Women's Studies in British Sociology: To End at Our Beginning?

'Men are rarely conscious of the quality of the air they breathe', wrote R. H. Tawney in 1931 with the firmly unconscious sexism that characterizes his writings, and many of those in this period in which British sociology was attempting to form its own distinctive tradition. Tawney's Equality, suitably dedicated to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, was concerned with differences in rank and status and power and property in the real world, and not as obtaining within what counts as 'knowledge' of the facts, interpretation and understanding of that world. None the less, Tawney's identification of the obstacle to progress as being chiefly 'the habit of mind which thinks it ... natural and desirable that different sections of a community should be distinguished from each other' would do as well today as an explanation of the impact of feminism on academic