ABSTRACT
This essay was written early in 1965 before the final formulation of the five-class model and before the recent surge of interest in women’s liberation led to a considerable re-writing of the history of women and women’s movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I include it here as originally published in 1967 because nothing that has been written since has invalidated the main line of argument and because it shows how, lacking an explicit theoretical framework, I was then groping for an adequate model of social change incorporating relationships of authority and subordination, the concept of class as a political rather than an economic category and the role of dependence and deference in inhibiting conflict. The major contribution of recent writers on contemporary women’s movements is that they have made explicit that the issue between the sexes is essentially about the loci of power in a patriarchal society, that it is consequently a political issue in the widest sense and, therefore, in the terminology of the five-class model a class conflict. In writing thus they have moved the social class consciousness of increasing numbers of women to a new political awareness. If women in the past were merely members of loosely knit quasigroups many are now class-conscious members of a new political class. And, if I were to re-write any part of this essay on the relationships between male working-class movements, working-class women and women from the middle and upper classes, I would make more of the clash resulting from the relative authority positions of men and women in a paternalistic society, and more of the conflict between the privatized but deferential attitudes of women like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and the more proletarian and non-deferential positions of the Women’s Co-operative Guild and Sylvia Pankhurst. I see more clearly now that the Suffragettes were the Philosophic Radicals of the women’s movement with only some of their strengths but with all of their weaknesses.
