To many historians this title may appear curious or even arouse scepticism, and this is both understandable and unfortunate. For, as we have seen, the apprenticeship system itself has been poorly documented, with the decline of its older form in the eighteenth century inadequately understood. Similarly, the involvement of women in the apprenticed trades, whether as apprentices, familial labour, or mistresses, is commonly omitted altogether, or, earlier in the twentieth century, was at times acknowledged only to be understated and devalued, seemingly through its incompatibility with prevailing judgements on the domestic roles of women. A number of factors have contributed to this situation. There has been stress by many authors on the successes of the feminist movement, on the significant advances in the legal position of women over the past century. This, alongside more heroic accounts of the ‘long upward struggle against patriarchal dominance towards sexual equality’, away from the ‘flickering black night of female domestic passivity’, has fostered historiographical assumptions of long-held and extreme sexually exploitative attitudes in the past. Such assumptions usually ignore social detail and specificity (often being based on upper-class literary evidence), and presume little discontinuity from preceding centuries of the mid-nineteenth-century status of women. They have provided a static, underrated, and socially undifferentiated picture of the pre-industrial importance of women, which has served to emphasise recent aspects of change.