"THE MOST SUFFERING CLASS": Gender, Class and Consciousness in Pre-Marxist France.

The article focuses on the gender representation in bourgeois society in pre-Marxist France. Because early discussions on the proletariat are a site of ideological manufacture, they reveal raw ideologemes often invisible when, once firmly in place, ideology naturalizes social construction as fact. The first French utopian socialist movement Saint-Simonians' seemingly feminist discourse served their efforts to render ideologically innocuous a discursively unstable and potentially dangerous social group. The consequences of the Saint-Simonian rhetorical work of gender for feminism are not entirely negative.