* The research and writing time for this article were supported by a University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. I would like to thank those institutions as well as the friends and colleagues who read and commented on earlier versions of this article: Rachel Fuchs, Seth Koven, Tessie Liu, Sonya Michel, Sharon Salinger, Amy Stanley, Margaret Talbot, Chuck Wetherell, Cynthia Truant, and the Southern California French history group: Ed Berenson, Patricia O'Brien, Elinor Accampo, and Nina Gelbart. Thanks, above all, to Willy Forbath. 1 Working women had long offered an especially poignant image of exploitation-a metaphor for capitalism's assault on nature and the social turmoil of industrialization. Thus, female labor figured prominently in both radical and conservative critiques of the industrial order throughout the century. See Joan Scott, L'ouvriere: Mot impie et sordide: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840-1860, in her Gender and the Politics of Women in History (New York, 1988), pp. 139-63; and Juliet Mitchell, Women's Estate (New York, 1971), on the metaphorical importance of woman in the writings of socialists and political economists. Related discussions may be found in Sally Alexander, Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 40s, History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 125-49; Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987); Steven Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp, eds., Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988). See also two special issues of Le mouvement social: Travaux de femmes, vol. 105 (October-December 1978) and Metiers de femmes, vol. 140 (July-September 1987); as well as Michelle Perrot, L'histoire sans qualites (Paris, 1979). On the symbolism surrounding the seamstress and sewing, see Terri Edelstein, They Sang the Song of the Shirt, Victorian Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 183-210; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York (New York, 1986), pp. 72-73; and Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington, D.C., and London, 1989).