Hartsock was born in 1943 in a Methodist lower-middle class family, in Ogden, Utah. She attended Wellesley College. While there, Hartsock was involved in the Wellesley Civil Rights Group. This group provided tutoring in Roxbury and Boston, Massachusetts, as well as working with the Boston NAACP. After finishing college, Hartsock went to get her Masters Degree from the University of Chicago. There, she got involved with a community organization group called The Woodlawn Organization, which was started by activist Saul Alinksky. When Martin Luther King brought the Civil Rights movements north, Hartsock marched to help this movement. After this march, she then help start a graduate student woman's caucus in Political Science. Hartsock received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1972. She was a practiced musician and prior to her dissertation, Hartsock built and played the harpsichord. Hartsock also expressed interest in equestrianism, food, travel and art. In 1985 Hartsock was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and lived for 30 more years. Hartsock died on March 19, 2015 in Seattle, Washington.
Career
Hartsock was a feminist philosopher. She was known for her work in feminist epistemology and standpoint theory, especially the 1983 essay "The Feminist Standpoint", which also integrated Melanie Klein's theories on psychoanalysis and the Oedipal crisis. Her standpoint theory derived from Marxism, which claims that the proletariat has a distinctive perspective on social relations and that only this perspective reveals the truth. She drew an analogy between the industrial labor of the proletariat and the domestic labor of women to show that women can also have a distinctive standpoint. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays was then published in 1998. Hartsock was the first woman to be hired by the University of Michigan, where she taught in the Political Science Department. After a 3 year period, she moved to Washington DC and took a course at IPS on feminist theory in 1973. She then took part in the Quest staff and was in the subscription department where she did writing and editing. Quest lasted for almost 10 years. Once she left Quest, she taught Political Science at Johns Hopkins. There she also helped take part in the effort to bring Woman's Studies to the University. Several years after, she moved to the University of Washington and learned that the Woman's Studies at Johns Hopkins was now a course. Later, she focused her attention on woman’s labor. Specifically, in the political economic dynamics of globalization. Hartsock then retired in 2009.
Selected bibliography
Books
Chapters in books
Hartsock, Nancy, Discovering Reality. "The feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism", in Harding, Sandra.pp. 283–310
Available .
Sisterhood is Powerful. Short entry explaining the remarks that professors made about the Woman's Caucus in 1970
Prior to her retirement in 2009 Hartsock established the Nancy C.M. Hartsock Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Feminist Theory. Students from any college, and from any department can apply.
