Academics live in a world where it is (mostly) no longer considered acceptable to assign tasks and the compensation for their performance purely on the basis of gender. However, nagging evidence of the continuation of past practice in this regard is abundant, if indeed troubling to neoclassical economists whose intellectual paradigm suggests that competitive market forces will correct for inefficiencies in labor allocation decisions based on discrimination alone. Thus, explaining the often radical differences in men's and women's work patterns in the past, let alone their persistence into the present, has become an important agenda item for economic history. The resulting explanations are, moreover, forced to shoulder a heavy burden of social and political freight, as gender inequality in the control of economic resources is a hot topic both in the popular press and among policy makers. In such a climate it behooves us to get the explanations right.

Sheilagh Ogilvie's much expanded and revised thesis, published as A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany, makes an important contribution to this task of getting it right. She begins this case study of Germany's Württemberg Black Forest region by outlining the three questions she understands to be fundamental to the larger enterprise of understanding why “women have less access to resources” than men and why this has been “true of every society in history?” (pp. 1–2). First, what are the facts about women's and men's work in the past? Second, why are the facts they way they are? And third, what are the more general implications of women's economic position? (p. 2). She next reminds her readers that despite her sweeping claim about inequality everywhere and everywhen, the detailed answers to the seemingly straightforward first question are not as well understood as we might expect. Scholars have been no more successful in documenting a linear progression towards greater gender equity across time than they have been in locating a “golden age of women” in some distant and long ago place. Rather, the search for data to answer the “what” question has yielded a remarkable diversity of experiences, which often prove hard, if not impossible, to rank order clearly.

It is precisely this diversity of past experience that should make us suspicious of easy answers to the “why” question as well. Yet the public arena of ideas demands easy answers (that is ones which are monocausal and, even better, linear). And there is no shortage of candidates. The three most important according to Ogilvie are the “technological,” which “regards women's work as being determined by their physical endowments” (p. 7); the “cultural,” which looks to customs and mentalities, such as an ideology or creed of patriarchy (p. 10); and the “institutional,” which widens “the focus to the organization of the society in which women have to produce and reproduce” (p. 11). Ogilvie rejects all of these explanations, and their many subvariants, in favor of what she identifies as a “time allocation” approach. In this view, both men and women make “time allocation decisions within a framework of constraints” which include, among other things, technology, cultural norms, and institutions (p. 13). The pervasive but diverse range of economic inequities faced by women then comes out of this framework of constraints, the particulars of which can and do vary tremendously across time and space.

After such a broad and compelling introduction, the substantive chapters of the book get down to the historical nitty-gritty of making her case. A data-intensive documentation of men's and women's actual work experiences in early modern south-west Germany is used to debunk (sometimes repetitively) the three main monocausal explanations. The ingenious use of church-court records, in particular the Sabbath breaking cases, allows Ogilvie to infer the time individuals allocated to various kinds of tasks, as well as to identify the location of those tasks, either in the home or out of it. Because this evidence and analysis are central, the reader will probably continue to ask how robust the findings are, despite Ogilvie's care in addressing that issue.

Only a few of the numerous and nuanced results can be highlighted here. Despite the clear disabilities associated with child bearing, primary responsibility for housework, dependent status within the household, and legal exclusions from community decision-making and guild participation, women of all ages and marital status could be found regularly engaging in market work, which often was heavy or took them far from home. Indeed, women were most conspicuously absent from the lighter, domestically located industrial work of proto-industrial textile manufacture for the export market. Women may have proved to be highly flexible in their work time allocations, but they were also highly exploitable as a result (p. 337).

Only in the closing pages of the book does Ogilvie seriously address the last of her initial questions, the “so what” most important to policy-makers. Not surprisingly, Ogilvie documents every aspect of what she calls “this perverse regime” as negative (p. 348). The exploitation of female labor, coupled with the legal and status disabilities suffered by wives, daughters, and independent women, was clearly bad for the women themselves. It was also bad for their children, whose health and welfare were compromised by the pressures on the mother's time and consumption possibilities. The total productive capacity of the wider economy was also curtailed by the cultural and institutional constraints on a woman's free allocation of her own time to what would have otherwise been presumably its most productive use. If this were not enough to spur the policymakers of the modern world to action, Ogilvie speculates at the very close of the book that “it is surely no coincidence that those European societies in which the industrious revolution began earliest and most intensely were … [those] where the institutional obstacles facing women who sought to change their time-allocation patterns were weakest” (p. 350). Functioning markets and access to capital are all well and good as far they go, but for Ogilvie the long road to development is paved with gender equity.