In an era when trade guilds in France largely excluded women as members in their own right, the images depicted in Diderot's Encyclopedie and other contemporary French sources reveal what the statutes and archives of the time obscure: that women played integral, essential, and varied roles in the worlds of craft, manufacture, and commerce. Geraldine Sheridan, recognizing the need to recover the history of working women through alternative sources, employs period engravings to document and interpret how women contributed to the preindustrial process--as sources of power, as skillful workers, as finishers, and as managers of business. Sheridan draws not only from the well-known Encyclopedie (published in Paris between 1762 and 1772, with a supplementary volume added by Panckouke in 1777) but also from the Descriptions des arts et metiers, detailed studies of specific trades (published between 1761 and 1788 by the Academie royale des sciences and incorporating some plates engraved as...
