Everett C. Hughes on work, race, and the sociological imagination
✍ Scribed by Henry Yu
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 7 KB
- Volume
- 33
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The husband and wife team of Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes was perhaps the best example of Robert E. Park's mentorship of young sociologists. Both were students of Park at the University of Chicago during the 1920s, and contemporaries of Chicago prodigies Louis Wirth and Herbert Blumer. Everett Hughes (1897 -1983) went on to a long academic career, carrying on Park's strong interest in race relations, highlighted perhaps by his return to chair Chicago's sociology department after World War II. Helen MacGill (1903MacGill ( -1992)), married to Hughes in 1927, also finished her doctorate under Park but was relegated by the era's sexual division of academic labor into support roles. Helping her husband with his research and writing, and serving a seventeen-year tenure as a low-paid editor of the American Journal of Sociology, Helen Hughes shared much of the Hughes' sociological work but little of the institutional reward. And so with the entry of a collection of Everett Hughes' essays into the University of Chicago Press Heritage of Sociology Series, Lewis Coser mentions in his introduction the great contributions of Helen Hughes to the sociological tradition represented by the Hugheses and Robert Park, but it is Everett Hughes' name and picture that appear on the cover. Coser's description of the lives and work of Everett and Helen Hughes place them within the now familiar story of Park and the Chicago school of sociology. The seventeen essays, grouped thematically by the topics of work, race, and the sociological imagination, are united most of all by Hughes' interest in the social relations within industry, and his essays on race relations often focus upon race in the workplace. The documents show well the curiosity of Hughes and his ability to explicate the concepts of sociology in the same straightforward and example-laden style that marked his mentor's writing. Compared to the rather inaccessible language of both his contemporaries and of current sociology, this collection of Everett and Helen Hughes' work makes for a refreshing glimpse at how sociology was once practiced.