Women's Work in Industrial England is a collection of empirically rich essays on the complexities of women's employment in England from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The key to the volume is in its subheading: the overall aim being to “raise greater awareness” of the regional and local dimensions to industrialization and the consequences of this for women workers (28). This local focus, which successfully avoids the pitfalls of parochialism by carefully framing each study in relation to broader questions, makes the collection an important resource for scholars who wish to move toward a more nuanced understanding of women's labor history. Moreover, through demonstrating the rich potential of local case studies, and highlighting available primary source material, the authors should achieve their objective of stimulating further research.

Inspired by a conference held in 1996, this book has been a long time in the making. Seven chapters have already appeared in print, principally in the journal Local Population Studies. Indeed, Osamu Saito's article dates back to 1979. The editor takes account of this in his preface, suggesting that this collection serves to give these articles greater exposure while bringing eight new chapters to our attention. There is no standard introduction or conclusion, but each author is careful to draw out interesting links and points of contrast within the volume. In the first two chapters, Goose and Leigh Shaw-Taylor outline key debates and provide a wider national context. Shaw-Taylor helpfully translates 1851 census figures on the percentage of women workers into full-color maps of England, providing a striking visual representation of the diversity, extent, and geographical concentration of women's employment.

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the study of women's work in agriculture. Pamela Sharpe questions the thesis that women were marginalized as a result of capitalist intervention by suggesting that women's work on the land had always been relatively limited in England. However, she suggests the need for further local research to take into account both economic factors and other “less quantifiable aspects of human experience” (75). Nicola Verdon's subsequent chapter on women's labor in Sussex is an excellent example of just such a local study. Verdon draws on autobiographies, contemporary reports, and records from individual farms to offer a richly detailed snapshot of an area in which women were important members of the agricultural workforce.

While women workers from the textile factories feature in several chapters, the collection takes care to suggest the diversity of women's employment in industrial England. Goose's piece on the straw plait and hat trades challenges the dominance of particular kinds of factory labor (and thus particular regions) in histories of women's work. Domestic service is covered by Edward Higgs and Michael Anderson as they each unpack some of the problems of interpretation surrounding the recording of servants in the census. Anderson tests out Higgs's theory of “mis-specification” of family members as servants at a regional level, concluding that in textile regions where married women had a high rate of employment in the factories, census enumerators were more likely to return women who did remain at home as working in a service capacity. Marguerite Dupree focuses less on a particular occupation, and more on how employment opportunities in local communities (in this case the Staffordshire Potteries) could affect intersecting structures of work and family. Moving away from industrial production altogether, Owen Davies really brings the census to life in his chapter on female healers, impressively combining quantitative material with newspaper and ethnographic sources.

The issue of marital status and its effects on women's paid employment is well covered. John McKay and Michael Anderson analyze patterns of married women's work in the textile regions of Lancashire and Cheshire, concluding that for these areas at least, underrecording of married women's labor in the textile factories was minimal. Christine Jones, in chapter 14, provides an important analysis of never-married women's labor, comparing experiences in five different regions. Saito then adds another significant factor to be considered alongside marital status, that of age and life cycle.

Stana Nenadic's chapter is the only one to take the collection beyond England's borders. The question of why the “new woman” of late nineteenth-century Scotland did not engage in entrepreneurial activity is interesting, yet ultimately detracts from the value of the histories presented of the business women who did trade in Edinburgh. The final chapter of the collection takes the study of women's work into the twentieth century, testing out the assumption that women's participation in the labor force increased between 1891 and 1911, to fall again after the First World War. Eilidh Garrett posits that the changing nature of women's work, particularly their move into “male” occupations such as white-collar jobs, coupled with shifting understandings of “work” as simply paid employment outside the home, affected the ways in which women workers were perceived and thus the ways in which they were recorded in the census.

It is the extensive and sometimes innovative use of census data that really distinguishes this collection. Shaw-Taylor champions a return to census material as simply “the best and most comprehensive source we have on female employment” (33). While its limitations as a source are acknowledged, widespread assumptions concerning the systematic underrecording of women's labor are challenged. The census may not be a useful tool for studying women's involvement in seasonal labor, for example, yet it is shown to be much more reliable in documenting “regular” paid work. The dominance of the census, with the detailed statistical analysis it entails, could be off-putting at times for those more at ease with qualitative source material, and there is little theoretical innovation. Nevertheless, the majority of the contributions make analysis of census data accessible, even seductive. This collection convincingly suggests that to ignore this rich, if flawed, resource is to impoverish the study of women's labor history.