The Gendering of the British Working Class

How have feminist historians transformed the account of class formation and consciousness articulated in Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class? Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Woman , Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches , Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods , and Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil place the gendering of the British working class at the center of the process and explain the peculiar limitations of the working‐class movement. The essay also places these books in the theoretical tradition of socialist feminism and considers them as responses to Joan Scott’s call for a poststructuralist approach to gender, class and power.