Book contents
- Ingenious Trade
- Ingenious Trade
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Bred in the Exchange: Seamstresses and Shopkeepers
- 2 Girls as Apprentices
- 3 Managing the Trade: Women as Mistresses
- 4 What Girls Learned
- 5 Making Havoc: Discipline, Demeanour and Resistance
- 6 Freedoms and Customs
- Conclusion
- Appendix Who’s Who
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Making Havoc: Discipline, Demeanour and Resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2021
- Ingenious Trade
- Ingenious Trade
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Bred in the Exchange: Seamstresses and Shopkeepers
- 2 Girls as Apprentices
- 3 Managing the Trade: Women as Mistresses
- 4 What Girls Learned
- 5 Making Havoc: Discipline, Demeanour and Resistance
- 6 Freedoms and Customs
- Conclusion
- Appendix Who’s Who
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Two young women in apprenticeship, Katherine Venner and Christiana Hutchins, offer case studies of the difficulties that adolescence in apprenticeship might produce. It was a period in which girls learned, and resisted, gender identities. Mistresses might find themselves managing girls who refused to learn, spoke rudely, purloined shop goods and failed to perform the civil manners expected of seamstresses and milliners. Alongside court testimonies, the advice of Hannah Woolley, the one writer who dealt with female apprentices, presents a guide to the ways female apprentices were told to manage their minds and bodies, and how they responded. Work, this chapter argues, was formative of femininity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ingenious TradeWomen and Work in Seventeenth-Century London, pp. 178 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021