ABSTRACT
In 1985 Sue Webb argued that the re-formulation of the social class debate which had then resurfaced in the journal Sociology was primarily for and about male sociologists (Webb, 1985). In 1995 the debate in Sociology continues: the ‘problem’ of women and class is discussed, for example, by Richard Breen and Christopher Whelan (1995) and Stephen Roberts and Gordon Marshall (1995). I believe, however, that there are more fruitful ways to analyse people’s lives which do not involve a classification of the lives of one half of the world’s population from the perspective of a small part of the other half. I argue here for an approach which centres people as active participants in the construction of categories such as ‘women’ or ‘class’ and which makes their experiences important tools for analysis.
