Kmflett's Blog

Controversial histories: Revisiting E P Thompson & Women’s History

Barbara Taylor has an important and thought provoking piece on E P Thompson, gender and women’s history on-line at History Workshop

As she points out the writing and understanding of the history of working class women remains very much a work in progress.

Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class focuses on men, and criticisms of the absence of women as active makers did make an impact on him as Taylor notes.

Two points stand out for me in particular.

Firstly that while Thompson did come to engage with women’s and feminist histories he was less enthusiastic about actual socialist feminist activists (particularly in North London it seems!) in the 1970s and 1980s. It might be suggested that without such activists there would be a lot less of a focus on women’s history today.

Secondly Taylor refers to Thompson’s essay on Wife Sales which can be found in his collection Customs in Common. Thompson argued that these were essentially a means of divorce before it became legal.

There followed an exchange of letters in early 1990s editions of History Workshop- the last was in 1994 just after Thompson had died. Raphael Samuel argued that Thompson had ignored the reality that wife sales often had a background of rape and adultery. Thompson in a response justified his research.

I was also part of the exchanges, though understandably Taylor passes over my Fletter. Thirty years it only just about stands to be revisited. A summary of my argument is that Thompson might have found other matters to research balanced by the point that socialist historians should not avoid the awkward questions of history. From a 2024 angle this looks like some uncomfortable fence system. Samuel’s criticism had weight and one of the reasons Thompson didn’t accept it I suspect was precisely because he was not open enough to the research and arguments of socialist feminist historians of the 1970s and 1980s. His perspectives had been formed in earlier generations and it just did not compute..