International Studies in Sociology of Education, Volume 14, Number 2, 2004

Feminist Sociology and Feminist

Knowledges: contributions to
higher education pedagogies and
professional practices in the
knowledge economy
MIRIAM E. DAVID
University of Keele, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article uses feminist methodologies of critical and personal

reflections to consider the contributions that feminist sociology and sociology of
education have made to developments in the pedagogies and practices of higher
education, particularly professional and postgraduate education. First, the
article reviews the contributions of women and feminists to developing feminist
theories and methodologies over the last three or four decades. It considers, in
particular, the ways in which these developments around the notions of
personal and political have become more complex as generations of women as
academics and students have entered the academy. These complexities are
linked to the wider social and economic transformations and especially
changing forms of liberalism, from social democracy, through economic
liberalism to neo-liberalism. These developments are spelled out briefly and
linked to changing forms of higher education. The second half of the article
concentrates on developments in higher education and the massification of
postgraduate and professional education under neo-liberalism. A case study of
the developments in doctoral and professional education is provided, with an
emphasis on how women have become engaged in these practices.
Consideration is also given to changing pedagogies and the practice of more
personal pedagogies in higher education and how this has developed with
respect to a professional doctorate in education. In conclusion, consideration is
given to the prospects for the future of these changing developments and the
contribution of feminist pedagogies and practices for the renewal of sociology
and the sociology of education and forms of knowledge within the academy.

Introduction
Using feminist methodologies of personal and critical reflections, I reflect on
the contributions that feminist sociology has made to the development of

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sociology and sociology of education in the academy, in terms of
‘knowledge’, theoretical and methodological issues. I will consider the extent
to which feminist sociological perspectives have become embedded in the
wider pedagogies and research practices of aspects of higher education, such
as policy sociology of education, critical and educational ethnographies, and
learning and teaching in the last decade of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first, and what the implications are. In particular,
how have the notions of personal development and reflective practice been
developed within academic studies of education, especially doctoral and
professional education, and how might they be developed in future
pedagogies and research practices?
I argue that the key transformations in the landscape of higher
education, over the last three decades, have been the contribution and
critiques of women and feminists as both academics and students (Leonard,
2001; Morley, 2003). The changing forms of social and economic liberalism
and neo-liberalism have had major implications for changes in families,
labour markets and the economy, in the context of changes in information
technology and global transformations (David, 2003a). These have led to
moves towards ‘a knowledge economy’, contested though these concepts are
(Peters, 2001), and one in which feminist theories and ‘knowledges’ play a
key part (Blackmore, 2002).
I will look at the ways in which these developments build upon the
increasing involvement of women as both students and academics within
higher education, and sociology and sociology of education in particular. I
will situate these changes in the expansion of higher education and the
changing balances between undergraduate and postgraduate education,
including especially the developments in postgraduate professional education
and doctoral studies.
Women are now a majority of undergraduate students and a substantial
proportion of all postgraduate, including doctoral students, across higher
education in the United Kingdom (UK) (Morley, 2003; Reay et al, 2004). In
the social and health sciences and humanities, women make up a significant
minority of academics, although they remain extremely rare in the top
echelons and in management in British universities (David & Woodward,
1998; Woodward & Ross, 2002; Morley, 2003). I will thus reflect upon how
these involvements relate to, and reflect, more global, economic, familial and
social transformations.
In particular, I will provide a case study of recent developments in
professional doctoral education in the context of the ‘massification’ of
postgraduate and doctoral studies and research training, and reflect upon the
development of a feminist approach to education in a professional doctorate
on gender and education management. Women as professional educators
were the main target group and they have actively engaged with feminist
practices and pedagogies as well as developing ‘feminist knowledge’. I
consider that feminist sociological ‘knowledge’ and pedagogical practice may

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have prefigured developments in doctoral education and research training

and may contribute to developing innovative practices in professional
doctorates in education.
From this I will draw some conclusions about the contributions of this
kind of feminist perspective for future directions in methodologies,
pedagogies and research practices of aspects of higher education, especially in
sociology and sociology of education. The importance of the richness and
diversity of feminist methodologies for higher education and postgraduate
professional education will be highlighted. More generally, the role of
feminist knowledge in the renewal of the sociology of education and its
contribution to developments in changing forms of higher education will also
be emphasized. The distinctions between aspects of feminist theories,
sociology and sociology of education, or even of higher education, will be
blurred, as I argue that the future in higher education is likely to be in such
deeply embedded methodologies, pedagogies and research practices, rather
than their distinctiveness.

Theoretical and Methodological Background: feminist sociology?

This article draws on the themes and feminist methodology of my recent
book, Personal and Political: feminisms, sociology and family lives (David,
2003a). The book was a personal reflection, in feminist fashion, of the
development of feminist theories and methodologies within academic
sociology, and especially policy sociology and sociology of education, drawing
on a range of international literature. I reviewed these developments from
their embryonic beginnings over three periods: ‘liberalism’ (social
democracy), economic liberalism and neo-liberalism, contested though these
notions may be.
I argue that the theoretical and methodological developments within
sociology as part of emergent social sciences and cultural studies are such
that the ‘boundaries’ or distinctions between sociology tout court, sociology of
education and policy sociology are now relatively porous and permeable.
What constitutes each subject or discipline is highly contested and dependent
upon changing theories and methodologies, among which feminist theories
were critical.
In particular, I am interested in the shifts in notions of ‘personal and
political’ from ‘second-wave’ feminist attempts to embed an innovative
approach to learning and teaching around the centrality of women’s
experience, to the ways in which, through transformations within the social
sciences and cultural studies, especially with post-structuralism, and
educational ethnographies, personal, subjective and qualitative accounts are
now entrenched within sociology and sociology of education. Whether these
perspectives can now be claimed as purely feminist is rather more
problematic.

