In this collection of essays, sociologist Dorothy E. Smith develops a method for analyzing how women (and men) view contemporary society from specific gendered points of view.

The book begins by examining the foundations of institutional ethnography in women's movements, differentiating it from other related sociologies; the second part offers an ontology of the social; and the third illustrates this ontology ...

So argues Dorothy E. Smith in this provocative study of her own discipline and its relationship to women's lives.

Texts, Facts and Femininity is a collection of essays which illustrate the full range of work by this leading feminist scholar on social relations as texts. It includes Smith's famous essay K is mentally ill.

In a revelatory chapter on the biographer Quentin Bell's account of Virginia Woolf's suicide, the author demonstrates how the text implicates the reader in the objectification of Woolf's "psychiatric problems.

A collection of essays based on Smith's unique rebel sociology. Smith turns wit and common sense on the prevailing discourses of sociology, political economy, and popular culture to inquire directly into the actualities of peoples' lives.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The book introduces the concepts – Discourse, Work, Text – that institutional ethnographers have found to be key ideas used to organize what they learn from the study of people’s experience.

Starting from her experience of the rejection of feminism by the Marxists, Smith attempts, through an analysis of the division between women and men in the working class, to establish a basis for feminism in Marxism--a basis which is ...