Industrialization and Women's Work: Case Studies of Patterns of Female Employment in Normandy, Flanders and the Centre-Loire Valley, 1715-1900

The concept of industrialization has consistently produced a wealth of scholarship concerned with its
nature, timeline, causes, and consequences and, in recent decades, growing interest in women's history
has both perpetuated and significantly reshaped interest in the question. Although the validity of protoindustrialization1
as a tool for explaining processes of industrialization has been largely discarded,
2
a
combination of the ongoing interest in consumption as a motor for economic growth3 and protoindustrialization
theory's focus on the household as a unit of production and consumption has
maintained interest in the concept as a framework for historians wishing to survey women's
interactions with market forces in the early modern period. More recently, the focus on women's work
has produced numerous works concerned with the impact of industrialization on women's labour
opportunities