Historians have identified two dominant currents in the Russian women's movement of the late tsarist period. ''Bourgeois" feminism, so called by its more radical opponents, emphasized ''individualist" feminist goals such as access to education, career opportunities, and legal equality. ''Socialist" feminists, by contrast, emphasized class, rather than gender, as the principal source of women's inequality and oppression, and socialist revolution, not legal reform, as the only road to emancipation and equality.
  However, despite antagonism between bourgeois feminists and socialist feminists, the two movements shared certain underlying beliefs. Both regarded paid labor as the principal means by which women might attain emancipation: participation in the workplace and economic self-sufficiency, they believed, would make women socially useful and therefore deserving of equality with men. Both groups also recognized the enormous difficulties women faced when they combined paid labor with motherhood. In fact, at the First All-Russian Women's Congress in 1908, most participants advocated maternity insurance and paid maternity leave, although the intense hostility between some socialists and bourgeois feminists at the Congress made it difficult for them to recognize these areas of agreement. Finally, socialist feminists and most bourgeois feminists concurred in subordinating women's emancipation to what they considered the more important goal of liberating the entire Russian population from political oppression, economic backwardness, and social injustice.

    For many years, historians thought that the development of capitalism had not faced serious challenges in the United States. Writing in the early twentieth century, Progressive historians sympathized with the battles waged by farmers and small producers against large capitalists in the late nineteenth century, but they did not question the widespread acceptance of laissez-faire (unregulated) capitalism throughout American history. Similarly, Louis Hartz, who sometimes disagreed with the Progressives, argued that Americans accepted laissez-faire capitalism without challenge because they lacked a feudal, precapitalist past. Recently, however, some scholars have argued that even though laissez-faire became the prevailing ethos in nineteen-century America, it was not accepted without struggle. Laissez-faire capitalism, they suggest, clashed with existing religious and communitarian norms that imposed moral constraints on acquisitiveness to protect the weak from the predatory, the strong from corruption, and the entire culture from materialist excess. Buttressed by mercantilist notions that government should be both regulator and promoter of economic activity, these norms persisted long after the American Revolution helped unleash the economic forces that produced capitalism. These scholars argue that even in the late nineteenth century, with the government's role in the economy considerably diminished, laissez-faire had not triumphed completely. Hard times continued to revive popular demands for regulating business and softening the harsh edges of aissez-faire capitalism.