Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London

by Laura Gowing

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, London

275 pages, Hardcover

Published November 29, 2021

Reviews

[Mel]

Hands down the best book on London history I've read. The first part talking about the exchange is so vivid. It would be easy to picture as a full scale tv series. The women's lives are so clearly realised. Gowing does a tremendous job describing the working lives of these women and how they fitted into the broader London world. Very highly recommended.