Women and Class Analysis: A Reply to the Replies

In this note my main concern is to respond to the comments on my paper 'Women and Class Analysis: in Defence of the Conventional View' (. Sociology , vol. 17, no. 4) that have been offered by Stanworth ( Sociology , vol. 18, no. 2) and by Heath and Britten (this number). I shall however also refer frequently to Erikson's paper, 'Social Class of Men, Women and Families' (this number) since it is of obvious relevance to the issues under debate. It is always congenial to find one's critics at odds among themselves, and the disagreements explicit and implicit between Stanworth and Heath and Britten are evident enough. I shall return to them in due course. First, though, I would like to note one respect in which they seem in accord for what is here indicated is that they have alike failed to engage with the central thrust of my original argument. Both Stanworth and Heath and Britten apparently think that my position must be necessarily and automatically undermined to the extent that it can be shown that the employment of married women 'makes a difference'. Thus, the purpose of the analyses on which the latter report in their Tables 6-8 is to show that the employment of married women is associated with their political partisanship and their fertility; and while Stanworth's paper contains no comparable analyses, she invokes 'accumulated information' which indicates that wives' employment has an important effect on family income, family saving, home ownership etc. However, there would be point in all this only if I had sought to deny effects of the kind in question which I most certainly did not do. 1 The chief concern of my paper was with the way in which the position of married women has been treated by exponents of class analysis. More specifically, I aimed to show that their approach was a more considered one than critics had recognized and that charges of 'intellectual sexism' were unwarranted. In this regard, I was at some pains to spell out what, as I understood it, class analysis did, and did not, attempt to do. Here I can only refer the reader to my original text (pp. 467-8, 483 esp.) and make the following summary points. (i) Class analysis aims first to establish how far classes have formed as relatively stable collectivities.