By Peter Kaufman

There is a common theme that often plays
out in television sitcoms and movies that goes something like this: A wife and
husband are trying to accomplish a task—maybe trying to put something together
or convey a life-lesson to their children. The husband takes first crack at the
task and fails miserably. Next, the wife tries and is eventually or even immediately
successful. Despite her prowess in accomplishing the task the husband finds a
way to butt in and somehow take all of the credit. The woman often gives a
knowing look to her husband (or the audience) and laughs it off (along with the
audience) as typical male behavior.

This scenario is not only played out
in fictional settings; it also happens in real life. In fact, it even happens
in the world of sociology—particularly in the construction of sociological
knowledge. Let me offer a few examples.

Many
students of sociology have heard of the concept of double consciousness—the
notion that
African Americans feel torn between two identities: that of being
Black and that of being American. This term is attributed to W.E.B. DuBois, one of early
African-American sociologists who coined this concept in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring
one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his twoness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Although
DuBois is rightly given credit for coming up with the name of this social phenomena it may not be quite accurate for us
to credit him with being the first to identify this social-psychological
process. Souls of Black Folk was
published in 1903. Nearly ten years earlier in 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, a
turn-of-the century African-American scholar, wrote the following words in her
book, A Voice from the South:

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique
position in this country. . . She is confronted by both a woman question and a
race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.

Cooper
does not use the phrase “double consciousness,” but there is no doubt that she
is referring to the same sense of twoness, and inequality, that DuBois
articulated a decade later. In fact, we can even go back nearly fifty years
earlier to Sojourner
Truth, the escaped slave who became an abolitionist and women’s rights
activist, who also conveyed these themes. In her famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
delivered to the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 28-29 1851, Sojourner
Truth bemoaned the inequality, or twoness, facing Black women:

Well, children,
where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think
that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking
about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this
here talking about?

That man over
there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over
ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into
carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a
woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much
and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And
ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to
slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
And ain't I a woman?

The cases of W.E.B. DuBois, Anna
Julia Cooper and Sojourner Truth are interesting because the construction of
knowledge and credit were presumably established after the individuals were
deceased. But as noted in the fictional vignette I described in the beginning
of this post, often times women “allow” men to receive all of the credit. Such
consent—acquiescence is probably a more appropriate word—seems to be the case
with two other sociological examples.

Most
students of sociology know C. Wright Mills as the
author of The Sociological Imagination.
Mills also wrote numerous other books that helped to establish his reputation
as one of the leading critical sociologists of the mid-twentieth century. Mills’s
books include The
Power Elite—his classic critique
that showed how power is centralized in the hands of political, military, and
economic elites—and White
Collar, a groundbreaking analysis
of the middle class. Mills is the sole author of record for these books but as
revealed in an
interview with his daughter Kathryn Mills, these books (as well as a third,
New Men of Power) seem to have had a silent
co-collaborator in his second wife Ruth Harper:

It [The Power Elite] is the book that my
mother, Ruth Harper Mills, and my father worked on together from the time my
father first got the idea of doing the book until it was completed. As a math
major, my mother did the statistics for the book, and my father referred to her
as his “chief researcher and editorial advisor” in the book’s acknowledgment
pages. [. . .] My mother ended up working on White Collar for three years, but
unlike The Power
Elite, White
Collar had been under construction by my father a long time before
he met my mother.

The next sociological example
concerns the well-known idea in sociology called the Thomas Theorem. This
idea suggests that if people define situations as real they are real in their
consequences. The concept is generally attributed to W.I. Thomas even though
the book in which this concept appears, The
Child in America, was co-authored with his wife Dorothy. As the sociologist
Robert Merton discovered through his personal correspondence with Dorothy, W.I.
was responsible for the theory and analysis in this book and Dorothy’s
contribution were solely statistical. Consequently, Dorothy believed that it was
appropriate that the Thomas Theorem be associated solely with W.I.

Merton wrote extensively about this
particular example in an article titled “The Thomas
Theorem and the Matthew Effect.” The Mathew
Effect is named for a passage in the New Testament, Matthew 25:29, that suggests
that those who have more get more and those who have less will get theirs taken
away. Merton used this concept to explain the process in the social and natural
sciences whereby researchers who are well known will get more credit and fame than
their less known colleagues and collaborators. Not surprisingly, there are
countless examples of this phenomenon that are both contemporary and
historical. When a woman is one of the collaborators, this phenomenon is sometimes
referred to as the Matilda
Effect.

This issue of who gets credit and
recognition is really an issue of power. Whether it’s a man taking credit for a
woman’s idea, whites taking credit for the accomplishments of non-whites, or
the rich receiving praise for the efforts of the poor (as in the case of
architectural wonders—those who actually built the structure are invisible and
unknown), the question is really a matter of who has the ability and the
authority to define and construct reality. More often than not, it is those with
the social, economic, or political clout—a point that Marx
alluded to in The German Ideology when he
proclaimed: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas.”

Knowing this process occurs should
give us the impetus to speak up if it happens in our presence, reject it if we
watch it in the context of entertainment, or challenge it if it’s something we
are studying. Otherwise, our silence will be mistaken for consent and the
relationships of inequality will be perpetuated.