ABSTRACT
There is a connection between the study of ‘language’ and the study of gender, when both are carefully defined; that certain epistemological theories, by providing historians with a way to analyze how gender figures in the construction of social and political meaning, thereby provide us with a way to recast the understanding of the place of gender in history, of the operations of sexual difference in the ‘making’ of the working class. Those who contest the notion that the working class was embodied in masculine form usually point to the fact that women participated in and supported the utopian movement. The ‘language’ of class, placed women (and children) in auxiliary and dependent positions. One cannot understand how concepts of class acquired legitimacy and established political movements without examining concepts of gender. The link between gender and class is conceptual; it is a link every bit as material as the link between productive forces and relations of production.
