ABSTRACT
Capitalist industrialisation in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe was based upon the specialisation and concentration of work processes in socially organised production, which led to a gradual divorce of workplace and household. The public sphere, populated largely by men from the eighteenth century onwards, became firmly separated from the private sphere of the family, the female domain. This transformation wrought fundamental changes in the economic, social, family and personal lives of women. The diminution of their productive role in the household was not matched by a corresponding expansion of employment opportunities in the new factories and workshops. In nineteenth-century Germany there was a surplus of labour seeking industrial employment; and the developing industrial structure, particularly from mid-century, emphasised employment in construction, railways, mining and engineering, which favoured the employment of male workers. The majority of women were as a consequence confined to more marginal economic activities in or associated with the household, whether as middle-class non-earning wives, or as servants, outworkers, washerwomen or charladies.1
