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Each of the 13 essays in this volume considers an aspect of female participation in the paid or unpaid labor force of the antebellum American south. The work of ordinary women is the theme that unites the essays, work the editors in their introduction note was often unacknowledged due to prevailing and evolving attitudes about women's proper work and the role of the male head of household as the family breadwinner. The essays vary widely in their scope, but share a search for ingenious sources of information, a search necessitated by the invisibility of women in official and more conventional sources. The topics range from Native American female makers and sellers of baskets to antebellum female iron manufacturing workers, from coastal Savannah slave women participants in produce markets to western Virginia businesswomen, from Richmond prostitutes to New Orleans nuns.

Economic historians have to respond favorably when sociologist–feminist scholar Christine Bose early in her text writes, "This book is intended to provide a historical perspective on contemporary issues that all too often are analyzed only in terms of the present" (p. 3). She returns frequently to this theme, stressing that female participation in the labor force began long before the late 1960s. Of course, numerous economic historians have noted that such participation began long before 1900 and their work, unsurprisingly, exhibits stronger understanding of historical economic conditions than does Women in 1900. Bose's intent, however, is not to study women throughout U.S. history; rather, she analyzes data on 29,673 women included in the Public Use Sample of the 1900 census to re-estimate female labor-force participation, and determine the effect of gender, race, ethnicity, and class on that participation. Her most valuable contribution comes through matching her sample observations with county economic data obtained through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. She uses these data to generate what she calls contextual variables, basically regional and urban or rural location of the sample respondent, and average female manufacturing wage and population characteristics of the respondent's county.