Sex and Class in Women's History (HISTORY WORKSHOP SERIES)

This volume, which focuses on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America and includes work by scholars in both countries, takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. The collection adopts what Joan Kelly . . . calls 'the doubled vision of feminist theory,' the view that it is the simultaneous operation of relations of class and of sex/gender that perpetuate both patriarchy and capitalism. . . . Many of these articles had their origin at an international conference in women's history at which the theoretical and political agendas of feminist historians were discussed with a vigour and urgency possible only where scholarship is infused with social aims. Both the vigour and the urgency can be clearly felt in the essays collected here."