The short text has been at the centre of dispute and analysis in the working class, labour and socialist movement for three decades.
Over four editions and constant re-printings it has informed the debates in the trade union movement, animated discussions in academic circles, been fiercely contested and defended in the women's movement and has educated successive waves of young communists, socialists and trade unionists.
Mary Davis brings to these renewed debates a marxist analysis of the role of women in class society, provides a sharply polemical introduction to competing conceptions of feminist theory and dissects the ways in which women's work in class society is experienced as both oppression and exploitation.
In a newly revised section she provides a firm repudiation of new forms of idealist thinking about sex, gender and identity that constitute a barrier to practical action and materialist thought