(4) In other crafts and trades where a tendency can be traced for women to withdraw from business as this developed on capitalistic lines. The history of the gilds shows a progressive weakening of their positions in these associations, though the corporations of the seventeenth century still regarded the wife as her husband’s partner. In these corporations the effect of capitalism on the industrial position of the wage-earner’s wife becomes visible. Under family industry the wife of every master craftsman became free of his gild and could share his work. But as the crafts became capitalised many journeymen never qualified as masters, remaining in the outer courts of the companies all their lives, and actually forming separate organisations to protect their interests against their masters and to secure a privileged position for themselves by restricting the number of apprentices. As the journeymen worked on their masters’ premises it naturally followed that their wives were not associated with them in their work, and that apprenticeship became the only entrance to their trade. Though no written rules existed confining apprenticeship to the male sex, girls were seldom if ever admitted as apprentices in the gild trades, and therefore women were excluded from the ranks of journeymen. As the journeyman’s wife could not work at her husband’s trade, she must, if need be, find employment for herself as an individual. In some cases the journeyman’s organisations were powerful enough to keep wages on a level which sufficed for the maintenance of their families; then the wife became completely dependent on her husband, sinking to the position of his unpaid domestic servant. In the Retail and Provision Trades which in some respects were peculiarly favourable for women, they experienced many difficulties owing to the restrictive rules of companies and corporations; but where a man was engaged in this class of business, his wife shared his labours, and on his death generally retained the direction of the business as his widow. The history of brewing is one of the most curious examples of the effect of capitalism on women’s position in industry, for as the term “brewster” shows, originally it was a woman’s trade but with the development of Capitalism it passed completely from the hands of women to those of men. The tendency of capitalism to lessen the relative productive capacity of women might be overlooked if our understanding of the process was limited to the changes which had actually taken place by the end of the seventeenth century. No doubt the majority of the population at that time was still living under conditions governed by the traditions and habits formed during the period of Family and Domestic Industry. But the contrast which the life described in the following chapters presents to the life of women under modern conditions will be evident even to readers who have not closely followed the later historical developments of Capitalism.