ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century everyone assumed that most women would work. For much of the twentieth century most women's historians were quite pessimistic about the effect of the market and especially industrial capitalism on women. Selling things at market, on the street, or door to door was among the most common jobs for women in the early modern period, throughout all of Europe and the Near East, as well as in the New World. In much of Europe live-in domestic service was the main way rural immigrants and orphans negotiated entry into urban life, adulthood and marriage. Ottoman women entrepreneurs were often associated with the slave trade, and the Istanbul slave-dealers' guild, unusually, actually included some women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And yet, women's work had also to be controlled if men were to hold on to the better jobs, more of the capital, and most of the prestige.
