Founding Women, Sociology, and Hope

Abstract

From the perspective of revolutions, utopias and/or optimism, the logic of transforming the future has been one of the axes at the beginning of the social sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries. If hope is understood as a practice of anticipating the future, in the sense that Ernest Bloch gave it, it is easy to see how these actions that perform and “pre-form” the connection between past, present and future acquire a special interest for sociology.In this article, we will take as a platform for reflection the thought of Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). The two, from different perspectives, thematize hope as an emotion, social practice and behaviour pattern, which offers an unbeatable possibility for reflection on hope today.The objective of the article is to reconstruct the notion of hope from the perspective of the women who originated sociological theory, taking up the thought of the aforementioned authors and presenting some central topics needed to build a sociology of hope.To achieve this objective, the following argumentative strategy has been followed: (a) it is established what constitutes a sociological ‘classic’, and in what sense Martineau and Perkin Gilman are such; (b) hope according to Harriet Martineau is presented; (c) the concept of Hope according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman is synthetized, (d) some clues for sociology of hope are developed, based on the thoughts of Martineau and Perkins Gilman; and (e) some notes for a sociology of hope are summarized.