Integrating analytical tools from feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology to illuminate detailed historical evidence, Sonya Rose argues that gender was a central principle of the 19th century industrial transformation in England.
Sonya O. Rose specializes in the study of women and gender in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, and has recently turned her attention to the impact of empire and decolonization on British metropolitan life. Her publications deal with the intersections of gender and class in the development of industrial capitalism, and she has published both theoretical and historiographical essays on the subjects of gender, class formation and citizenship. She has also published on nineteenth-century family and household strategies, and on national identity and citizenship in World War II Britain.
Sonya Rose uses gender as a lens of understanding the working class in industrial 1800s England. Gender as a lens can be used for understanding both men and women ("men are gendered, too"). Ideas of what masculinity and femininity were often shaped class relations, gender relations, politics, and workplace relationships.