Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

  • 2 - Girls as Apprentices

  • Laura Gowing, King's College London
  • Book:
    Ingenious Trade
    Published online:
    29 November 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021, pp 55-98

  • Summary

    A carefully adapted indenture, made for a boy and rewritten for a girl, shows the ambivalence with which young women were bound into London’s Livery Companies, or guilds. Chapter 2 uses new data to estimate for the first time the numbers of London’s female apprentices, which were considerably higher than they appear from the formal record. The complex relationship between women, work and guilds across early-modern Europe often excluded and marginalised women, whilst in some places providing a parallel route to recognition. London’s distinctive customs presented particular opportunities as well as constraints for women. Within the companies, both officially and unofficially, and alongside them, the female apprenticeship sector was growing, prompted in part by economic and social dislocations and by family ambitions. Apprenticeship for girls was coming to be a significant and familiar option through the social spectrum.

Ingenious Trade
  • Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London
  • Laura Gowing
  • Published online:
    29 November 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • 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.