In Knowledgeable Women, originally published in 1989, Sara Delamont traces the history of women's education and the elites it produces. She examines class and gender divisions in the structure and contest of education in Britain and the USA from 1850 to 1989. Her empirical focus is of course elites – especially elite women – but the justification for this is the belief that sociologists should study the powerful as well as the poor and powerless. Above all, Delamont argues the case for the relevance to sociology of a serious study of women, their schooling and professional training, and their struggle to enter the professions.
She also encourages a broader focus to the sociology of education itself, viewing her subject from an anthropological structuralist perspective and encouraging the inclusion of anti-sexist ideas and material from other areas of sociology such as the study of science and stratification. She demonstrates for the first time the relevance to education of structuralist theorists such as Mary Douglas.
Knowledgeable Women is a structuralist and feminist challenge to the sociology of education by an author highly regarded in Britain and the USA. It offers a non-sexist, structuralist, fully sociological sociology of education.