¹ For example Hartmann, Heidi, ‘Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex’, Signs 1 (1976), 137–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, work and the family (New York, 1978), Barbara Hanawalt ed., Women and work in preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986); Martha Howell, Women, production and patriarchy in late medieval cities (Chicago, 1986); Merry Wiesner, Working women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, 1986); Bridget Hill, Women, work and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England (Oxford, 1989); W. R. Lee and Pat Hudson, Women's work and the family economy in historical perspective (Manchester, 1990); Honeyman, Katrina and Goodman, Jordan, ‘Women's work, gender conflict, and labour markets in Europe, 1500–1900’, Economic History Review 44 (1991), 608–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daryl Hafter ed., European women and preindustrial craft (Bloomington, 1995); Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to capitalism: working women in the English economy, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1996); Monica Chojnacka, Working women in early modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001); Sheilagh Ogilvie, A bitter living: women, markets and social capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003); Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working women in English society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge, 2005); van Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise, ‘Segmentation in the pre-industrial labour market: women's work in the Dutch textile industry, 1581–1810’, International Review of Social History 51 (2006), 189–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hannah Barker, The business of women: female enterprise and urban development in Northern England 1760–1830 (Oxford, 2006); and Nicola Phillips, Women in business 1700–1850 (Woodbridge, 2006). See also the research projects ‘Women's work in the Northern Netherlands, 1500–1800’, International Institute of Social History Amsterdam, the Netherlands (started in 2002) http://www.iisg.nl/research/womenswork.php, ‘Women and work in the early modern Southern Netherlands’, University of Antwerp (started in 2007) and the Swedish Gender and Work Database, Uppsala University and Umeå University (started in 2008).

² See for a recent example Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The first modern economy: success, failure, and perseverance of the Dutch economy, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1997), 596.

³ The other shadow figures are daughters. Also living within the household economy, they are generally invisible in the historical sources.

⁴ A very inspiring exception is the book by Sheilagh Ogilvie which dedicates a full chapter to the work of married women; see Ogilvie, Bitter living, 104–205. Also in the more recent work on middling families, the dedication of married women to family businesses plays a role. See for instance Margaret R. Hunt, The middling sort: commerce, gender and the family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), and Richard Grassby, Kinship and capitalism: marriage, family and business in the English-speaking world, 1580–1740 (Cambridge, 2001) and, very recently, Ariadne Schmidt has shed some light on the activities of married couples who worked in Dutch orphanages in the early modern period; see her ‘Managing a large household: the gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800’, History of the Family 13 (2008), 42–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ On this, see Richard Wall, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett eds., Family forms in historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 1–64, and ‘The contribution of married women to the family economy under different family systems: some examples from the mid-nineteenth century from the work of Frederic le Play’, in Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Sølvi Sogner eds., Socio-economic consequences of sex ratios in historical perspective, 1500–1900: proceedings, Eleventh International Economic History Congress Milan, September 1994 (Milan, 1994), 139–48.

⁶ See for example Tilly and Scott, Women, work and the family; Howell, ‘Women's work in the new and light draperies of the Low Countries’, in N. B. Harte ed., The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 1997), 205–6; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, De draad in eigen handen: vrouwen en loonarbeid in de Nederlandse textielnijverheid, 1581–1810 (Amsterdam, 2007), 211–12, 254, 301–3; Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and entrepreneurship: female traders in the Northern Netherlands (Amsterdam, 2007), 67, 146–7, 219–20.

⁷ For this argument see for example Deborah Simonton, A history of European women's work: 1700 to the present (London, 1997), 66, and Ariadne Schmidt, Overleven na de dood: weduwen in Leiden in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 2001), 158–9.

⁸ See Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century (London, 1919); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women workers and the industrial revolution 1750–1850 (London, 1930); and Tilly and Scott, Women, work and the family.

⁹ See among others Jan de Vries, ‘Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter eds., Consumption and the world of goods (London and New York, 1993), 85–132; Jan de Vries, ‘The industrious revolution and economic growth’, in Paul A. David and Mark Thomas eds., The economic future in historical perspective (Oxford, 2003), 43–72; Maxine Berg, The age of manufactures: industry, innovation and work in Britain 1700–1820 (London, 1985), 169–72; and Neil McKendrick, ‘Home demand and economic growth: a new view of women and children in the industrial revolution’ in Neil McKendrick ed., Historical perspectives: studies in English thought and society (Cambridge, 1974), 197–200.

¹⁰ Hunt, Middling sort; 147–71; Ogilvie, Bitter living, 179–94.

¹¹ Anne Laurence, ‘How free were English women in the seventeenth century?’, in Els Kloek, Nicole Teeuwen and Marijke Huisman eds., Women of the Golden Age: an international debate on women in seventeenth-century Holland, England and Italy (Hilversum, 1994); De Vries, ‘Industrious revolution’; Leo Noordegraaf and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Early modern economic growth and the standard of living: did labour benefit from Holland's Golden Age?’, in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen eds., A miracle mirrored: the Dutch Republic in European perspective (Cambridge, 1995), 426; Ogilvie, Bitter living, 328, 344–6.

¹² Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb eds., The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England (Bloomington, 1982); De Vries, ‘Industrious revolution’; James C. Riley, ‘A widening market in consumer goods’, in Euan Cameron ed., Early modern Europe: an Oxford history (Oxford, 1999) 233–64.

¹³ Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Vrouwen en de geboorte van het kapitalisme in West-Europa (Amsterdam, 2006). For an English version of this essay see: http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/demoorvanzanden.pdf.

¹⁴ For earlier attempts see Ogilvie, Bitter living; Van Nederveen Meerkerk, De draad in eigen handen; and Van den Heuvel, Women and entrepreneurship.

¹⁵ This is not to say that their actual economic activity was absent or negligible, as especially Amy Erickson's article in this issue clearly shows.

¹⁶ See Howell, ‘Women's work’, 206.

¹⁷ For hints in this direction see also Ogilvie, Sheilagh, ‘How does social capital affect women?’, The American Historical Review 109 (2004), 358CrossRefGoogle Scholar.