E. P. Thompson, the feminine condition in The Making of the English Working Class and his personal, academic and political relations with women: Notes for its analysis.

Abstract

These notes come back, in the first place, about an analysis of The Making of the working class by E. P. Thompson, whose influence has been incontestable in the approches of the social historiography of the second half of the 20th Century, with the purpose of estimating the relative absence of the feminine condition in that text. However, diverse moments in which there are delayed mentions to certain profiles of workers, to their mobilisations, to millenary figures, and especially, to whom acted with emancipatory demands of women, are recovered. In second term, this article examines the academic, political and affective relations of E. P. Thompson with a small number of women that had influence in his life: his wife, the historian, Dorothy Thompson, the featured feminist Sheila Rowbotham, the notable historian of women Natalie Zemon Davies, and the communist militant Diana Torr, in great measure, promotor of the “marxist historians” group in England.