content and shape of one's analysis. In Smith's formulation, women's experience, historically and theoretically marginalized in the structure of power relationships (but rich with its own theoretical authoritativeness on that account), becomes the point of origin, or the standpoint from which theoretical work proceeds.
Experience, on this view, is implicated in sociological method, first because it resonates with social realities as they are either perceived or declared in extant discourse and theory, and second because authoritative interpretations of those realities may be derived and asserted in terms of such resonant experience. Organized elaboration of patterns of women's social experience has the effect of inductively revealing a view (or multiple views) of form and content of social reality. This can be said to become the content of feminist standpoint theory, although according to Smith that designation was derived (by Harding, in a review of standpoint methodologists) rather than declared as a discipline.
Smith specifically denies that feminis
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