Cover of Laura Gowing: Ingenious Trade

Laura Gowing Ingenious Trade

Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London

Price for Eshop: 809 Kč (€ 32.4)

VAT 0% included

New

E-book delivered electronically online

E-Book information

Cambridge University Press

2021

EPub
How do I buy e-book?

978-1-108-78706-2

1-108-78706-1

Annotation

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.

Ask question

You can ask us about this book and we'll send an answer to your e-mail.