The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
One problem for the early modernist is that feminist writing on the nineteenth century has tended to force upon historians of the early modern period an unenviable task, that of locating a bon vieux temps when women enjoyed a harmonious, if hard-working, domestic role and social responsibility before they were downgraded into social parasites or factory fodder under the corrupting hand of capitalism. So far the location of this bon vieux temps has proved remarkably elusive.2