the means of production. Through the capitalist's accumulation of profits derived from the surplus value of the worker's product, the exploiters were becoming richer and the exploited poorer (Tuchman, 1966, p. 479).
The relevance of this argument for the present study is that, by 1890 and beyond, women workers were among the most soundly exploited of all exploited workers. In material and psychological ways, women workers experienced the strongest effects of social, spiritual, and physical control that were visited upon all women in the culture as a result of the industrial transformation of Europe.
Certain images of fin-de-siecle women suggest that life was more than bearable for women as a result of industrial advancement. But such images are misleading. Pope (1977) emphasizes the cult of social morality with which Victorian-era women as a group were identified, but points toward the psychological oppression that resulted, in both England and France. In one sense, the industrial revolution freed women of the middle class from hard manual labor required to maintain subsistent living. Thus physically, they were decidedly free, and the industrial revolution made this possible. But psychologically, women suddenly became less than free, for the reason that the work ethic persisted. And because women had limited tangible contribution to make toward results-oriented labor, their contribution to society as a whole was drastically curtailed. This had the effect of putting women in their "place." One aspect of this, according to Pope, was the emergence of a cult of domesticity, which began in the early 19th century and persisted into the 20th century. Women did not uniformly acquiesce in this code. As Jeanne Deroin, a French feminist and housewife who died in 1894, wrote, "It is in the household that woman's work is the most tiresome and the least appreciated . . . And they say, in speaking of her, that only her husband work...