ABSTRACT
For many historians the industrial revolution marked a turning point in the history of women and work, as the impact of capitalism profoundly altered the status and role of the female workforce. This chapter addresses patterns of women's work, by looking at women's involvement in one area of the eighteenth-century economy, the printing trades. Concentrating on women of property constitutes a major diversion in a field that has been dominated by research on the labouring poor. The economic activity of women in general, the role which women played within the printing trades is not easy to identify. Finally, although an examination of widows and other women who inherited business interests suggests a level of female involvement in the workplace among women as a whole that would have made them integral to economic life. Female economic power over men seems to have been typically expressed by widows over their sons.
