This article seeks to analyze prevalent paradigms of class formation, to critique their neglect of gender, and to explore the implications of bringing gender into the existing models. The author suggests that the two forms of absence-theoretical and historical-empirical-are related, and propose to evaluate the theoretical concepts of class and class formation in terms of a historical case study of male and female textile workers in Germany between 1880 and 1930. This attempt to insert gender as a category of historical analysis and women as historical subjects into prevalent models of class formation results not in the seamless integration Wierling imagines but in the transformation of the model itself.
