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The article considers the history of women workers, focusing on comparative studies of women in labor in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics considered include women's marital status, whether women's work was marked as such on census data, women in agriculture, women in industry, family and married women, and women household employees.

The article focuses on the structures of consciousness, universalization processes and civilizations. Professor Benjamin Nelson's typology of structures of consciousness is a provocative comparative historical research strategy aimed at breaking through the static and misleading perspectives which take conventionally labeled cultural structures. The universalization process, a circulatory sociocultural process, is another way of referring to those profound alterations in the total sociocultural structures of experiential reality. Nelson's theoretical constructs may open the way to a comparative depth historical anthropological theory of sociocultural process.

The article discusses research in the context of education history. The author stresses that research remains focused essentially on schooling to the exclusion of other social influences and agencies purposefully designed to change behavior. The increasing use of concepts from the social sciences and the persistent concern with education in 19th century affect the study of rhetoric. According to author, there are two perspectives on the topic of milieu which should be more commonly reflected in the work of historians of education: One concerns the cultural setting, the other the professional climate of opinion.