One scholar has used the term industrious revolution to summarize the social and economic changes taking place in northwestern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.2 This occurred as households reduced leisure time; stepped up the pace of work; and, most important, redirected the labor of women and children away from the production of goods for household consumption and toward wage work. In the countryside, the spread of cottage industry can be seen as one manifestation of the industrious revolution, while in the cities there was a rise in female employment outside the home. By working harder and increasing the number of wageworkers, rural and urban households could purchase more goods, even in a time of stagnant or falling wages.

These new sources and patterns of labor established important foundations for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 20). They created households in which all members worked for wages rather than in a family business and in which consumption relied on market-produced rather than homemade goods. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, with rising industrial wages, that a new model emerged in which the male “breadwinner” was expected to earn enough to support the whole family, and women and children were relegated back to the domestic sphere. With women estimated to compose 40 percent of the global workforce, today’s world is experiencing a second industrious revolution in a similar climate of stagnant wages and increased demand for consumer goods.3