Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700–1870. By Katrina Honeyman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, Pp. viii, 204. $59.95

The process of industrial change energized generations of historians to explain the transformations that reformed the modern world. Over much of the twentieth century, historians of Marxist and liberal persuasions staged mighty contests to define most persuasively the effects of factory production, work discipline, class, and capital formation. The sometimes triumphalist chronicle of factory reform, capital accumulation, and trade-union growth were painted across the nineteenth century; more detailed studies of communities, corporations, and institutions had to fit in as best they could. Until the 1970s, as graduate students signed up for one or the other of these interpretative camps, few authors, liberal or Marxist, considered the experience of women. Adding women's history and gender analysis to the study of industrialization has brought about one of the most significant transformations of this chronicle. Katrina Honeyman's most recent contribution stands as an essential text for those teaching and working in this field.