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Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation? A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Janet Thomas
Janet Thomas
Affiliation:
University of Keele
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Extract

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions—also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view.1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.

Type
Inventing Women's Roles
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 1988 , pp. 534 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1988

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