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Reviewed by Wendy Stocker Project Ploughshares Conrad Grebel College Waterloo, Ontario
Catherine Hall is Reader in Cultural Studies at the Polytechnic of East London. She is also a self - declared feminist, a British Marxist historian in the tradition of the Co mmunist Party Historians' Group that includes Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson, a middle - class, white woman married to a non - white man, and the mother of mixed - race children. In the first of ten essays which make up this book, she provides a critique of her work as an hi storian, finding significant connections between her early training in materialist, socialist his tory, her position as a working woman professional, and her family life, on the one hand, and the f ocus of her academic interest on the other. After reading her opening essay, it is easy to understand why she would be drawn to such topics as "The History of the Housewife," "The Butche r, the Baker, the Candlestick - maker: The Shop and the Family in the Industrial Revolution," and "Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s." From her own development as a woman and a professional, from her position in contemporary Bri tish society, she has developed a desire to understand the connections between gender and cult ure, gender and class, gender and work. These topics are the concern of the middle six essa ys in the book. Finally, the last two essays look at "the shifting and contingent relations of g ender, class, race and ethnicity between the 1830s and the...