Given the centrality of legislatures in our representative system of government, it is a remarkable fact that there is today no general, systematic history of state legislative development in America. There are numerous studies of particular laws or individual legislators, but the process by which this important institution evolved historically and its role in the political system remain largely unexplored. The internal development of state legislatures in the century or so after the Revolution, as Ronald Formisano (1974: 480) has observed, is “generally almost terra incognita to historians” (see also Zemsky, 1973; Bogue, 1974; Campbell, 1976). The men who served as legislators in this period are equally obscure. Historians have also assumed, without investigating the proposition, that policy making was the primary function of legislatures and that citizens were linked to that policy-making process through representatives. Studies of past legislative behavior have focused principally on the role of political parties and interest groups in the conversion of constituent demands into public policy.

The last few decades have witnessed a new interest in the study of the family in colonial America. By concentrating on single communities, historians have been able to assemble increasingly complex demographic information that has shed new light on colonial society. Until recently this research has been primarily concerned with New England communities where the necessary information is most complete, but in the last few years several studies have appeared which deal with the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia (Demos, 1965, 1968, 1976; Greven, 1966, 1967, 1970; Lockridge, 1966, 1970; Vinovskis, 1972; Walsh and Menard, 1974; Rutman and Rutman, 1976; Smith, 1978). The early results of the most recent research offer an interesting contrast to the demographic patterns established in New England, and even passing comparisons of the two regions suggest a wealth of differences which must have played important roles in creating distinct colonial societies.

Recent work in women's history suggests that the dramatic rise in female labor force participation in the first decades of the twentieth century cannot be understood solely in terms of labor market forces. Although the demand for female labor increased substantially between 1900 and 1920 (Oppenheimer, 1970), such variables as religion, education, ethnicity, and social class interacted to determine the supply of women available for hire at any one time. It should not be surprising, therefore, that “cultural” variables such as these also served to limit the ability of women to improve their position in the labor market generally. This article will examine the ways in which the family and work environments interacted to determine the responsiveness of working women to different sorts of organizations which (theoretically) could have assisted them in altering the basic conditions of their work and family experiences.

In the course of my current research I have made machine readable a variety of socioeconomic data that was not available before. Because most of this data bank can be displayed in graphic form, and because it covers a vast amount of information, I want to describe its contents and make it available to the scholarly community. I have used the arrondissement and department codes employed by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and I hope that everyone doing quantitative work on France will use this system, so that all of our efforts will be compatible. Anyone who is using this coding system will be able to add data easily to my four sets, and ideally we will be able to develop a data bank with even more variables and a wider time frame.

Three years ago in this journal, J. Morgan Kousser( 1977) offered a stunning challenge to historians—a program for significantly improving the quantitative competence of historians and for expanding the number and range of quantitative studies. Faithful readers of Social Science History, however, will have noted that no response has been made to Professor Kousser's “Agenda for ‘Social Science History'“; indeed, not so much as passing notice of Kousser's argument has appeared in this medium. Were it not for the often spectacular, informal debates that have surrounded Kousser's agenda and similar proposals, the absence of response in these pages might well be taken for consensus on what once was the tenderest of issues among historians, quantitative analysis. Nevertheless, the debate is very much alive, and the issue, though less tender now than even a few years ago, continues to possess great importance to historians actively engaged in many areas of historical research.