The industrial revolution changed the social and financial estimation of unpaid "housework." Although a great part of the real work that ladies performed in the "local circle" continued as before over the nineteenth century—cooking, cleaning, looking after kids, keeping up family social connections, and generally dealing with the family unit economy—socially it lost a lot of its previous esteem. As one student of history has put it, the "sexual orientation division of work" that once existed gradually turned into "a gendered meaning of work": men earned wages outside the home ("work"), and ladies did unpaid work ("not work") inside it.
