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4 - What Girls Learned

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2021

Laura Gowing
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Chapter 4 recovers what girls in apprenticeships learned, the range of trades they practiced and how they were taught. Treating apprenticeship as a training system, operating in parallel to that of boys, this chapter uses the mass of information in legal disputes to reconstruct tasks like starching, binding petticoats, using patterns and making lace; keeping shop; and the wider world of training in housewifery, literacy and working in schools. Gentry apprentices were particularly concerned with learning the right level of skills and avoiding ‘drudgery’, aiming at running their own shops and pressing for independence, while apprentices through the rest of the social spectrum followed a highly differentiated set of occupations making textiles and clothes, very few of which were entirely sex-specific. Training involved watching and copying, but also included a keen regulation of appearance and the risk of physical correction.

Type
Chapter
Information
Ingenious Trade
Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London
, pp. 137 - 177
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • What Girls Learned
  • Laura Gowing, King's College London
  • Book: Ingenious Trade
  • Online publication: 29 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108639323.005
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  • What Girls Learned
  • Laura Gowing, King's College London
  • Book: Ingenious Trade
  • Online publication: 29 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108639323.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • What Girls Learned
  • Laura Gowing, King's College London
  • Book: Ingenious Trade
  • Online publication: 29 November 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108639323.005
Available formats
×