"Lurking in the Wings...": Women in the Historiography of the Industrial Revolution

The analysis of gender develops through four stages [40]. First comes the realization of how much women have been neglected, and second the exposure of theoretical and empirical fallacies made glaringly apparent by this realization. In the third stage, the results of research on women are added to mainstream discussions, which gives rise to yet a fourth stage in which the resulting analytical dualism is criticized and demands are made for greater integration. The stages are discernible in the development of economic historians' interest in women. The first priority was to learn more about women in order to rectify earlier neglect. This stage of the research program has flourished. Building on the classic texts [for example, 32, 10], and continuing through new studies of wives, mothers, and workers with different class backgrounds and family circumstances, a picture of the economic experience of women has emerged. But work on women was needed for correctness as well as completeness. Women had to be put back into the historical contexts from which they had been abstracted, and in the process economic historians needed to revise their understanding not only of the historical meaning of gender but also of the economic processes in which women were now seen as active participants [34]. As yet integration remains rudimentary. Mainstream economic history's lack of response to the accumulation of research on women is all the more surprising in that historical analysis of gender has affirmed women's importance in economic life. Subordinated as they might have been politically and socially, this did not exclude women from work, consumption, thrift, or accumulation. Indeed women's subordination seems to have been interwoven with their economic activities so that it molded