ABSTRACT
This book is about a longstanding debate in feminist and social science literature: the relationship between class and patriarchy. For two decades and more, sociologists and feminists have argued about that relationship. Key questions have been: in what way are the two axes of social division related? which, if either, has primacy? what, if any, is the degree of autonomy for each? That debate and the questions addressed within it can be seen as paradigmatic forms of modernist feminist and sociological inquiry and critique. It has been concerned with an analysis of large-scale social inequalities and their causes; and it has been informed by the enlightenment view of the individual subject as capable of questioning truth through reason, and using it to construct an emancipatory politics.
