Durkheim's Response to Feminism: Prescriptions for Women

There is a striking parallel between Durkheim's assessment of feminism and his assessment of socialism.1 For Durkheim feminism, like socialism, is essentially "an unconscious movement." Like socialism, feminism is a nonscientific, misguided perception of conditions which are nonetheless both real and problematic. Like socialism, feminism misinterprets actual social problems and therefore suggests radical (i.e., unrealistic and destructive) pseudosolutions. For example, feminism advocates legalized divorce, "the most drastic and revolutionary solution" to women's problems (Durkheim 1906, p. 240).2 Like socialism, feminism is based on a false, ideological understanding of society, one which entails the misrecognition of social structures as both fatally flawed and malleable and the misrecognition of their differential effects on various social