Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution.

Two decades ago, Joan Wallach Scott and Louise Tilly vigorously challenged both Marxist and modernization theorists who contended that women's wage labor had been a step on the road toward emancipation and equality. In a series of influential articles and in Women, Work and the Family (1978), Tilly and Scott argued that familial, not individual, interests dictated patterns of women's work in the early industrial era in Western Europe.

Was the United States different? In his prize-winning Women at Work (1979), Thomas Dublin showed that it was, for tens of thousands of native-born young women who went to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the decades …