Clark is also rewriting history for the ‘casualities of history’ she is rescuing women who were previously a recognised subaltern part of the patriarchal society during the industrial revolution. She is re-visioning the narrative in The Making with the intention of privileging gender, not to replace the history of manhood with the history of working-class women, but to ‘infuse gender’. Women are marginalised in Thompson’s narrative and presented as a masculine version of working-class history. He delineates that his monograph is a ‘biography of the English working-class from its adolescence until is early manhood’, within the first few pages the tone of a universal male working-class identity has been set. Notwithstanding, Thompson acknowledged that domestic servants made up ‘the largest single group of working people’ in 1830, but despite this he neglected to analyse their position in the class struggle, only mentioning that the trade unionists perceived them to be so entrenched within upper class subservience that their experience did not resonate with the working-class. Overall the structure of Thompson’s narrative seeks to place emphasis on the role of men. Paradoxically, Thompson’s concept that class was a relationship, rather than a thing, is better tailored to fit the domestic service, more so compared to any other profession, as it is an example of the most intimate relation of class. In this sense, The Making provides inspiration for the socialist feminist discourse. Thompson working within a Marxist framework, to create a ‘conscious class,’ means he overlooks certain relationships that do not fit.

Even conventional Marxists such as Hobswbawm began to include the gender dimension Marx had omitted from his theory. Hobsbawm articulated his ‘‘embarrassed astonishment’’ that the survey of the state of social history he carried out in 1971 did not ‘‘reference … women’s history’’. Hobsbawm is perceived to be a conservative in his beliefs, rarely straying from orthodoxy. Yet his deviation and willingness to incorporate gender demonstrates how other historians can also adapt and intersect their ideas with aspects such as gender or even race, as history progresses.

Captain Swing, woven together by historians of different approaches: Hobsbawm, more intertwined in the deep-rooted Marxist interpretation of economic and social history, Rudé, was interested in the revolutionary crowd in terms of agency. Their book is an example of how despite differing ideas, it is possible