Kathleen Canning explores the changing meanings of women's work in Germany during the transformation from agrarian to industrial state from the mid-nineteenth century through 1914. Canning places gender at the heart of the transitions from workshop to factory, community to society, and estate to class in the textile-producing regions of the Rhineland and Westphalia.

Canning distinguishes structural transformations from the changing meanings contemporaries ascribed to women's work, exploring not only the rhetoric and imagery of the new social question of female factory labor, but also the ways in which women workers perceived their own experience, analyzing career patterns, work identities, and work cultures, and debunking the notion that women constituted a peripheral and transient labor force.

She also argues that female textile workers became a crucial object of the social policy debates that engaged Catholic, Socialist, feminist, and liberal academic social reformers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and helped to shape the protective labor policies of the emergent German welfare state.