The Significance of ‘Others’ in the Thought of Alfred Schutz, G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley”. The Sociological Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 141-145.

The lives and ideas of early female sociologists are rarely documented in textbooks, classrooms, or historical accounts of the profession. This patriarchal legacy is rejected by an increasing number of contemporary sociologists. These more egalitarian professionals soon discover, however, that they have few resources in their sociological stock of knowledge to guide them in this new enterprise. This paper is a guide for teachers in a variety of courses who want to start filling these deep gaps in knowledge. Specific guidance is provided on reference works, autobiographies, and biographies that provide information on 10 early female founders of American sociology. Given these references and our capacity to innovate and recreate our social world, we have a sufficient stock of knowledge to change our sociological practice in the classroom.

From 1915 to 1935 the inventive community of social scientists at the University of Chicago pioneered empirical research and a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, shaping the future of twentieth-century American sociology and related fields as well. Martin Bulmer's history of the Chicago school of sociology describes the university's role in creating research-based and publication-oriented graduate schools of social science. "This is an important piece of work on the history of sociology, but it is more than merely historical: Martin Bulmer's undertaking is also to explain why historical events occurred as they did, using potentially general theoretical ideas. He has studied what he sees as the period, from 1915 to 1935, when the 'Chicago School' most flourished, and defines the nature of its achievements and what made them possible . . . It is likely to become the indispensible historical source for its topic." Jennifer Platt, "Sociology ""