Ingenious Trade

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Gowing
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Revolution

Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.

scholarly journals Girls on Forms: Apprenticing Young Women in Seventeenth-Century London

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Gowing
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City ◽  
Work Contracts

AbstractThe 1650s saw an influx of young women to skilled apprenticeships in London's companies. Apprenticed to women through the names of their husbands, they practiced seamstry and millinery in a wide range of guilds. The preprinted forms by which these girls were indentured demonstrate the means by which a long-established city institution both made room for women, incorporating them into the culture of company, and kept them marginal. A series of print and manuscript adaptations marked out girls’ forms, paying particular attention to the rules around marriage, and resulting, by the late seventeenth century, in a new trend towards non-sex-specific forms. This article argues that record keeping was both symbolically and concretely important for women's work and that the material culture and context of these print objects can shed a new light on gender roles at a key juncture in the histories of work, contracts, and the city.

Butter, Milk, and a “Spare Ribb”: Women's Work and the Transatlantic Economic Transition in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts

2009 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. McWilliams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic Transition ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Economic Behavior ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Butter Milk ◽  
Vital Element ◽  
Contemporary Account

Exploring the generally unappreciated connection between local economic behavior and the emergence of larger commercial endeavors in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the article demonstrates, through a close analysis of contemporary account books, that “women's work” was a vital element in the colony's pivotal transition to a transatlantic economy.

scholarly journals Embroidery in the Circle of the Last Romanovs

Experiment ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Wendy Salmond
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Preliminary Survey ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Royal Women

The goal of this article is to make a preliminary survey of the liturgical embroideries made or commissioned by the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna and her sister Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fedorovna. It suggests that the sisters’ needlework for sacred purposes was invested with a significance not seen in elite Russian society since the late seventeenth century. At a time when the arts of Orthodoxy were undergoing a state-sponsored renaissance, the wife and sister-in-law of the Nicholas ii were the last in a long line of royal women seeking to assert their piety and their power through traditional women’s work. In the closing years of the empire, to make and to donate sacred textiles was a way to emulate ancestral women, while providing modern women with examples of piety, industriousness, and patriotism.

scholarly journals Segmentation in the Pre-Industrial Labour Market: Women's Work in the Dutch Textile Industry, 1581–1810

2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Market Theory ◽  
Job Status ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Gender Conflict ◽  
Women’S Work

This article analyses women's work in the Dutch textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of dual (or segmented) labour market theory. This theoretical framework is usually applied to the modern labour market, but it is also valuable for historical research. It clarifies, for example, how segmentation in the labour market influenced men's and women's work in the textile industry. Applying this analysis, we find that, even in periods without explicit gender conflict, patriarchal and capitalist forces utilized the gender segmentation of the labour market to redefine job status and labour relations in periods of economic change. Although this could harm the economic position of all women and migrants, it appears that single women were affected most by these mechanisms.

A NEW GENDER(ED) ORDER? RESEARCHING AND RETHINKING WOMEN’S WORK

Sociology ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-873 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARRIET BRADLEY
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Women’S Work
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document