An examination of different stages of gendering the division of labor from the seventeenth-century English revolution through the industrialization of the nineteenth century. The division of labor in the earlier period was almost ungendered, unlike in the period of nascent capitalism in England, when the masculinization of the laboring class excluded anyone who occupied a position dependent on productive labor, including working women & children. Excerpts from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) are used as examples of the modern distinction between the spheres of poetics & politics, & between the manipulation of things & working with words, & women's "loss" in these divisions. Economic independence started being seen as contemptible for women, since labor was a masculine sphere; working women were the signs of moral decay of the whole laboring class. A. Devic