Viola Klein: Forgotten Émigré Intellectual, Public Sociologist and Advocate of Women

Abstract

This article revisits the much neglected work of Viola Klein, one of the first sociologists of women in Britain. Her contribution to sociology lies both in her innovative work on patriarchal conceptions of seemingly scientific knowledge about women, undertaken under the tutelage of Karl Mannheim, and in her empirical studies of women's changing position in the labour market. The article places her work in a biographical as well as theoretical context and raises issues about the impact of her triple marginality as a Jewish refugee to Britain, a woman in search of an academic career, and as a public sociologist in women's studies, at the time not seen as a mainstream field in sociology, nor uniformly understood by later waves of feminist theorists.