Search

The Woman Suffrage Movement experienced ideological changes so that earlier and later suffragists had different views. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert was one reformer who first criticized female socialization and the system of separate spheres. Later her views became more sentimental and she idealized the traditional role of women. (VM)

In his classic essay on the well-informed citizen, Alfred Schutz investigated the social distribution of knowledge from a phenomenological perspective. In the process, he offered a typology of the various relations between knowers and what they know. The expert possesses a limited form of knowledge that is clear and distinct because it is based on warranted assumptions rather than guesswork or loose suppositions. The well-informed citizen stands between these two types. Whereas Schutz's phenomenological approach illuminates the meaning of what it is to be well-informed, the analysis of citizens who are well-informed requires a more political approach that underscores the historical specificity of this role. Citizenship presumes the emergence of a polity in which a public sphere provides a forum for the debate and discussion of political questions. It also presumes some form of democratic representation that translates these debates and discussions into some meaningful form of influence in political decision making. In this essay, the author is primarily interested in two other phenomena that have equally strong connections to the rise of modernity: social movements and sociology itself.