Series: Feminist Classics

Along with her mother Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading women’s suffrage activists in early twentieth-century England, working with the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. Unlike her family, however, who looked to parliament and spoke to elite and middle-class women’s concerns, Sylvia consistently looked to working women and the labour movement as central...

Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby's most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon analyses diverse aspects of US and British culture. Carby's writing is invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Cultures in Babylon quickly became a standard reference point in debates over race, ethnicity, and gender. With a new...

The Heart of the Race is a powerful record of life as a black woman in Britain. Grandmothers drawn to the promise of the "mother country" in the 1950s talk of a different reality; young girls describe how their aspirations at school were largely ignored; working women tell of their commitments to families, jobs, and communities. First published in 1985,...

In this landmark study of American labour history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organisers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in...

Scrutinizing the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Woman's Estate describes the organisation of women's liberation in Western Europe and America, locating the areas of women's oppression in four key areas: work, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children. Through a detailed study of the modern family and...

Sadly no less relevant today than when it was first published, this prize-winning study is the definitive text on the politics of abortion and fertility. Drawing on a wealth of material, Petchesky provides overwhelming evidence against the anti-abortion forces and also takes up issues of teenage sexuality, the politics of eugenics, and women's relationship to medical technology. Petchesky deftly weaves...

The stereotypical nuclear family is in the minority of households, yet remains a powerful ideology. This classic of socialist feminism charts how the family reinforces conditions of inequality, and asks: Why does the family enjoy such popular support, including by feminists and the left? Despite its many problems, The Anti-Social Family answers, the family meets real needs. These needs must...