ABSTRACT
The first major scholarly investigation of women’s work in the early modern period was Alice Clark’s Working life of women in the seventeenth century (1919), which was influenced by socialist theories about the effects of the growth of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Clark divided economic production into three different systems: domestic industry, in which goods were produced solely for the use of the family and were not subject to exchange or money value; family industry, in which the family was the unit of production of goods for sale or exchange; and capitalistic industry or industrialism, in which production was controlled by the owners of capital and their labourers received wages.
