ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The contours of feminist social science in 1990s Britain are very different from those of the 1970s and 1980s (Spender, 1981; Kramarae and Spender, 1992). There are large active groups of feminists working at all levels in disciplines ranging from sociology, accounting and economics, to politics, anthropology and development, to law, to economic and social history. Mainstream social science journals, such as Sociology, are considerably more sympathetic to feminist material than such journals were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while a range of specialist academic feminist journals, such as Gender, Gender & History, Women’s History Review, Gender and Education, and Feminism & Psychology, now stand alongside Women’s Studies International Forum and Feminist Review. The academic job market is tighter and considerably more depressed (and depressing); and, although jobs still go mainly to the boys, these days many more people, departments and institutions are embarrassed about it. There is a wider recognition of the limitations, as well as the strengths, of feminist systems of thought as of others. Structuralist approaches-particularly functionalism, marxism and conjunctions between the two-are no longer in the vanguard, and feminist versions of postmodernism, deconstructionism and post-structuralism confidently stalk our intellectual landscape.
