116Christian Simon work with few exceptions, too, the manufactures were the ones to gather large groups of women under one roof, thus providing a fairly solid basis for studying the difficulties of women.3 While manufactures employed fewer individuals in Europe than cottage industries and putting-out systems, justice demands consideration of the "working conditions" in the manufactures. As the various types of production should be seen as interrelated, viewing proto-industrialization exclusively in terms of cottage industries would be too restrictive.There have been several worthwhile attempts to define manufactures.
4The distinction between traditional trades (Handwerky a smaller type of business, which -as assumed by much earlier research -usually served the market for individual orders in the vicinity, and in Europe was primarily viewed by German authors as pertaining to the guild system), versus cottage industries (which often had no affiliation to guilds, like the manufactures, although production was decentralized) and the putting-out, system (Verlag) is crucial. Division of labour is an important aspect of this description of manufactures. Unfortunately, these definitions all contain some ambiguity, particularly as they are often based on inaccurate assumptions. Handwerk does not necessarily involve a guild, nor does it always serve a local market, or produce finished