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
4 - What Girls Learned
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
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 TradeWomen and Work in Seventeenth-Century London, pp. 137 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021