1988/07/01 by Janet Thomas · 2 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
paper · doi:10.1017/s001041750001536x
openalex publication_date 1988/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.