ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the arguments put forward by socialist women and identifies differences between them. It discusses that these differences, as well as changes in the perspective of individual women over time, need to be understood within their specific historical context and also in the context of the personal experience of the woman putting them forward. During the 1880s and 1890s British socialist groups all expressed a complex range of arguments around the Woman Question. Socialist women sought to ensure that debates about woman’s nature, the social construction of gender and the meaning of women’s emancipation would not just be left to the women’s movement but would be placed on the socialist agenda. It is difficult to disentangle women’s attempts to develop a theoretical understanding of the relationship between feminism and socialism from their response to particular issues and to current political debates.
