In 1675, Louis XIV established the Parisian seamstresses' guild, the first independent all-female guild created in over 200 years. Guild members could make and sell women's and children's clothing, but were prohibited from producing men's clothing or dresses for court women. Tailors resented the ascension of seamstresses to guild status; seamstresses, meanwhile, were impatient with the remaining restrictions on their right to clothe women.

    The conflict between the guilds was not purely economic, however. A 1675 police report indicated that since so many seamstresses were already working illegally, the tailors were unlikely to suffer additional economic damage because of the seamstresses' incorporation. Moreover, guild membership held very different meanings for tailors and seamstresses. To the tailors, their status as guild members overlapped with their role as heads of household, and entitled them to employ as seamstresses female family members who did not marry outside the trade. The seamstresses, however, viewed guild membership as a mark of independence from the patriarchal family. Their guild was composed not of family units but of individual women who enjoyed unusual legal and economic privileges. At the conflict's center was the issue of whether tailors' female relatives should be identified as family members protected by the tailors' guild or as individuals under the jurisdiction of the seamstresses' guild.

Line	In current historiography, the picture of a consistent,
	unequivocal decline in women’s status with the advent
	of capitalism and industrialization is giving way to an
	analysis that not only emphasizes both change (whether
(5)	improvement or decline) and continuity but also
	accounts for geographical and occupational variation.
	The history of women’s work in English farmhouse
	cheese making between 1800 and 1930 is a case in
	point. In her influential Women Workers and the Industrial
(10)	Revolution (1930), Pinchbeck argued that the agricultural
	revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
	centuries, with its attendant specialization and enlarged
	scale of operation, curtailed women’s participation in
	the business of cheese production. Earlier, she
(15)	maintained, women had concerned themselves with
	feeding cows, rearing calves, and even selling the
	cheese in local markets and fairs. Pinchbeck thought
	that the advent of specialization meant that women’s
	work in cheese dairying was reduced simply to
(20)	processing the milk. “Dairymen” (a new social category)
	raised and fed cows and sold the cheese through
	factors, who were also men. With this narrowing of the
	scope of work, Pinchbeck believed, women lost
	business ability, independence, and initiative.
(25)	Though Pinchbeck portrayed precapitalist,
	preindustrial conditions as superior to what followed,
	recent scholarship has seriously questioned the notion
	of a golden age for women in precapitalist society. For
	example, scholars note that women’s control seldom
(30)	extended to the disposal of the proceeds of their
	work. In the case of cheese, the rise of factors may
	have compromised women’s ability to market cheese
	at fairs. But merely selling the cheese did not
	necessarily imply access to the money: Davidoff cites
(35)	the case of an Essex man who appropriated all but a
	fraction of the money from his wife’s cheese sales.
	By focusing on somewhat peripheral operations,
	moreover, Pinchbeck missed a substantial element
	of continuity in women’s participation: throughout the
(40)	period women did the central work of actually
	making cheese. Their persistence in English cheese
	dairying contrasts with women’s early disappearance
	from arable agriculture in southeast England and
	from American cheese dairying. Comparing these
(45)	three divergent developments yields some reasons
	for the differences among them. English cheese-
	making women worked in a setting in which cultural
	values, agricultural conditions, and the nature of
	their work combined to support their continued
(50)	participation. In the other cases, one or more of
	these elements was lacking.

    To compete effectively in international markets, a nation's businesses must sustain investment in intangible as well as physical assets. Although an enormous pool of investment capital exists in the United States, the country's capital investment practices put United States companies at a competitive disadvantage. United States capital investment practices, shaped by sporadic and unpredictable changes in tax policy and high federal budget deficits, encourage both underinvestment and overinvestment. For example, United States companies invest at a low rate in internal development projects, such as improving supplier relations, that do not offer immediate profit, and systematically invest at a high rate in external projects, such as corporate takeovers, that yield immediate profit. Also, United States companies make too few linkages among different forms of investments. Such linkages are important because physical assets, such as factories, may not reach their potential level of productivity unless companies make parallel investments in intangible assets such as employee training and product redesign. In general, unlike Japanese and German investment practices, which focus on companies' long-term interests, United States investment practices favor those forms of investment for which financial returns are most readily available. By making minimal investments in intangible assets, United States companies reduce their chances for future competitiveness.