1992/06/01 by Kathleen Canning · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #European history and politics
paper · doi:10.2307/2164779
CLASS FORMATION IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MARKERS of the economic and social transformation of nineteenth-century Europe, of the dissolution of feudal estate society and the rise of a modern, industrial urban society. Class is also a keyword in the vocabulary of social and labor history, one that occupies a central place in a process of rethinking and recasting the conceptual framework of social history that is currently under way in the United States, Britain, and France.' The emergence of gender as a category of historical analysis and the growing importance of language in the theory and practice of social history have undermined the stability of the historical and analytical vocabulary of social and labor history, especially of the concepts of experience, agency, and class. The linguistic turn combined with the theoretical innovations of feminist history have resulted in a disorienting epistemological crisis in social history, during which the concepts of class and class formation have been challenged and redefined.2