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Breaking Out Again is a new edition of the authors' original 1983 Breaking Out which, although widely cited and used, has been out of print for several years. This is not the usual second edition where the material has been up - dated and expanded. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise have chosen to republish the original text sandwiched between a brief introduction in which they provide a reading of the first Breaking Out, and a more substantial afterword where they show that the issues and questions dealt with originally continue to be at the centre of contemporary feminist theory a decade later.
In the first Breaking Out, Stanley and Wise argued that if social science research is to be genuinely "feminist," it must be constructed out of feminism. Feminist social scientists, they reasoned, should stop merely reacting to existing research by using the traditional ideas and methods about how science should be conducted. They were unequivocally against positivism, Marxism, heterosexism, and structuralism positing instead a feminist social science that focused on how and where women's oppression occurs in the context of their differing everyday life experiences. Of absolute importance was "feminist consciousness" in that women's experiences constitute a very different view of reality, a way of making sense of the world, and an entirely different ontology. It also...