1 Introduction:Some Facts in the Case This chapter attempts to show why a social analysis of gender is needed for a comprehension of personal life,politics and society as a whole.It makes out a prima-facie case for the enterprise. Accordingly the facts are set out here with little commentary. Their interpretation is provided by the rest of the book. The first part of the chapter takes one person-an Australian teenager called Delia Prince-as a point of departure and explores how her circumstances and choices are shaped in terms of sex and gender.Delia has not been chosen to represent a particular 'type'; the point is,rather,that the same kind of analysis would be needed to understand any individual life.The second part of the chapter looks at the collectivities Delia lives in:city,state,country,world. Here I discuss some of the statistical and institutional evidence about sex inequality and sexual politics.This too is illustrative. The topic is vast and only a fragment of the evidence can be recited in a single chapter.But it is perhaps enough to demonstrate the scale and importance of the issues. A Teenager and her Family Delia Prince (the name is a pseudonym)is one of the teenagers my colleagues and I interviewed in 1978,along with their parents and teachers,in the research project later published as Making the Difference.The research was an attempt to understand the circumstances,in school,family and workplace,that lay behind the massively greater drop-out rate from working-class high schools compared with ruling-class secondary colleges