The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London

The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London
Author: Paula Humfrey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351889990

The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented here describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. Domestics' court depositions offer qualitative evidence that female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital phase of women's lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour. While some women left service once they married, others relied on domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in London had considerably more agency than has earlier been recognized. Female servants who deposed before London ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and distinct as they present information about their working and personal circumstances.

The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London

The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London
Author: Paula Humfrey
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780754661559

These late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. This volume exposes the contractual underpinnings of domestic service, suggesting female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. The depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour rather than a pre-marital life phase. Voices of the non-literate in this volume are clear and distinct as they present their working and personal circumstances.

Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London

Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London
Author: T. Reinke-Williams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137372109

Drawing on legal and literary sources, this work revises and expands understandings of female honesty, worth and credit by exploring how women from the middling and lower ranks of society fashioned positive identities as mothers, housewives, domestic managers, retailers and neighbours between 1550 and 1700.

Gender in Early Modern England

Gender in Early Modern England
Author: Laura Gowing
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 100068640X

This concise and stimulating book explores the history of gender in England between 1500 and 1700. The second edition has been thoroughly revised to include new material on global connections, masculinity and recent historiography. Amid the upheavals of the Reformation and Civil Wars, gender was political. Sexual difference and women’s roles were matters of public debate, while social and economic changes were impacting on work, family and marriage. The rich archives of law, state and family testify to the complex configurations of patriarchal order and resistance to it. Gender in Early Modern England provides insight into gender relations in a time when a stark hierarchy of gender co-existed with a surprising degree of female capacity, great potential for challenge and confrontation, and a persistent sense of the mystery of the body. Documents include early feminist argument, law, midwives’ books, recipes, protest, sexual insults, cross-dressers, women escaping slavery, royal favourites and petitions. With a chronology, who’s who, glossary, guide to further reading and previously unpublished archival documents, Gender in Early Modern England is the perfect resource for all students interested in the history of women and gender in England between 1500 and 1700.

Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture
Author: Jennifer Higginbotham
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-05-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319727699

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700
Author: Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2023-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198860633

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Female Alliances

Female Alliances
Author: Amanda E. Herbert
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300199252

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, cultural, economic, and political changes, as well as increased geographic mobility, placed strains upon British society. But by cultivating friendships and alliances, women worked to socially cohere Britain and its colonies. In the first book-length historical study of female friendship and alliance for the early modern period, Amanda Herbert draws on a series of interlocking microhistorical studies to demonstrate the vitality and importance of bonds formed between British women in the long eighteenth century. She shows that while these alliances were central to women’s lives, they were also instrumental in building the British Atlantic world.

Sweet and Clean?

Sweet and Clean?
Author: Susan North
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 019259821X

Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850

Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850
Author: Samantha Williams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319733206

In this book Samantha Williams examines illegitimacy, unmarried parenthood and the old and new poor laws in a period of rising illegitimacy and poor relief expenditure. In doing so, she explores the experience of being an unmarried mother from courtship and conception, through the discovery of pregnancy, and the birth of the child in lodgings or one of the new parish workhouses. Although fathers were generally held to be financially responsible for their illegitimate children, the recovery of these costs was particularly low in London, leaving the parish ratepayers to meet the cost. Unmarried parenthood was associated with shame and men and women could also be subject to punishment, although this was generally infrequent in the capital. Illegitimacy and the poor law were interdependent and this book charts the experience of unmarried motherhood and the making of metropolitan bastardy.

Colonization and Domestic Service

Colonization and Domestic Service
Author: Victoria K. Haskins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317677935

This book brings together two key themes that have not been addressed together previously in any sustained way: domestic service and colonization. Existing studies of domestic service rarely make mention of colonization, but colonization offers a rich and exciting new paradigm for analysing the phenomenon of domestic labour by non-family workers, paid and otherwise. Scholars in diverse fields and disciplines here share new and stimulating insights on the various connections between domestic employment and the processes of colonization, both past and present, in a range of original essays.