The aim of this chapter is to present a historiographical account of research on women's employment in the nineteenth century. This will provide a framework for the following chapters. My approach is certainly not novel: many historians have furnished their accounts of gender, work and industrialisation with a similar grounding. However, it is worth reiterating the main stands of this historical debate in order to locate the subject of rural women's employment within the broader context of research on women and work in the nineteenth century. This chapter does not discuss the protracted and complex path taken by economic history towards becoming more sensitive to the implications of gender. Nor does it assess the subtle divisions between the approaches taken by women's history, gender history and feminist history. Katrina Honeyman has recently provided an excellent account of economic history's tendency to marginalise women and recent efforts to mainstream gender history within the context of industrialisation, as well as the broad developments in feminist history. Instead, the following section appraises the key themes and debates that have resulted from scholarly research on women, work and industrialisation in the past thirty years or so. This will be followed by a consideration of the major arguments that have dominated recent agrarian history and a review of new endeavours designed to write women into the rural historiography. The chapter will close with an analysis of sources for the study of rural women's work, highlighting the uses and limitations of material on which the book is based. Overall it is my intention in this chapter to bring together the foremost scholarship on investigating and interpreting the economic position of nineteenth-century women in an accessible and informative forum.