Mediated Knowledge: Reexamining Six Classic Community Studies from a Woman's Point of View

Six studies published in the 1940s have become classics in the analysis of rural community and change: the community stability/instability studies. One of their less recognized features is that their analyses included women. This article revisits these six studies, but from a different vantage point. As a socially constructed enterprise, the community studies can be seen as a product of human agency. Examining how these researchers saw and included women, this analysis examines the historically embedded mediating impact of the research producers' positionality on the knowledge they produced. In particular, this analysis examines how women came to be included in the studies, how these researchers interpreted women's roles, and how gendered assumptions affected the conclusions they reached regarding the communities' stability or instability.