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The Methodology of Critical, Feminist and Personal Reflections
The notion of critical and/or personal reflections has been gaining currency
over the last decade or so in the social sciences and cultural studies within the
global academy. These ideas emanate from several sources, but in particular
draw upon feminist concepts and methodologies, as they have been
developed within academic sociology (David, 2003a). They may also derive
from ideas about reflective practice as they have been considered within
educational theories, drawing upon Schon’s work (1987, 1991), notions of
psychology of personal construct theories (Denicolo & Pope, 1997, 2001),
and how these have contributed to ‘personal development’ as a method
within the social sciences and even beyond. More generally, they draw upon
what has been called the ‘social and cultural turn’ (Jones, 2003) or the
‘biographical turn’ within the social sciences (Chamberlayne et al, 2000).
These all entail a methodological focus on notions of the subject and
the self, known as ‘the project of the self’ (Rose, 1999), including biography
and autobiography (Stanley, 1992), rather than on traditional and social
scientific subject/object distinctions hitherto used. Giddens (1992) has also
emphasised how the self in relation to a more reflexive society and its
associated risks has become endemic to high or late modern societies.
These ideas have been highly contested even amongst feminist
sociologists (Oakley, 2000). Nevertheless, they have led to changing practices
in social and educational research methodologies (Oakley, 2000) and
critiques of traditional approaches to social scientific knowledge and
methodologies; away from positivism towards more experiential,
ethnographic and qualitative approaches (Drake & Owen, 1998; St Pierre &
Pillow, 2000; Weis & Fine, 2000; Fine & Weis, 2003).
At the same time, the rich diversity of sociology has also led to notions
of reflexivity as an epistemological break with the past within sociology and
extended developments in critical theory (Giddens, 1990, 1992; Bourdieu,
1992; Beck et al, 1996). All of these trends have contributed to changes
within the practices, theories and methodologies of sociology and sociology of
education. Moreover, the distinctions between substantive areas within
sociology are far more difficult to sustain, as far as sociology of education has
developed an approach that can be distinguished from sociology tout court.
Nevertheless, it has become fashionable, within the social sciences, and
sociology and sociology of education, to develop personal, biographic and
narrative accounts of personal experiences (Stanley, 1997; Drake & Owen,
1998; St Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Kamler, 2001).
Whilst this approach has become endemic in the social sciences,
extending the notions from purely feminist ones, as a part of the social and
cultural turn, this is particularly the case from the perspective of women of
my generation internationally. We became involved in the academy and the
social sciences, sociology and sociology of education as part of the generation
who benefited from the expansion of educational opportunities in the post-
war period. Many of these women in the UK became conscious feminists and

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have reflected upon their experiences (Stanley, 1992; Weiner, 1994; Deem,
1996; Walkerdine, 1997; David & Woodward, 1998; Williams, 1999).
Oakley, in contesting the methodological developments, has also contributed
a rich and detailed analysis from her own feminist perspective of
developments in academic sociology (Oakley, 2003). This phenomenon is
international, with evidence in the Anglophone literature of critical and
personal reflections from, among others, Australia (Blackmore, 1999;
Curthoys, 2000; Kenway & Bullen, 2002), New Zealand (Middleton, 1998)
and North America (Britzman, 1991, 2003; Pitt, 2000, 2003; Luttrell,
2003).

Personal and Political: feminist theories and pedagogies

The notion of ‘the personal is political’ was key to the second-wave women’s
movement, as it developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It entailed the
notion that personal, private and intimate family matters nevertheless were
highly ‘political’ in the sense that they relied upon deep power relations
between men and women. In other words, women’s private family
experiences were not unique but the product of wider power relations
between men and women in society. At first, these became ideas that
influenced the burgeoning women’s liberation movement as a political
movement, but they later began to influence academic developments,
especially in sociology as women entered the academy and became involved
as academics.
The term ‘feminist’ was not in the lexicon of academe until the 1970s,
when such women became involved as academics, although it had been used
in the late nineteenth century as a political concept. The ideas were highly
contested as academic subjects, such that women’s studies initially developed
outside conventional undergraduate courses, in extramural departments for
mature women students, as part of lifelong learning. However, as more
women became involved as academic sociologists, sociologists of education
and social scientists, they began to develop and transform ideas and develop
feminist theories, methodologies and/or pedagogy and ‘knowledge’.
The growth and development of such theories and methodologies
within social and cultural studies reveal the complexities and transformations
of these concepts (Ramazanoglu with Holland, 2002). A key transformation
has been the shift in notions of ‘personal and political’, in that there have
been moves from the centrality of women’s personal experiences being seen
as deeply ‘political’, to the ‘gaze’ focusing on how the political is suffused
with the personal. In other words, there has been a major shift from
‘outsider’ and objective approaches and accounts to more subjective and
‘insider’ approaches.
A hallmark of these various feminist perspectives was the centrality of
women’s personal experience to understandings and the development of
‘knowledge’. It is also a hallmark of feminist pedagogy (Morley, 2001;

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Kamler, 2001). Thus feminist pedagogy involves an exploration of personal
experiences, reflections and narrative or biographical accounts of both
professional and personal developments as part of the approach to learning
and teaching, the ‘curriculum’ and the ‘knowledge’ created.
As higher education has developed, these ideas have become embedded
in wider pedagogical practices and can be seen now as a form of continuing
professional development (CPD). Indeed, they have spread to forms of
professional education, not only in the study of education in higher
education, but in wider educational developments and practices of learning
and teaching. The notion of personal experience is no longer the preserve of
feminist pedagogy and practice; some key ideas about personal development
are part of professional changes and training and are linked to lifelong
learning. However, it is still important to account for these developments in
both pedagogy and practice in sociology and educational studies by reference
to the new ‘knowledge society or economy’ (Blackmore, 2002; David, 2003).
The notions of personal and political have become deeply embedded in
the theories and methodologies of many disciplines and subjects in the social
sciences. However, the ways they have been adopted and adapted have been
associated with feminist and post-structural or post-modern theories and
methodologies in particular. I want now to show the complex links with the
three phases of liberalism.

