In this chapter I will consider some of the ways in which C. Wright Mills's work resonates with feminist ideas or has utility for feminist analysis, focusing on The Sociological Imagination ([1959] 1970) and one of his early articles, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive” (1940). I will not present an extended exegesis or critique of either work, but rather will pick up on some ideas that have inspired me as a feminist sociologist or where a sociological imagination overlaps with a feminist one. Mills's work has never been widely taken up in feminist academic circles, though a few have acknowledged his influence (e.g., Letherby and Cotterill 1993; Smart 2009). Coming to it afresh from today's perspective his work might seem dated. Like all work of Mills's era and before, his is written in a language that now jars, peppered as it is with references to “man” as the generic human being and “he” as the default third person pronoun – though to do him credit he does occasionally use “men and women.” Despite his radicalism on other issues, he nonetheless largely took the gendering of the social world as given and was sometimes guilty of condescending and dismissive depictions of women – as noted by Michael Burawoy (2008) and Tom Hayden (2006) – though with very occasional insights into the inequities of gender relations (see, e.g., Mills 1970, 16–17).

It would be unwise to dismiss Mills's work on grounds of insufficient gender awareness – to do so would be to discount many other theorists who have influenced feminist scholarship, from Marx to Foucault. Just as it is now fundamental to feminist scholarship to acknowledge the positions (social and political) from which we write and research (Letherby 2003), we must also acknowledge Mills's own historical, geopolitical and biographical location, writing as he was in the context of US society and sociology in the 1940s and 1950s (Brewer 2004). As Carol Smart (2009, 297) says of Mills, we “cannot import him wholesale into a sociological project some fifty years later in a different time and place,” but we can continue to appreciate his contribution and acknowledge his influence on our own sociological imaginations. Mills could not be expected to anticipate or even imagine events and developments that occurred after his death in 1962.