Jessie Taft: Biography Of This Reference Of Symbolic Interactionism

Jessie Taft (1882-1960) was a philosopher and sociologist who pioneered symbolic interactionism , the women’s movement and the discipline of Social Work. However, these contributions are frequently dismissed as she is best known for having made important translations of the works of the psychoanalysts Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud.

Furthermore, Taft belongs to a generation of female scientists who faced multiple forms of professional exclusion and segregation, among other things as a consequence of the strong rejection of the assimilation of feminine values ​​in the public sphere, reserved exclusively for men.

She was also one of the women who made up the Chicago Women’s School and addressed the rise of the women’s movement from the perspective of social consciousness, placing emphasis on the psychological conflicts that women scientists of the time were going through.

In this article we will follow the work carried out by García Dauder (2004; 2009) to approach the life and work of Jessie Taft through a brief biography paying attention to both their theoretical contributions and the social context in which they were developed.

Biography of Jessie Taft: a pioneer of Social Work

Jessie Taft was born on January 24, 1882 in Iowa, United States. She was the eldest of three sisters, daughters of a businessman and a mother who was a housewife. After having studied high school at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa; She studied higher education at the University of Chicago.

In the latter he trained with George Mead, a sociologist known for having laid the foundations of symbolic interactionism and who participated as his thesis director. In addition He was trained in the pragmatist tradition of the Chicago School

In the same context, Taft met Virginia Robinson, a woman with whom he adopted two children and who was his life partner for more than 40 years. Among the many subversive phrases she contributed, Jessie Taft said that in America, where business riots above culture, it was not unusual to find the single woman seeking company and refuge in another woman with whom to build bonds of similar criteria and values. , difficult to find in a husband (Taft, 1916).

On the other hand, the doctoral thesis work carried out by Jessie Taft in the same context was called “The Women’s Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.” , where problematized the tensions between the private and the public paying attention to how political, economic and social transformations had shaped the “self”, especially in relation to the conflicts that women face at home and at work.

Hull House and the beginnings of Social Work

Founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gate Starr, the Hull House social center became a meeting space for many women (several reformers and social scientists who came from the University of Chicago). They soon generated an important network of contacts and collaboration.

This network resulted a qualitative and quantitative research work that is recognized as the Chicago Women’s Sociological School and that, among other things, had an important impact not only on North American sociology, but also on the social and legislative situation, for example on the issue of social and racial inequalities, immigration, health, child labor and labor exploitation.

At the same time, this was a context of important social transformations generated by industrial capitalism. The women of the Chicago School, along with some already recognized sociologists, such as Mead, Dewey, William Isaac Thomas, and others, questioned the strong androcentrism that marked the discipline and recognized the need to expand both the participation of women and the presence of feminine values ​​in public spaces.

Meanwhile, and to the opposite side, management and access to higher education was marked by both sexual and disciplinary segregation which means that there were “junior” schools intended only for women, whose objective was to stop the growing feminization of the university student body.

Likewise, and in the disciplinary field, sociology ceded part of its contents to a new school, which also received a good part of the reform work and political content that the Chicago Women’s School had been developing. This school was “Social Work” And it was precisely in this context that Jessie Taft found herself displaced from sociology towards Social Work, and later she inaugurated a school known as “clinical sociology.”

Among other things, the above had as a consequence the displacement of feminine values ​​to activities related to the new and subsequently undervalued discipline, Social Work; and the masculine values ​​towards the academic institution and the sociology that was developed there. As a result, Jessie Taft and many other female scientists found themselves in serious difficulties in accessing positions as teachers or researchers at different universities.

Social work and clinical sociology

In the context of a reform school for women in New York State, Jessie Taft remained critical of considering that these women had “mental deficiencies,” and maintained that there could be rehabilitation focused not so much on themselves, but on modify your environment and living conditions For example, ensuring that they have sufficient economic resources or adequate education.

These were the beginnings of “clinical sociology”, which was later transferred to the social assistance of children with different difficulties and restructuring adoption practices

After facing various difficulties in obtaining employment as both an auditor and a researcher in sociology, Jessie Taft joined the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, which among other things made her a leading woman in that discipline.

Symbolic interactionism and the women’s movement

Jessie Taft argued that the women’s movement (which was sparked by an increasingly evident malaise), had its roots in a psychic conflict of this group They had desires for emancipation that they could not put into action because social conditions did not allow them.

He importantly emphasized the need to make changes in a “social consciousness” that promoted domestic individualism around a depersonalized industrial order

In analyzing the social and economic transformations of industrial societies, Taft was careful to detail how gender made the lived experiences different for men and women. This is how she maintained that reforms could be carried out only when each person’s “self” became aware of the subjectivities and social relations that were being built in industrial societies.