First published in 1968. This investigation was undertaken with a view to discovering the actual circumstances of women?s lives in the Seventeenth Century. The Seventeenth Century itself forms a sort of watershed between two very widely differing eras in the history of Englishwomen? the Elizabethan and the Eighteenth Century. It demonstrates the conditions under which the obscure mass of women live and fulfil their duties as human beings and focuses on one aspect of their lives, namely the place of women in the economic organisation of society.