The early socialist feminists celebrated female altruism and regarded it as a model for society as a whole. In this sense they emphasized the importance of differences between men and women.
The early liberal feminists chose a simpler, and in the short run, more successful strategy, celebrating the masculine pursuit of self-interest as a strategy that women could and should adopt for themselves.
Demanding equality, they de-emphasized gender differences. It is, however, difficult to find perfect examples of either extreme, and both feminisms were united by their discomfort with the traditional dualism that encouraged self-interest in men but demanded altruism from women.Liberal feminism emerged most vigorously in countries with a strong tradition of individualism and adherence to laissez faire. Still, the French utopian socialists influenced even writers as confident of individualism as John Stuart Mill, who recognized the need to redefine and, in a sense, redistribute the pursuit of individual self-interest. The sexual double standard also came under scrutiny. Those who professed horror at the very mention of free love could not ignore the moral inconsistencies and economic realities of state-regulated prostitution. The line separating desire from lust, like that separating self-interest from greed, was drawn differently for women than for men. Efforts to redraw these lines in less gendered terms provoked magnificent contention.
The Census of England and Wales began enumerating individual occupations in 1851, often assigning married women the same occupation as their husband on the presumption that the couple worked side by side. In 1871, women accounted for 31 percent of those defined as ‘‘economically active,” significantly more than in the United States at the same time (but probably reflecting an upward bias). Domestic service was similarly predominant, accounting for 46 percent of the total. Agricultural employment was much lower and manufacturing employment concomitantly greater than among women in the United States or France.1 Women in manufacturing (a term defined more broadly in the English than in the U.S. census) accounted for 40 percent of all women with gainful occupations.2 English economists were forced to take heed of an increasingly visible transformation of women's work.