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Concept information

Preferred term

bifurcated consciousness  

Definition(s)

  • In the 1970s, Dorothy E. Smith wrote about women's “bifurcated consciousness,” a distinctive subjectivity produced by women's household or reproductive work and the supporting and applied tasks assigned to them, historically, in the occupational division of labor. She argued that women's everyday activities—as paid or unpaid caregivers, support workers, volunteers, and so on—positioned them to engage with people where and as they actually live and, further, that women's activities often involved “working up” the particularities of individual lives so as to fit them to the more abstract frameworks that organize institutional activity— as when mothers prepare children for attendance at school or nurses prepare patients to be attended by physicians. [Source: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society; Bifurcated Consciousness]

Broader concept(s)

Belongs to group

URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/N9J-RBX0NC5T-L

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