There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic 'emancipation' usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls 'the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home'. He maintains that previous civilizations did not use female labor because of restrictive cultural definitions. 'I believe', Goode writes, 'that the crucial crystallizing variable-i.e. the necessary but not sufficient cause of the betterment of the western woman's position-was ideological: the gradual logical philosophical extension to women of originally Protestant notions about the rights and responsibilities of the individual undermined the traditional idea of "women's proper place".' 1 Many people have helped us with comments on earlier drafts of this essay. We especially wish to thank Susan Rogers,
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