Generation of Feminists and Feminist Ideas:

links with phases of liberalism
I argue that the three phases of liberalism (post-war ideological developments
around social and political values) are linked with the changes in generations
of feminists and their involvement in the academy as students or academics. I
associate the phases of liberalism with the ways perspectives on the personal
and political have been transformed, together with transformations of
generations of women as academics and students involved in higher
education, especially sociology and sociology of education.
Broadly, the three phases of liberalism are social liberalism, economic
liberalism and neo-liberalism.
Social liberalism was associated with social democracy or socialism or
individual political rights and with the 1960s and 1970s in the UK, Europe,
Australia and the USA. A key characteristic was the rise of social and political
movements, such as civil and political rights, and in particular the rise of the
women’s movement and movements for sexual equality (Eisenstein, 1981).
This was also linked with economic growth and social changes in family lives,
especially for women from middle-class families. In particular, women’s
involvement in education, especially for middle-class women, began to lead
to the opening of opportunities for employment. Social welfare changes also
facilitated women’s working for pay (albeit often part-time) while being
married and raising children. The principle of equality of educational

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opportunities began to be extended to women from the middle classes, rather

than to children from working-class families (Arnot et al, 1999).
Economic liberalism, characterised by consumer choice, was associated
with the political backlash in the late 1970s against earlier forms of social
liberalism. In the UK this was particularly associated with Thatcherism; in
the USA, with Reaganism. These went with the revival of a conservative
approach to consumerism and market forces in public services and the rise of
a market economy. However, during the 1980s and early 1990s,
contradictory forces were at work, and family lives continued to change.
Women continued and increased their involvement in education, including
higher education, as students and increasingly as academics. The era of
economic liberalism is identified as contradictory, in that it signalled the
expansion of educational opportunities for all and the transformation to a
mass system of higher education largely for undergraduates, and emergent
and attendant forms of control and regulation. However, this did not entail a
transformation in terms of social class and educational opportunities, but
rather an increase for all social classes, leaving class distinctions relatively
untouched.
Neo-liberalism is associated with the extension and enhancement of the
market economy during the latter half of the 1990s and into the 21st century,
and is characterised as ‘the post-socialist condition’ (Fraser, 1997) in the
USA. This is also the case in the UK, despite New Labour’s return to
government, since it is committed to the politics of the ‘third way’ (Giddens,
1998), ‘new managerialism’ and ‘the modernisation project’, entailing
transformations of public services through private and market forces.
Although higher education remained fundamentally elitist, the era of neo-
liberalism is identified as the time when postgraduate education and doctoral
studies moved to a mass system, with attendant forms of quality assurance
standards and consumerism (Morley, 2003). During this period, still in
existence, global economic, familial and social changes are so great that they
signal moves towards what has been called a ‘knowledge society’ or
‘knowledge economy’, characterised by the importance of forms of education
to the society and to economic growth and development. Women’s
involvement and engagement with education, including higher education and
postgraduate studies, has continued such that they now form the majority of
undergraduate students. Women predominate in postgraduate professional
education, and academic women are now a substantial minority of feminists
and sociologists.
I characterise each period of liberalism in terms of the relationships
between the personal and political and the forming and framing of feminist
knowledge, theories and practices. I elaborate on these distinctions below.
‘The personal is political’ relates to social democracy or liberalism and the
initial ‘feminist project’ of embedding ‘liberal’ or socialist feminist ideas and
practices about equal opportunities and critiques of past ‘patriarchal
practices’ within a sociological framework, in an essentially elitist and

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traditional system of higher education. In the UK, the proportion of students
in higher education was less than ten percent, and they were all mainly from,
or became, the middle classes. Women constituted an even smaller minority,
although as social and economic changes began to be felt, women’s
opportunities for professional employment, including higher education,
began to grow.
‘Personal and political’ relates to the period of economic liberalism of the
late 1970s and 1980s, when feminist knowledge and practices were firmly
established within the academy, especially within sociology and its
subdisciplines such as the sociology of education, and yet were subject to
increasing forms of quality control in the UK. At the same time, there was a
backlash from the New Right against new feminist knowledge, complex and
diverse theories and practices within higher education. Women were more
involved as students, academics and researchers, but it was a period of
limited opportunities for women as academics and researchers. New
movements for women in higher education were formed in the UK, such as
Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN). For senior women as
managers or administrators, ‘Through the Glass Ceiling’ (TTGC) as a
network was born.
‘Political is personal’ refers to the most recent period, that of neo-
liberalism, and shifts to a market and ‘knowledge’ economy. Higher
education has been transformed to a mass system such that, in the UK,
about 40% of the relevant 18-30 year-old population participate in it,
although opportunities are still linked to social class. Women have come to
dominate as students, and feminist practices entwine with other social and
cultural methodologies. The ‘social and cultural turn’ leads to a diversity of
biographical, autobiographical and personal subjective theories and practices
within sociology and the wider forms of policy sociology and sociology of
education. In particular, the dominance of post-structuralism, changes in
critical feminist research ethnographies and the rise of ‘critical realism’ lead
to challenges and a rich diversity of feminist perspectives within sociology
and sociology of education. A key factor is the way ‘the research gaze’ is on
the political and social as personal. Thus the transformation in theories and
methodologies associated with women’s involvement in sociology leads to the
possibilities of further methodological developments.
I will now elaborate on how ‘second-wave feminism’, as a political
project of making the personal political, was transformed as it entered the
academy and the academic discipline of sociology, and sociology of education
in particular. I will look at feminist contributions to the pedagogy of the
personal and studies of power relations and the sexual division of labour in
the ‘private’ family, as opposed to the public world of work and politics. I will
then consider a case study of current developments in doctoral and
professional education, to exemplify developments around the ‘personal’ as a
pedagogy and practice.

