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.

    Acting on the recommendation of a British government committee investigating the high incidence in white lead factories of illness among employees, most of whom were women, the Home Secretary proposed in 1895 that Parliament enact legislation that would prohibit women from holding most jobs in white lead factories. Although the Women's Industrial Defence Committee (WIDC), formed in 1892 in response to earlier legislative attempts to restrict women's labor, did not discount the white lead trade's potential health dangers, it opposed the proposal, viewing it as yet another instance f limiting women's work opportunities. Also opposing the proposal was the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW), which attempted to challenge it by investigating the causes of illness in white lead factories. SPEW contended, and WIDC concurred, that controllable conditions in such factories were responsible for the development of lead poisoning. SPEW provided convincing evidence that lead poisoning could be avoided if workers were careful and clean and if already extant workplace safety regulations were stringently enforced. However, the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), which had ceased in the late 1880's to oppose restrictions on women's labor, supported the eventually enacted proposal, in part because safety regulations were generally not being enforced in white lead factories, where there were no unions (and little prospect of any) to pressure employers to comply with safety regulations.