Amazon.com description: Product Description: A collection of papers intended to provide a temporal and geographical perspective to the issue of women's work and the family economy. The papers raise a spectrum of interrelated issues about economic development, personal life and ideological structures. The first section of the book deals with proto-industrialization in a corporate society and discusses the role women undertook in the woollen weaving industry and, later, in agriculture in Germany. The effect of female employment on the life of the family, in terms of change in income and change in family structure and responsibilities are discussed in the second part of the book. Urban employment for women in the pottery industry (1890-1920) and in the car industry of Coventry (1920-1945) are also considered and the effect of women's employment in the shaping of the Russian working class is analyzed. The casual labour undertaken by women during the Lancashire cotton famine and in Liverpool in the 1930s are the subject of the final two papers included in the volume.