ABSTRACT
In “seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper … and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity,” E. P. Thompson sought to unveil “the making of the English working class.” 1 In so doing, he made explicit that, while class was central to his analysis, it was not to be understood as a structure or even a category of analysis, but as “an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness.” 2 Through such an approach, he gave life to class, as well as to the people themselves, and thereby moved the fields of labor and social history away from a focus on institutional history to an emphasis on history from the ground up. Despite the fact that women themselves did not emerge center-stage, the importance of this study for women’s history was implicit and its impact profound.
