Women Take Issue
Women Take Issue draws on collective and individual research by members of the Womens Studies Group at the Centre. It concentrates on the problems of analysing womens subordination in Britain.
The book opens with a retrospective article which comes to grips with the problem of doing feminist intellectual work through the experience of the Womens Studies Group. This is followed by an analysis of some aspects of the early womens movement. In the third section economic approaches to the basis of womens oppression are examined for their usefulness and limitations.
The second half of the book includes articles on:
The culture of teenage girls
Young working class women at home
Woman the problem of femininity as constructed in this magazine
Womens reproductive role through class and history
Anthropology
Women, kinship structures and family.
This combination of theoretical work and contemporary case studies engages constructively with the traditions of cultural analysis from a feminist perspective, and contributes to the study of womens situation in Britain.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham. It is notable for producing many key studies and researchers in the field of Cultural Studies. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, who became the first centre director. The Cultural Studies department at the University of Birmingham was closed in 2002.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Classic Texts
6 volume set
Volume I:Making Histories
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Volume II:Off-Centre
Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey
Volume III:On Ideology
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Volume IV:Unpopular Education
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Volume V:Women Take Issue
Womens Studies Group
Volume VI:Working Class Culture
John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson
Available as a complete set:
ISBN10: 0-415-41259-5
ISBN13: 978-0-415-41259-9
Women Take Issue
Aspects of womens subordination
Womens Studies Group
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
University of Birmingham
Editorial Group
Lucy Bland
Charlotte Brunsdon
Martin Culverwell
Rachel Harrison
Dorothy Hobson
Trisha McCabe
Frank Mort
Rebecca ORourke
Olivia Smith
Christine Weedon
Janice Winship
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Volume V: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Classic Texts
First published 1978 by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
An imprint of the Hutchinson Publishing Group
This edition published 2007 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
First issued in paperback 2012
Womens Studies Group 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN13: 978-0-415-51258-9 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-40829-5 (Volume V)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-41259-9 (Set)
Contents
We would like to thank all the members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies who have helped in various stages of the production of this book. Special thanks to those who helped with the typing, running off and reading of drafts, particularly in the last rushed weeks. Thanks also to Claire LEnfant of Hutchinson. Finally, we would not have been able to produce this book without the support of our various households and friends.
Editorial Group
This book has been produced by a group of nine women and two men, some of whom have previously worked together in the Womens Studies Group (WSG) at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). This is a postgraduate research centre where students and teachers, as well as conducting individual research, work collectively in groups organized around areas of shared interest -for example, education, media, womens studies. This form of work allows groups to define their own area of study without the formal division teacher/taught or the constraint of examinations. There is also usually some continuity in group membership which makes it possible to attempt extended and continuing collective work. This work is annually presented to the whole of the department in the summer term and has formed the basis for issues of the journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies.
When we decided to do this book we thought we were deciding to produce the eleventh issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies (). Ten issues, with only four articles concerning women it seemed about time. Womens continuing invisibility in the journal, and in much of the intellectual work done within CCCS (although things are changing), is the result of a complex of factors, which although in their particular combination are specific to our own relatively privileged situation, are not unique to it. We want here to outline some of the problems the Womens Studies Group has faced, in a way which gives this book some sort of history, but also attempts to deal with the more general problems of womens studies and trying to do feminist intellectual work.
Our situation, as a group of research students, may seem very removed from that of women trying to introduce non-sexist teaching materials in schools, running womens studies (WS) courses on a shoe-string or trying to do feminist research alone in an unsympathetic department or at home with kids. We think, however, that the very different problems of each specific academic environment in which we try to work as feminists are informed by broadly the same basic issues and needs. We are all involved in some way in challenging both the existing understanding of society, and the role and construction of sex/gender within this, and the ways in which this understanding is achieved and transmitted. It is through the questions that feminism poses, and the absences it locates, that feminist research and womens studies are constituted as one aspect of the struggle for the transformation of society which would make womens studies unnecessary.
Working as a group in an academic context raises in a particular way the problems of the relationship between intellectual and political practice. Our relationship to the Womens Liberation Movement (WLM) as a group has been ambiguous. For some of us the WSG is our closest contact with the WLM. Others are more active in relation to womens liberation outside an academic context. This topic, and our disagreements over what our practice should be, dominated our early discussions about taking the journal on. The questions this raised became the problem of whom to address in our writings: how far could we assume our readers to be Marxists, or feminists, or both, or neither? We also had to try to be self-conscious about the use we made of theoretical concepts to help us to understand womens subordination more precisely; to avoid a general tendency in CCCS towards an