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The Era of Social Liberalism, ‘Feminism’

and Women’s Involvement as Academics
For me, using personal reflection or an intellectual biography is relatively
new, as I was trained as a sociologist in the 1960s, when a traditional focus
on the social sciences of objectivity was the vogue (David, 2002a, 2003).
Here, I point to the key role of sociology in my personal developments and
how I tried, with others, to develop feminist sociology, especially policy
sociology and sociology of education. We were taught ‘structural-
functionalism’ of a Parsonian variety, with some critical assessment from a
Marxian sociological perspective provided by Rex (1964) and his disciple,
Dawe (Dawe, 1970).
On graduation I became a social researcher at London University and
was schooled in the skills of empirical social science research, initially on
topics such as the diagnosis of mental illness (Cooper et al, 1972), and
studies of gambling, work and leisure, conducted within a sociological
framework (Downes et al, 1976). My first encounter with educational
research came when I was involved in a research team studying the origins
and outcomes of local educational planning. Even here, however, we engaged
with relatively positivist methodologies of evaluation, rather than more in-
depth qualitative or ethnographic studies.
This was the era of social democracy, especially the rise of new social
movements such as the women’s liberation movement, and subsequent
developments of feminist ideas, not yet theories or knowledge, were initiated
within the academy (David, 2002a, 2003). While practising as a social
researcher, and an extramural teacher of sociology, in theoretical and
empirical studies of modern Britain, I became involved in the movement. We
developed political ideas and strategies, and learnt from the emergent, mainly
ephemeral, feminist literature.
While in the UK the development of higher education from the
nineteenth century onwards had opened up opportunities for some women,
elite institutions were reluctant to allow women’s entry as students. This was
particularly the case with Cambridge University, which allowed women as
students from the 1870s but only awarded them degrees from 1948. Very few
women were able to obtain academic positions, and those who did were often
discriminated against (Rose, 1994). From the end of the Second World War,
women, and middle-class women especially, were afforded opportunities to
continue in education, including higher education, on an unprecedented
scale (Arnot at el, 1999). The economic growth and educational expansion of
the early post-war period led to social change and women’s increasing
involvement in labour markets and in higher education as students and
academics (both teachers and researchers).
The era of social democracy was marked by considerable political
change, and worldwide political engagement with liberal and socialist politics
challenged traditional ideas (Rowbotham, 2000). The women’s movement
emerged in the UK associated with student politics as a political challenge to

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patriarchy and, although based upon essentially intellectual ideas, its aim was
to challenge political ideas to transform women’s positions in social and
public life, questioning their traditional confinement to the private family.
The driving force behind these movements for political change was key
writings from outside the academy, taken up by women as students and
workers. In particular, Simone de Beauvoir (1953) captured our
imaginations. Her main influence was more political than sociological, in that
women began to consider alternative ways of living, especially the question of
marriage and family. Nevertheless, de Beauvoir came from a highly bourgeois
family and was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris (Moi, 1994), hardly a role-
model for the majority of women in the emergent women’s movement.
Feminist sociologists from the UK and the USA, including Friedan (1982),
have noted her key influence on their becoming academic sociologists. Also,
more recently an Australian academic feminist (Curthoys, 2000) singled out
her influence on developments in Australian feminism. As I shall argue, de
Beauvoir’s work has become critical to recent debates about post-structural
feminist theories and methodologies (Moi, 1999).
During this era of social liberalism, British higher education remained
relatively traditional and elite, although there was a modest expansion of new
universities in the early 1960s and a reformulation of policy by the Robbins
committee on higher education (Robbins, 1963). The development of a
binary policy of higher education in 1966, with the creation of polytechnics
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, heralded the beginnings of the
transformation of higher education justified in relation to economic and
technological developments. The twin system of higher education allowed
traditional universities to build upon their early ‘modern’ origins and relative
autonomy, while polytechnics were subject to bureaucratic systems of control
and management. A central government body – the Council for National
Academic Awards (CNAA) – was given the role of awarding degrees, rather
than individual institutions. The polytechnics were to develop vocational
education in relation to technological and technical changes in the economy.
Many women at this time began to enter the academy as researchers
and teachers, developing their ideas in more academic and intellectual
fashions (e.g. David & Woodward, 1998). However, these notions were a
challenge to traditional academic disciplines and were not readily accepted
(Bird, 2001). In the UK the first women’s liberation conference was held at
Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, mainly attended by students and recent
graduates of elite universities (David, 2003a). Thus, early involvement was of
young, middle-class, privileged women, who developed relatively
sophisticated political concepts and an analysis of power relations. As the
1970s wore on, more and more such women became academic sociologists
and other social scientists. They developed new courses in women’s studies
and attempted to develop new ways of teaching around notions of personal
experiences, which later became known as feminist pedagogy.

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During this era, notions of feminism and feminist thought were

introduced into academic discourse, as was the idea of women’s studies as a
discipline or subject. The initial usage of the term ‘feminist’ in higher
education was highly contested, given the then commitment to positivist and
objective social sciences. Those women who entered the academy in the late
1960s and 1970s (including myself) were not appointed to teach or research
in either women’s studies or feminism, but rather in the traditional academic
disciplines, usually the social sciences.
There was no body of knowledge to build upon for our critiques and
embryonic theories. Most of the ‘knowledge’ was in ephemeral publications
and only began to be codified in this era (Bristol Women’s Studies Group,
1979/1984). By accumulating and augmenting these publications, women
academics, becoming feminists in the contested terrain of academe, began to
build up a new knowledge base for feminist theories and thought.
Collectively we began to challenge both the traditional forms and content of
academic disciplines and subjects, and their knowledge base, particularly in
the social sciences and humanities.
We drew on earlier women’s writings, such as de Beauvoir’s, and
developed critiques of patriarchal practices. De Beauvoir (1953) became a
mainstay of early feminist courses in sociology and was also influential in the
developments in feminist sociology of education. Evans (1985) and Okely
(1986) both wrote key texts about her influence in feminist thinking within
sociology. They also both wrote on the gendered nature of schooling, Okely
(1987) from a personal perspective in her study of boarding education for
girls, and Evans (1991) of her own single-sex grammar-school education.
However, these studies were written over a decade after the rise of the second
wave of the women’s movement and feminist scholarship, when we were
trying to develop new perspectives.
We argued for the creation of new academic knowledge and subjects,
such as women’s studies, and based our pedagogical practice upon women’s
experience, drawing on the ideas of the women’s movement (David, 2002a,
2003a); introducing these notions was no simple endeavour. For example,
one of my first doctoral students at Bristol University, doing a thesis in social
policy on family planning and the birth control movement in the 1920s,
wanted to use the term ‘feminist’ in her thesis title. This had to be agreed at a
meeting of the social science academics on a faculty board. Supervisors had
to defend thesis titles rather than students, and I was closely questioned
about the use of political notions rather than objective social science
concepts. I had not yet accepted the term ‘feminist’ for myself, but this
academic argument confirmed me in its critical importance. This example
illustrates the patriarchal structuring of the academic disciplines and
university procedures, reflecting broader social structures within British
society.
Explicit attempts to incorporate these ideas into academic fare, whether
at undergraduate or postgraduate level, were highly contested and difficult to

