Ingenious Trade

Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London

Laura Gowing author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:2nd Nov '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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Ingenious Trade cover

Reveals the stories of girls making their way as apprentices in 17th-century London, through arguments, thefts, profits, and paperwork.

Set in rapidly changing late 17th-century London, Ingenious Trade reveals a generation of young women taking up apprenticeships and making their way in trade. Drawing on engagingly detailed court cases, it recovers their ambitions, conflicts, networks and careers, showing the significance of women's work to their identities, and to the city.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.

'Gowing puts female apprenticeship convincingly front and centre in the history of early modern women, showing how girls learned the gendered mix of agency and contingency that would shape their lives as producers, traders and consumers. This book is a pleasure for its readers and a triumph for its author.' Cynthia Herrup, University of Southern California
'This wonderful book shifts women's artisanal training from the historiographical margins to the centre of city life. Focusing on people rather than things, Gowing's meticulous research brings to life the female makers and sellers of the consumer revolution and shows how women's skilled work crafted gendered identity alongside producing goods.' Alexandra Shepard, University of Glasgow
'… she writes in a style that makes her book readily accessible to students and those generally interested in early modern daily life.' Joseph P. Ward, Seventeenth-Century News

ISBN: 9781108707701

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: 417g

285 pages