This book focuses on early examples of women who may be said to have anticipated, in one way or another, modern professional and/or career-oriented women. The contributors to the book discuss women who may at least in some respect be seen as professionally ambitious, unlike the great majority of working women in the past. In order to improve their positions or to find better business opportunities, the women discussed in this book invested in developing their qualifications and professional skills, took economic or other kinds of risks, or moved to other countries. Socially, they range from elite women to women of middle-class and lower middle-class origin. In terms of theory, the book brings fresh insights into issues that have been long discussed in the field of women's history and are also debated today. However, despite its focus on women, the book is conceptually not so much focused on gender as it is on profession, business, career, qualifications, skills, and work. By applying such concepts to analyzing women's endeavours, the book aims at challenging the conventional ideas about them.

Most historical studies of child labour have tended to confirm a narrative which witnesses the gradual disappearance of child labour in Western Europe as politicians and social reformers introduced successive legislation, gradually removing children from the workplace. This approach fails to explain the return or continuance of child labour in many affluent European societies. Centuries of Child Labour explains changes in past child labour and attitudes to working children in a way that helps explain the continued survival of the practice from the seventeenth through to the late twentieth centuries. Centuries of Child Labour conveys a richer sense of child labour by comparing the experiences of the Northern European periphery to the paradigmatic cases of Britain,and France. The northern cases, drawing heavily on empirical evidence from Sweden, Finland and Russia, test received ideas of child labour, through comparisons with Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Presenting the children themselves as the main protagonists, rather than the law makers, industrialists and social commentators of the time, Marjatta Rahikainen provides fresh information and perspectives, offering revelations to readers familiar only with the situation in France and Britain.

This book focuses on early examples of women who may be said to have anticipated, in one way or another, modern professional and/or career-oriented women. The contributors to the book discuss women who may at least in some respect be seen as professionally ambitious, unlike the great majority of working women in the past. In order to improve their positions or to find better business opportunities, the women discussed in this book invested in developing their qualifications and professional skills, took economic or other kinds of risks, or moved to other countries. Socially, they range from elite women to women of middle-class and lower middle-class origin. In terms of theory, the book brings fresh insights into issues that have been long discussed in the field of women's history and are also debated today. However, despite its focus on women, the book is conceptually not so much focused on gender as it is on profession, business, career, qualifications, skills, and work. By applying such concepts to analyzing women's endeavours, the book aims at challenging the conventional ideas about them.