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sustain (Bird, 2001; David, 2003a). By the end of the decade a generation of
women, explicitly committed to feminist ideas and pedagogies, had become
entrenched within the academy. I was one of those women, securing my first
academic post in 1973. We struggled to embed such ideas into our teaching
and research, both within the university and as part of extramural liberal
education for occasional students.

The Era of Economic Liberalism and

Feminist Sociology in the Academy
By the end of the 1970s, we had witnessed the rise of Thatcherism, with her
election as Prime Minister in 1979. This ushered in a new era of economic
liberalism, and became the start of the backlash against feminist ideas and
ideals, despite the fact that Thatcher herself had exhibited liberal feminist
ideas in the early 1950s (Thatcher, 1995; Arnot et al, 1999). The 1980s were
highly contradictory: feminist ideas and practices had received limited
acceptance within academic sociology, yet there was a political backlash
against them (Faludi, 1991). Increasing numbers of women were entering the
academy and becoming interested as both students and academics or
researchers in feminist theories and methodologies, especially within the
social sciences. During this period, as higher education expanded, so too did
the social sciences, sociology and the sociology of education. The sociology
of education developed as a separate subdiscipline within schools of
education, where it was increasingly taught to future teachers and used as a
basis for educational research.
Women were also moving into more senior positions in the academy as
academic managers and administrators. In the mid-1980s I became an
academic ‘manager’, as an appointed head of a large social sciences
department in a new university (then a polytechnic). I was not alone in this,
and became pro-active in developing networks of like-minded women in such
positions. These developments in feminist activities for women, especially in
academe, became known as ‘femocracy’, as Australian feminist sociologists
named them (Yeatman, 1990). Yet almost as quickly as they developed they
became highly contested, in what the Australians called the ‘chilly climate’ of
the 1990s (David, 2003a).
In the UK, the political challenges to education, including higher
education and wider social policies, followed rapidly from the opening of
opportunities for economic growth. Just as some feminist sociologists and
women were beginning to get a foothold in academia and effectively
challenge traditional knowledge and create new feminist knowledge and
pedagogy, the political backlash of the New Right occurred. Thatcherism as a
political force scapegoated education for its inability to develop the economy.
Thus revised political ideas from the right were introduced in the late 1970s
and early 1980s in an attempt to make the UK more internationally
competitive. These ideas included the contradictory ideas of central control

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and the introduction of market forces into public services, including higher
education.
During this second era, higher education rapidly expanded to meet the
perceived needs of a changing economy based on developments in
information and computer technologies. However, this expansion did not
build upon the traditional universities but introduced new measures of
control, both through financial resources and management, linked to fiscal
measures. Ostensibly both universities and polytechnics were afforded more
autonomy at the organisational and institutional level, but were subject to
new regimes of quality control.
At this time, all forms of higher education expanded rapidly, including
moving into new subject and discipline areas, arguably to meet the changing
needs of the economy and to make the UK more internationally competitive.
Sociology was a major new subject. This process became known as the
‘massification’ of higher education: the move from an elite to a mass system
of access to undergraduate education. However, this did not necessarily
involve a greater proportion of students from working-class families attending
higher education; rather, it tapped into the expanding middle classes (David,
2003). The change from a manufacturing economy to one based on service
industries and new professions provided the push for rapid educational
expansion.
Expanding education in the 1960s had led some of these further needs
for expansion and transformations in the characteristics of social and
economic organisation. Not only did undergraduate education expand, but
so too did postgraduate courses in a variety of subjects and disciplines. On
the one hand, new subjects such as information technology developed
quickly, especially in the polytechnic sector. On the other hand, given the
notion of markets within higher education, subjects such as women’s studies
finally found limited acceptance within the academic curriculum, especially
at undergraduate level but also in postgraduate courses in the social sciences
and humanities.
Although the growth of postgraduate and doctoral ‘education’ or
training was relatively unremarked upon in this period, a series of policy
documents was followed by sociological research studies on the traditional
doctorate (PhD) in the late 1980s and 1990s (Winfield, 1987; Delamont,
1989; Beecher et al, 1994; Burgess, 1994, 1997; Dunkerley & Weeks, 1994;
Youngman, 1994; Delamont et al, 1997, 1998; Graves et al, 1997; Hockey,
1997; Evans, 1999; Deem et al, 2000; Leonard, 2000). Linked with these
contradictory developments was the flowering of a diversity of perspectives
and theories around feminist thought.
Thus from its initially highly contested status in the academy during the
1980s, sociological and feminist theories and practices mushroomed at all
levels within academic life. The bodies of feminist knowledge proliferated
and developed on an international basis, despite the wider political climate of
hostility to women’s changing lives in public and in the family. It is still the

