Women, Work and Wages brings together a set of “detailed and closely researched academic case studies” (12), which significantly advance our understanding of the nature and meaning of women's wages. They particularly reinforce a sense of the densely intertwined nature of work and welfare in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century England. The book deliberately eschews homogenizing, or synthesizing analyses of women's work, and each essay could easily stand alone. Collectively, however, they demonstrate the benefit of studying women's work in ways that emphasize the interaction of custom and market forces, showing that cultural assumptions about gender, the language of work, the complex nature of remuneration, as well as the twists and turns of market forces and technological change all had to be negotiated by the women (and men) who worked for a living before the end of the nineteenth century.

Although the book focuses very heavily on the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, two essays investigate the earlier period. Steve Hindle's chapter on the neglected topic of pauper apprenticeships in the seventeenth century reveals a system that was deeply coercive of families and masters alike. The contradictions and ambiguities of pauper apprenticeship were embedded as much in the language of the law as they were in the culture of the period. While he emphasizes the local variations in the practice of poor relief, Hindle also notes the shared ideological justification among middling sorts and elite for putting the poor to work, even at the cost of weakening that central institution of the early modern polity: the family.

In a similarly underresearched arena, Pamela Sharpe's essay explores the connections between seventeenth-century London women and the English East India Company. Clearly, there was a large role for women on land when their husbands or relatives left for sea on Company business, as sailors usually conferred power of attorney on their wives or female kin. Women served as patrons, laborers, petitioners, stockholders, and pensioners to the Company. Although neither Hindle's nor Sharpe's essays consciously frame a relevant historical context for the later chapters of the book, they do serve as excellent demonstrations of the need to study language, custom, and community carefully when considering issues of women's employment and wages, and thus they set a methodological frame of reference for the essays that follow.

Michael Roberts's essay, a revisiting of his influential work on the transition from sickles to scythes in agricultural labor, effectively demonstrates that climate, culture, gender, and the economy all determined the experience of work and the nature of wages in preindustrial and industrializing England. Roberts's work reminds us that just as women's work was nearly always the product of women's bodies in this period, so too the history of women's work benefits by considering the history of the body.

Two of the essays in the book engage Joyce Burnette's theory that gendered wage differentials were a result of actual differences in capabilities and hours worked, rather than a result of customary wages for women. Penelope Lane makes good use of employers’ wage books and wage lists in examining the role of custom in determining women's wages from 1700 to 1850. Lane offers a highly qualified but significant correction to previous notions of the inequity of women's wages. Similarly, Nicola Verdon's stimulating essay assessing female day laborers in English agriculture, 1790–1850, finds a continued, important gender division of farm labor throughout this period, but a contraction of women's work opportunities on many farms by the 1830s. Like Lane, Verdon qualifies Burnette's views on market wages for women: “The uniformity of women's pay suggests that although market forces were a key determinant of wage levels, customary ideas about the nature and status of female agricultural labour were also significant” (210). Both Verdon and Lane highlight the tremendous local variability in women's work and wages in this era.

Three essays that explore women's work in the later eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century emphasize the conjoined nature of work and poor relief. Samantha Williams painstakingly reconstructs the work of Bedfordshire nurses and caregivers who were paid by overseers of the poor to care for paupers, clearly revealing this hidden work as essential to the “economy of makeshift” of the poor. In a very subtle essay on the female labor market in northern England, Steven King stresses the gendered expectations of employers, poor law officers, and poor women themselves. The study reveals women operating in a sort of three-way tug-of-war with poor law officials and employers. Neil Raven's discussion of women's work in southern urban centers reinforces both the sense that women's participation in the labor force was essential to this transitional era and the fact that women's work must not be studied in isolation from the nature of poor relief. Here, the poor law was used to facilitate women's ubiquitous employment in the new industries of the towns. Once again, an unusual source—this time trade directories—is shown to be of great value.

While each of these essays is stimulating and illuminating, it is a shame that so many similar essays, all in the same place, took so little note of one another, despite the fact that the volume originated in a conference. Still, what comes to the fore here is not merely a series of contributions to the history of women's work and wages, but a sense of the uniform utility of the approach of these essays. Using neglected sources, and with an intense awareness of the local or regional variability of their topics, each of these historians demonstrates the benefit of taking subtle and multifaceted approaches to narrowly defined studies of women's economic experience in this era.