Imperfect workers – imperfect answers: recent publications on the history of women and work

Historically speaking, women's purposeful activities have contributed significantly to the uses and meanings of urban spaces and have been a key part of the texture of social and economic relationships in town and city as well as the countryside. A good deal of the scholarship which underpins this conclusion has called for the detailed study of particular historical situations: the domestic economy in industrializing Montreal, dairying in mid-twentieth-century Denmark, gossip in the back yards and closes of inter-war Manchester. Methods of inquiry such as oral history or the close examination of census data necessarily lend themselves to the case study approach. This kind of detailed investigation has encouraged re-examination of some of the overarching meta-narratives of historical change more characteristic of earlier historical studies of women and work, notably that of Tilly and Scott.