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subject of controversy that Thatcher should have witnessed such a
transformation in women’s lives whilst being so committed to traditional
‘family values’ (Arnot et al, 1999).
These developments were followed by rich research within sociology
and the sociology of education. Across the social sciences, issues of sexual
divisions and/or relations were transformed as theories were introduced about
notions of ‘social construction’ (Giddens, 1990). Thus, the notion of gender
became more acceptable as a way to codify the social construction of gender
relations within sociology and for studies within the sociology of education
(David, 2003). By the mid-1990s there had been massive transformations in
higher education, from the characteristics of the subjects and students taught
to the processes of control and management, especially within postgraduate
education.
Particularly remarkable, although not often remarked upon, were the
growth and proliferation of sociology and the sociology of education within
academic educational studies. This took place despite official sanctions, in
terms of research developments and the transformation of academic
curricula. For instance, in the mid-1980s, the name of the official body for
dispensing research funds was changed from the Social Sciences Research
Council (SSRC) to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),
signalling a discursive shift in the balance between economics and social
sciences. Teaching sociology of education to postgraduate students in teacher
education was proscribed, signalling a contradictory shift in ideologies about
‘the social’. Even more remarkable were the transformations of the student
population within higher education, with a changing balance between both
undergraduate and postgraduate students, and between men and women
students at both levels.

Neo-liberalism and Feminist ‘Methodological

Diversity’ in Higher Education
By the 1990s, economic liberalism had shaded into neo-liberalism and
become the new orthodoxy in the polity, as market forces were increasingly
introduced into public services and an emphasis on quality assurance and
‘managerialism’, known as ‘the modernization project’, began to emerge. In
the UK this was characterised by more ‘deregulation’ and the rise of ‘new
managerialism’ generally, and in higher education in particular. By the same
token, theoretical and methodological diversity was flourishing in the
academy (Fraser, 1997). However, sociology and sociology of education were
endemic in the practices of higher education, whether specifically sociology
departments or schools of education and/or educational research. Widening
participation in higher education by class, ethnicity/race and gender and,
more recently, new forms of access to higher education, including lifelong
learning, have contributed to these developments. These have entailed the
increase in women’s involvement in a diversity of issues.

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Women as both academics and students were engaged at every level of

education, including schools and further and higher education. In
educational studies they were increasingly involved, not only with initial
teacher education, but with a variety of forms of professional development.
In other words, there was complexity and diversity in forms of educational
studies and research, including feminist perspectives, theories,
methodologies, and pedagogies and practices (Ramazanoglu with Holland,
2002).
In particular, the development of postgraduate professional and
doctoral education has been the hallmark of this period; for instance, the
expansion of traditional PhDs (still called research degrees in the UK) and
the growth of professional doctorates, especially but not only in education
(Leonard, 2001). There have been contradictory developments in doctoral
‘education’ versus ‘training’. On the one hand, the main emphasis with
respect to traditional PhDs has been ‘research training’ rather than
‘education’. This is a growing prerequisite as part of the quality assurance
movement. Similarly, there have been moves towards so-called ‘new route
PhDs’, based on North American and some European experiences, including
the Bologna agreement for the harmonisation of European postgraduate
studies. These involve one year of taught course programmes as a prelude to
the production of a research thesis on traditional lines, including full-time
individual study.
On the other hand, there has been a rapid growth of professional
doctoral education, modelled more on Commonwealth, particularly
Australian, experiences (Johnson et al, 2000; David, 2003b; McWilliam et al,
2002). These doctorates are mainly part-time and involve periods of intensive
blocks of teaching and study, usually in cohort groups.
The process of ‘massification’ was accelerated by the creation of a new
system of universities in the UK from 1992, which resulted in a doubling of
the number of universities, each having their own regulations and formal and
informal procedures for awarding their own doctorates (Dearing, 1997;
Quality Assurance Agency, 1999). It ensured that even those higher
education institutions that are not yet universities have to be engaged in PhD
supervision in order to become eligible to change their status. Interestingly,
however, the removal of research degree-awarding powers as a criterion of
university status is one of the key features of the latest government proposals
on the future of higher education (White Paper, 2003; Higher Education Act,
2003-2004). The implications of this change for all forms of doctoral
education in the UK, however, are hard to gauge.
The massification of doctoral education is also indicated by the recent
increase in numbers and accompanied the increased autonomy and potential
variation among the universities. By the end of 2000 there were over 101,000
doctoral or so-called research students in UK universities. More than 10,000
new students started their PhDs in 1998-1999, compared with just over 3000
in 1992 (Hartley, 2000; Tinkler et al, 2000, 2004). With the advent of

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‘professional doctorates’, ‘new route PhDs’ and general credential inflation,
those undertaking ‘research-based degrees’ represented a quarter of all
postgraduates and included many overseas students. Moreover, postgraduate
students made up about forty percent of all students in higher education
(Morley et al, 2002).
In a recent study with Morley et al(2003), our interest as feminists was
in the transformations, as we felt that although the massification of doctoral
studies had opened up possibilities for women as doctoral students on an
unprecedented scale, it also limited the further creation of feminist
knowledge. Moreover, although there have been massive transformations, the
procedures for realising quality, and especially for sustaining or developing
equality and fairness have not been addressed.
Under the current New Labour administration there has been a new
stress on the doctorate as research training rather than as scholarship or
original knowledge. Through the various quality assurance procedures and
reports of the different research councils, it gradually became accepted
practice to require postgraduate research students to undertake a programme
of research training in their preparation to undertake a research thesis. The
first such programme was an MRes, or Masters in Research in the physical
and biological sciences, as a prelude to a doctorate. More recently this has
been generalised to all doctoral studies and has required methodology
courses or a preceding specialist masters course in research. These have
become the criteria for awards or bursaries from the various different
research councils across the sciences and social sciences.
Despite the emphasis in New Labour’s approach to evidence-based
policy and practice (David, 2002b), the evidence base for these policy
changes was sparse: inadequate statistical records, self-report studies,
documentary analysis and narratives (Eggleston & Delamont, 1983;
Delamont et al, 1998). Thus new managerialism in the UK has transformed
the priorities, culture and practices of the academy. In keeping with
developments in new forms of management and forms of reflective and
feminist practice, studying this would constitute a new research agenda and
contribute to equity procedures within universities.

