ABSTRACT
Perhaps a more apposite term would be ‘women's lack of treatment’. The conventional sociological view of women's social class position is that it is mediated through their relationship with men, while men's social class is deemed to be independent, unaffected by the women they live with. When women are made visible in classificatory systems such as Goldthorpe's, it becomes apparent that the relative stability of men's social class status is being achieved at the cost of a hidden, female, social-class instability. Regardless of whether the social class debate is being conducted by men taking the ‘conventional’ stance, other men seeking to modify that stance, or feminists contesting the status quo, the focus is still on the labour market position. Sociological language cannot be either ‘neutral’ or ‘clear’. The word ‘class’ will never be a neutral word as long as there are classes: the question of the existence or non-existence of classes is a stake in struggle between the classes.
