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.

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.

The Nurturing Male: Bravery and Bedside Manners in Isocrates' Aegineticus (19.24–9)

2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-185
Author(s):  
Rachel Hall Sternberg
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Women’S Work

Scenes from Euripidean tragedy can lead us to imagine that sick-nursing was women's work in ancient Greece. In the Hippolytus, a matronly Nurse attends the fretfully ill Phaedra; in the Orestes, Electra cares for her brother. Several prose sources, moreover, seem to corroborate this view of gender roles. We learn in Xenophon's Oeconomicus (7. 37) that the mistress of the household was expected to nurse sick slaves. Demosthenes, in a letter (3. 30), mentions two courtesans who are caring for the consumptive Pytheas. And the speaker in Against Neairanotes explicitly ‘how much a woman is worth during illnesses, when she is there for a man who is suffering’ (Dem. 59. 56).

Women’s Work

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin C. Bloomer
Keyword(s):  
Water Resources ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Women’S Work

This chapter begins with the story of Sahaya Mary, a resident of Dhanam’s village who struggled with a difficult pregnancy and marriage and was healed by Mātā, who diagnosed her as being possessed by Pāndi Muni. Her story displays the restrictions placed on the female body through local customs, religion, and Catholic doctrine. As with Rosalind and Nancy, possession by Mātā gives Dhanam authority outside normal gender roles and power structures and, on occasion, allows her to confer that greater authority on others. Her experiences are notably different than those of Nancy and Rosalind. Mātā’s interventions through the body of Dhanam allow women to circumvent certain daily power struggles. Dhanam specifies differences between Mātā and Hindu deities. Changes are coming to the rural community as newcomers stretch land and water resources. One such newcomer threatens Dhanam, and her possession practices wane.

scholarly journals TRADITIONAL MARKET AND WOMEN’S WORK IN THE BERINGHARJO MARKET, OF YOGYAKARTA

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Budiawati Supangkat ◽  
Rahman Latif Alfian ◽  
Johan Iskandar
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Large System ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Market System ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Traditional Market ◽  
The City

Traditional market is often one of the locations for economic turnover in an area. Various goods from villages, sub-districts, and other areas around the city are sent to be traded. In this market there is a large system that makes the market “live” in which there are interrelated actors. Some of the actors in the traditional market system such as the Beringharjo Market are women who work odd jobs. To see this phenomenon, this study used an ethnographic method to delve deeper into the phenomena that occur from the point of view of stakeholders in Beringharjo Market. The results of study showed that Beringharjo Market always changes from time to time, both physically and the actors who “live it”. Women who work in al kind of work become one of the actors who play an important role in the sustainability of dynamic market activities.

The Clockmaker’s Cosmos

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Protestant Books

On one level confessional distinction began to define material culture in the first decades of the seventeenth century, but a microhistorical approach reveals the persistence of plural devotional practices and beliefs. A close reading of the 1635 inventory of a court clockmaker, Kúndrat Šteffenaúr, reveals the complex intersections of confessions in Central Europe. It indicates an environment in which a wide range of devotional options were available. Analysis of Kúndrat’s possessions as individual items, and how they were kept together, shows the need to think across and beyond confessional boundaries of Protestant versus Catholic in order to understand lay religious beliefs and practices at this historical moment of confessional rupture. This chapter examines the inventory from two perspectives: first, it surveys the confessional spectrum of objects—Protestant books, Catholic devotional jewellery, clocks, and charms—contextualizing them and exploring why they may have come into Kúndrat’s possession; second, it offers an interpretation of the objects as items that formed Kúndrat’s individual cosmos, as ‘fragmented religion’.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document