Professional Doctorates in Education:

the case of feminist knowledge and pedagogies
I now move into the case study of feminist methodologies within doctoral
professional education and consider some of the contradictory and
challenging features of professional doctorates, drawing particularly on
international experiences, particularly in the anglophone and Commonwealth
countries such as Australia and New Zealand (Middleton, 2001; Green et al,
2001; McWilliam et al, 2002). McWilliam and colleagues are particularly
intrigued by the contribution that professional doctorates might make to
mandatory research training in Australia, and by implication, also the UK.

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I shall look at the opportunities afforded by professional doctorates in

education for imparting some of the insights of feminist theories and
knowledge, and developing aspects of feminist pedagogies around the
personal, as well as those more central notions of personal development and
portfolios that are now accepted as part of the pedagogies and practices of
learning and teaching in higher education.
Using my own experiences, again in traditional feminist fashion (David,
2002a, 2003), I shall focus on developments in the professional doctorate in
education on gender and feminist knowledge and pedagogy. Whilst we have
seen how the massification of doctoral education has not been clearly linked
to new public management, it has opened up new potentialities and
possibilities. On the one hand, the emphasis on research training has
extended to all forms of doctoral education, including professional
doctorates, but there has been considerable variation of forms in terms of
practice-based perspectives (UKCGE, 1999, 2002; Winter et al, 2000). Thus
variety has also emerged among professional doctorates and expectations of
content and assessment.
As stated earlier, there has been a massive growth in professional
doctorates over the last decade, and education doctorates in particular. Much
of this growth in the UK emulated earlier practices in Australia, New
Zealand and Canada (McWilliam et al, 2002). Thus there are now over
thirty professional doctoral programmes in education in the UK, the first
having started at the University of Bristol in the early 1990s. They all have
certain key features, namely many taught elements or coursework units in
addition to the writing of a thesis or dissertation, and operation on a mainly
part-time basis. These developments in coursework or taught elements
predated and may have actually prefigured some of the more recent
developments in research training and skills for the traditional PhD in the
UK.
Another feature of professional doctorates is that they tend to be taught
on a cohort basis to groups of students. A usual criterion of entry is
involvement in a professional activity and thus the majority of students are
mature, rather than undertaking study immediately after undergraduate
degrees. They can be seen as part of the process of lifelong learning and
continued professional development. These degrees are also for a particular
market of students, namely professional educators, who are teachers either in
schools, further or higher education, or lifelong learning, or administrators
and managers within aspects of education and related areas.
In exploring my own reflections on professional doctorates in
education, I decided to conduct a small survey of such doctorates, using what
became an ‘opportunity sample’. In the spring of 2003 I wrote to all directors
of doctorates in education, involved in a network in the UK. I tried to
develop a view of the same issues in Australia, but only had formal replies
from one university that had been deeply engaged in developing the broader
issues around research training. However, anecdotal and collegial evidence

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Miriam E. David
from Australia, Canada and New Zealand suggests similar developmental
trajectories. I was particularly interested in whether gender was a feature of
these doctorates, and in particular the balances between men and women as
both students and doctoral graduates from such programmes. I also wanted
to gain a sense of the extent to which new styles and forms of pedagogy,
around the personal and/or feminist, had been used, although I only have an
informal or anecdotal sense of this.
Of the 30 university directors, 14 replied, and confirmed my initial
supposition that women were in a majority on such programmes, although
not as dramatically as I had supposed. Out of students enrolled on the
programmes in the summer of 2003, 56 percent were women and 44 percent
men. Similarly, of those students who have graduated as doctors of education
(very small numbers, because the programmes are relatively new) 53 percent
were women and 46 percent men.
Although the study was neither representative, nor did it cover a range
of subjects and issues, it indicates that professional women educators are
taking up opportunities for professional development. From studies written
about Australia and New Zealand particularly (Middleton, 2001; McWilliam
et al, 2002), it seems clear that women’s and feminist involvement is
developing here too. However, it is also evident that the question of women’s
involvement and developments in new types of pedagogy including feminist
methodologies depends upon the orientation of the academics and
researchers involved at institutional level. For example, the doctorate in
education at Lincoln University seems to have targeted men rather than
women, since only a third of their graduates are women.

The Keele Doctorate in Education:

gender and education management
Keele University has developed a particular market niche for its doctorate in
education. We recognised what was implicit rather than explicit in other
professional doctoral programmes in the UK: that a majority of students in
professional education were likely to be women. Given the evidence of the
last thirty years about women’s growing professional involvement in
education and higher education, we assumed that there would be a market
for studies that made explicit issues of gender. Indeed, it quickly became
evident that a majority of students on doctoral programmes in education
were not just women from school-based education or local management and
administration, where men held the more senior positions, but women from
the rapidly expanding sectors of further and higher education.
In particular, they included a preponderance of women in education
administration and in the new forms of higher education, particularly the new
universities. We recognised and adopted an approach targeting the majority
of students wishing to undertake such programmes in the UK who were

