In this important theoretical and historical work, Brazilian sociologist Heleieth Saffioti deals with the interaction between the universal division of society based on sex and the capitalist division into classes. She focuses on two forms of capitalist society, the advanced and the emerging, with attention to the role of international capitalism in determining the particular problems of any minority in a dependent country.

The first section of the book is a theoretical analysis of the woman question, including a discussion of class and status in stratified society, which is then extended to the position of women under capitalism; of woman's labor and its relationship to the question of levels of consciousness; and of a possible socialist perspective. This sets the framework for the second section, which provides a detailed analysis of the Brazilian experience as it relates to women, especially in terms of their changing roles in the economy and their long struggle for equal education.

The final section integrates the foregoing into a broader framework, the goal of which is to demystify the way in which social science assimilates bourgeois practice. It begins with two short essays, one on Freudian theory and the other on the anthropological theory of cultural relativism as they have treated women. The major issue that emerges from these essays - the nature of the linkages between occupational and kinship structures under capitalism - is then explored in depth. Finally, the position of women is placed within a dialectical perspective. Throughout, Saffioti's argument is based on a Marxian analysis supplemented by the insights of Weber and the French structuralists.