Response to John French
After researching and writing my article, the one thing concerning issues of "ideology" and "practice" about which I am sure is that gender analyses anger some historians. John French's response to the article is fairly representative of negative reactions to the use of gender as a category of analysis. He fails to engage the artcle's arguments with new evidence or a reinterpretation of existing documentation. Instead, he attacks it as lacking "proof" and an "empirical" foundation.' I believe the article is well supported and that French's objection is that I do not document an argument-about women's lack of labor activity-which he puts forth and I reject. In order to attack the article, French misconstrues its main theses. He discusses at length, for example, alternative explanations for women workers' quiescence and then chides me for not engaging those ideas. The reason I do not refer to women's powerlessness is that I do not believe women shied away from strikes and other protest activities; I believe they often led them. In the article I argue that women organized on their own, around those issues they considered most important because of the sexual division of labor in working-class households and within Paulistano industry. Women's organizing and protest activities, I argue, played a key role in convincing many male anarchists to adopt more of a "bread and butter" perspective in the late 1910S and throughout the 1920S. I do not see the