Open Educational Resources (OER)

This textbook introduces key feminist concepts and analytical frameworks used in the interdisciplinary Women, Gender, Sexualities field. It unpacks the social construction of knowledge and categories of difference, processes and structures of power and inequality, with a focus on gendered labor in the global economy, and the historical development of feminist social movements. The book emphasizes feminist sociological approaches to analyzing structures of power, drawing heavily from empirical feminist research.

Household Politics paints a vivid and prickly portrait of gender relations in early modern England. It's just not true, Herzog argues, that contemporaries "naturalized" or "essentialized" patriarchal authority: they saw it as political and fought about it endlessly. Nor is it true that a gendered public/private distinction made the political subordination of women invisible: indeed understanding how women were public is crucial in understanding the terms of their domination. Against left and right alike, Herzog argues that conflict isn't an acid bath eating away at social order, but is what social order ordinarily consists in. To cash out that abstract view, he reconstructs practices of domestic service.