Abstract

What is the relationship between class and gender? This question has been both a perennial and problematic one within the women’s movement. Also within academic criticism, the two concepts have often been repeated as part of the mantra of gender, race and class, with class being perfunctorily mentioned, but hardly explored. The link between gender and race has seemed easier to trace, since both represent biological and cultural categories within patriarchy that, while certainly in need of some serious reinventing and restructuring, retain positive qualities that will always be with us. Class, in contrast, is a condition of oppression and exploitation that sits uneasily with the other two or is left out of the gender equation altogether. Thus, as Diane Reay notes, mainstream “feminism in the 1990s appears to have abandoned social class ” (Reay 2004: 141). Why is this? In part it is due to the fact that the debate within second-wave feminism was often aimed at distancing the movement from marxism,