ABSTRACT

The essays which make up Becoming a Woman were written over a twenty-year period, between 1974 and 1993. Arranged more or less chronologically, there is a narrative embedded in them: a story of the study of women in our times. The first essay, ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century London: a study of the years 1820–60s’ is resolutely material, its object being to make working women visible in a history that had hidden them. ‘Most historians define the working class de facto as working men…. The labour historian has ignored women as workers—on the labour market and within the household.’ What now seems merely commonsensical in such an opening was then both radical and unsettling. Marxism, gender-blind, nevertheless offered a coherent theoretical baseline of a broadly emancipatory kind for women historians who wanted more than a piecemeal women’s history. In the 1950s and 1960s, British Marxist historians of the New Left were reappraising all history, conceptualizing it in a way which could bring in new subjects not previously seen as historical agents. They were enormously influential as writers and teachers. It is not at all surprising that feminist history should have hitched itself to the wagon; nor that the fragmentation of the previously stable category ‘Woman’ should have contributed to the breakup of what Heidi Hartmann called ‘The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism’. The narrative we are offered here enacts that break, and a key essay, ‘Women, class and sexual difference in the 1830s and 1840s: some reflections on the writing of a feminist history’ engages directly with it. The overall trajectory of the collection takes us from the material to the subjective; from exteriority to interiority; from the concrete to the fantastic; from the economic to the unconscious; from what is to what is felt to be; from how things are to the meaning of what they seem; from a Marxist history to psychoanalysis.