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professional women, especially in higher education, requiring a doctorate for

professional development.
The majority of our students on the first four cohorts of the Gender and
Education Management (GEM) strand of our doctorate in education are
either female administrators or academics from the post-1992 universities,
teaching across a range of subjects from business studies to psychology. We
also have a small number of administrators from the further education sector,
augmented by a very small number of senior administrators in local authority
educational management. In addition, we have a number of health educators,
chiefly developing paramedical education in higher education, including
nurse educators and physiotherapists, from both the pre-and post-1992
universities.
We have thus tailored our learning and teaching strategy specifically for
these students, who are mainly women. We have focused especially on
providing feminist knowledge through feminist and personal pedagogies. As
far as we are aware this approach is unique in the UK, although it may not be
in other countries, especially Australia (McWilliam et al, 2002). We
developed this unique strand to our doctorate in education around feminist
theories and methodologies, and also used personal reflections and feminist
pedagogy. Our approach to the Evidence-based Policy and Practice (EPP)
strand, modelled on the approaches to doctoral education taken by other
universities in the UK, was to develop the notion of reflective practice
applied to both professional issues and to research on professional issues in
education. However, we also remained committed to a research-based
degree, whilst aiming to dovetail research training for traditional PhDs with
our doctorate in education.
We drew initially on Schon’s seminal work (1987, 1991). However, we
subsequently modified this to take account of feminist scholarship and
practices around reflexivity and experiential perspectives (Drake & Owen,
1998; David, 2002a, 2003). In particular, this entailed feminist approaches
to being a reflective researcher and practitioner. We used models such as
David (2002a) and Deem (1996) as academic reflexive researchers. Our
practices and pedagogies were also modelled on these notions and we drew
out personal and professional experiences within the classroom as well as
within the required assignments. We also have developed explicitly feminist
perspectives on research concepts and methodologies, as well as feminist
theories drawing on feminist insights around post-structuralism (St Pierre &
Pillow, 2000).
We have used feminist post-structuralism to critique ideas about
gender, masculinities and femininities. Here Whitehead’s (2002) ‘pro-
feminist’ work has been salient. This feminist perspective is threaded through
both the substantive course units or modules on educational theories and the
research ‘training’ elements. Our overarching pedagogical practice builds
upon traditional feminist practice but aims to integrate social science

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transformations through biography, narratives and voices (Britzman, 1998;
St Pierre & Pillow, 2000; Pitt, 2003).
More than three years into the doctoral programme for Gender and
Education Management (GEM), we find that this is by far the most popular
strand. Each course unit has been evaluated very highly by all students as
part of the quality assurance required by the university. Indeed, several
students who initially registered for the other EPP strand have asked to
transfer to GEM. Thus we have begun to integrate our two approaches and
provide only separate tutorials for the twin strands. We were eager to see the
fruits of our feminist and pro-feminist practices and found that our students
were very responsive to these gendered approaches and especially the
elements of reflective and critical research practices. Their enthusiasm has
been such that they have used their personal experiences as ways to critique
not only their past practices but centrally as part of their research endeavours,
and methodologies of critical and/or feminist ethnographies.

Conclusions
As women have entered the academy in increasing numbers and over the
generations, the academy itself has been transformed. These changes over the
last 30 years in British higher education have been associated with changes in
forms of liberalism and their justification in relation to technological and
labour market changes and the new knowledge economy. Thus developments
towards a ‘knowledge society or economy’ have also entailed developments
and diversity in women’s education and forms of largely professional
employment. A key feature of such developments, rarely noticed or
acknowledged, has been women’s contributions and engagement. What has
been particularly intriguing and important is the way in which feminist
sociological theories, methodologies and pedagogies have contributed to the
complexity and diversity of the changes, challenging future developments.
Feminist theories, methodologies and research practices have grown
from within sociology and sociology of education to the social sciences more
generally and have combined with other epistemological changes within
social and cultural studies. This has happened over 30 or 40 years, in
association with broader social and political changes, linked with
transformations in forms of so-called liberalism. Thus there is now a
complexity and diversity of theoretical and methodological changes to which
feminist and critical theories contribute. Indeed, it can be argued that, as part
of the ‘social and cultural turn’ feminists, within social and educational
studies, amongst others, theorize the political as personal, and contribute to
the pedagogical shifts towards the personal that are now endemic in higher
education. Moves towards personal reflections and reflective professional
practices have influenced not only undergraduate studies and research
practices, contributing to rich and complex educational research

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ethnographies, but also developments in postgraduate and professional

education.
Most recently, under neo-liberalism, while the majority of higher
education changes have led to a massification of doctoral education and
constraints on equity, originality and creativity through quality assurance
mechanisms, there have been great opportunities for women’s involvement
and the development of feminist knowledges as part of the new knowledge
economy (Blackmore, 2002). This seems to have been the case especially in
professional doctoral education, rather than in research training for
traditional doctorates.
Indeed, feminist ‘knowledge’ and pedagogical practices, from the early
second-wave feminist political movement initiating feminist knowledges and
theories, may have prefigured these developments in doctoral education in
the new knowledge economy, and feminist pedagogies may contribute to
developing innovative practices in professional doctoral education. The
development of feminist pedagogies within and across higher education and
especially doctoral education, including personal and critical reflections and
experiences, have become embedded in the practices and pedagogies of
higher education more generally.
I thus maintain, on the basis of personal reflection on the development
of professional doctoral education, that feminist sociological methodologies
have made, and will continue to make, important contributions to the
development of new knowledge and innovative approaches to learning and
teaching in higher education generally and in postgraduate professional and
graduate studies in particular. The moves in higher education towards the
personal in educational research and pedagogical practices, such as personal
development plans and portfolio assessment, have been critical to the wider
transformations in higher education, such as widening participation and
access to higher education. However, changes in higher education policies
and practices may militate against such transformations for future
generations, especially in relation to postgraduate studies. Nevertheless,
women’s engagement in higher education, the changing work/life balance and
the theorisation of the personal will continue to make important
contributions to understanding in the future.

Correspondence
Miriam E. David, Professor of Policy Studies in Education,
Research Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Keele,
Keele ST5 5BG, United Kingdom (m.david@keele.ac.uk).

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International Studies
in Sociology of Education
CALL FOR PAPERS
Volume 15 Nos 1, 2 and 3, 2005

will be concerned with the theme of

Teaching and Learning

in Changing Times
We welcome papers on any aspect relating to this
theme and 3 copies of the paper (to a maximum of
7000 words), together with an abstract on a separate
sheet, should be submitted to Professor Len Barton,
c/o Mrs Helen Oliver, School of Education, University
of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road, Sheffield S10 2JA,
United Kingdom, on or before 1st February, 2005
.
No papers will be accepted for consideration after this date.
All papers will be considered by two referees.

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