Sandra Dijkstra’s study recovers Flora Tristan as one of the nineteenth century’s early attempts to approach intersectionality, specifically the relationship between class and gender. 

Moving through Tristan’s writing, travels and activism in France, Peru and Britain, Dijkstra traces how her experience of marriage, poverty, exclusion and industrial labour shaped a feminism that was inseparable from her emerging socialism. Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah, Promenades in London and The Workers’ Union show the development of a politics that really reacted/shimmered the economic structures producing dependence in the first place. 

Originally published in 1992 and reissued by Verso in 2019, the book is a good look at who was looking at this kind of theory in a very serious and contemporary way, much before Marx and Engels had consolidated the language of Marxism, and before “feminism” had settled into the political category we now recognise. Dijkstra places her beside the utopian socialists, the emerging workers’ movement and writers including George Sand, showing someone constructing a politics from several traditions before their borders hardened.

Verso, London, 2019. New edition; originally published by Pluto Press in 1992. Paperback. Very light shelf and handling wear to covers; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.