WOMEN AND CLASS ANALYSIS: A REPLY TO THE REPLIES.

This article presents the author's remarks on review of his paper "Women and Class Analysis: In Defence of the Conventional View." The chief concern of this paper was with the way in which the position of married women has been treated by exponents of class analysis. More specifically, the author aimed to show that their approach was a more considered one than critics had recognized and that charges of intellectual sexism were unwarranted. According to him, class analysis aims first to establish how far classes have formed as relatively stable collectivities. From the standpoint of class analysis, how far variation in any particular aspect of social behavior or relationships, within the population at large, can actually be accounted for in terms of class membership is entirely a matter for investigation as the author says, it has never been supposed by class analysts that the variable of class membership itself can provide the basis for any complete mapping of socio-cultural patterns. He shows that exponents of class analysis could accept differences attributable to the employment of married women of the kind referred to by critics without being thereby required to depart from the conventional view that the class position of the family is a unitary one which derives from that of its head.