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To examine the psychology of merchants is to stay within a narrow social elite. Historians, in what is sometimes called “the new social history,” have paid close attention to the common people of Europe and to hitherto neglected social groups—women, the nonconformists, and minorities. Two fundamental changes affected the status of early modern women. Women under protoindustrialization were valued domestic workers, but they also had little economic independence; the male head of the household, the father or husband, gained the chief fruits of their labour. A second change, perhaps related to the first, was the advancing age of first marriage ...(100 of 156573 words)