ABSTRACT

During the last two decades, there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the writings of the radical twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, and one of the central issues in this wave of scholarship has been the Mills’ relationship to feminism and the place of sex and gender in his social theory. Contemporary scholars assert that Mills was largely ignorant about feminism or even hostile to it and that his social theory basically ignores issues of sex and gender. As this essay shows, the existing consensus is fundamentally mistaken. Mills’ social theory of sex and gender and his emerging critique of patriarchy were heavily influenced by the ‘silent feminists,’ Shira Tarrant's name for the leading women social scientists and philosophers of the 1930s and 40s. Though an analysis of Mills’ Character and Social Structure and White Collar, I show that Mills’ anti-essentialist conception of gender was inspired by the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead, sociologist Viola Klein, and psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Likewise, through an analysis of Mills’ review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, I show that not only is his critique of Beauvoir rooted in his readings of the silent feminists but also that Beauvoir’s influence on Mills’ thought can be traced through his most popular works, The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination.

摘要

在过去的二十年中，激进的20世纪社会学家C. Wright Mills的著作引起了跨学科兴趣的激增，而这一学术浪潮中的核心问题之一是Mills与女权主义和女性主义的关系。性别在他的社会理论中的位置。当代学者断言，米尔斯在很大程度上对女权主义一无所知，甚至对其持敌对态度，他的社会理论基本上忽略了性别问题。如本文所示，现有共识从根本上是错误的。米尔斯沉默的女权主义者对性别和他的新兴父权制的批判的社会理论都深受受影响‘’希拉·塔兰特的名字为龙头妇女的社会科学家和20世纪30年代和40年代的哲学家。虽然对米尔斯的分析性格，社会结构和白领，我证明了米尔斯的反本质主义性别观念是受人类学家玛格丽特·米德，社会学家维奥拉·克莱因和心理分析家凯伦·霍尼的工作启发的。同样，通过对米尔斯对西蒙娜·德·波伏娃的《第二性》的评论的分析，我表明，他对波伏娃的批评不仅源于他对沉默的女权主义者的解读，而且波伏娃对米尔斯思想的影响可以追溯到他的大部分经历。流行作品，《权力精英》和《社会学想像力》。