How important was the work of women?

In what ways was metropolitan masculinity contested?

How repressive was the sexual regime in early modern London?

B. Capp, 'Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England', in P.

Griffiths, A. Fox, and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern
England (1996)

 Rather obviously, female power and autonomy had no place in contemporary views
about ordered society; they were seen as intellectually inferior and told to live as
‘underlings’ to the household king, the man
 Most women conformed to this expectation or ‘colluded in their own repression’
 Interesting point about conflict between demands of the scripture or the magistrate
and demands of the husband; where does a women’s loyalty lie?
 In practice such segregation was less well-defined; women often led households
(about 20%), could be competent rulers (Elizabeth), often had to support families in
the absence or desertion of men etc
 Male concern over female agency in the home, violence, stories of murder and such
like
 In the late 16th century, social and economic disorder brought about great fears as to
the agency of women and their place in the house, such that heavy sanctions were
brought down on women deemed ‘loose’ – this was most evident in the role women
played in rioting and disorder, which was not insubstantial
 Petitions and campaigns – gave women a voice and was often quite liberal (in the
sense that they wanted equal rights)
 Plenty of evidence of non-submissive attitudes for Stuart women; petitioning, writing
and publishing, leafletting etc etc
 In the economic sphere, guilds steadily tightened their controls in Tudor and early
Stuart England, reducing opportunities for women; on the other hand, the importance
of the guilds and of apprenticeship was declining by 1700, freeing the labour market
for women at the lower levels. Most ordinary women in late Stuart London were
engaged in paid work, and better-off women could find an economic niche as
rentiers, money-Ienders, landladies, retailers and so on.23 More generally,
Underdown and Amussen argue that the sense of gender crisis had weakened by
1700, as population pressure eased and the social and political order feIt more
secure – felt like this was worth quoting in full as it’s very important
 The ability of the patriarchy to ‘react’ to changing social circumstance? It’s an
interesting point
 ‘Accommodation’ of male authority – the concept of softening and bypassing male
authority without challenging it outright – since the law was reluctant to take up
domestic matters unless extreme, women held significant leverage in the domestic
space, particularly when combined with female social networks that were able to
apply pressure in different ways
 Female autonomy from control over the household? This was exaggerated by female
labour, which was of high incidence and sometimes very important to the household
budget. In rural regions they made butter and sold cheese, in urban ones they made
 and mended clothes or were engaged as spinsters. Economic independence generates
agency
 Female labour also reinforced female social networks ; as did social identity in
religious contexts (separating men and women in church)
 Goes into some detail about using social circles and gossip mechanisms as a means of
mocking men and other women, mostly owing to promiscuity or adultery
 Interesting expression of patriarchy in the above though – most women tended to
attack the women with whom their husband was having an affair or some such, not
the husband himself
 Susan Amussen has argued that most women rated wifely obedience as far less
important than sexual honesty
 Not all women were bound by patriarchal authority – plenty of instances of them
choosing their family and their image over cultural expectations of conformity

P. Crawford and S. Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England 1550-1720 (1998)

Subsection 1 – The makeshift economy of poor women

 Women’s worked varied through class division and location, but there were common
themes such as underpayment, housework and childcare, and low status
 Things covering women’s work status; identity as a worker obscured by
contemporary preoccupations with their marital status, historians preoccupation with
the family economy muddies perceptions of individuality in women’s work
(particularly in the surprisingly large instance of female-headed households),
women’s occupations changed over their lifetime (thus making typical occupational
identity hard to pin down), concepts of ‘work’ ignoring non-economic activity
 Good general question about what we consider as work; housekeeping, cooking,
cleaning, mending, spinning, budgeting, etc all absorbed time and often physical
labour on the part of woman, but without the exchange of a wage we do not deem it
work
 Outlines two broad categories of women in the makeshift economy; the poor but
employed (labourers, artisans, cottagers) and the destitute
 Makes the good point that the number of poor women isn’t just half the estimated
total poor; some women were locked out of their husband’s earnings and more
destitute than he
 Women’s work paid far too little to meet subsistence requirements, often even when
conducted full-time (such as spinning) – ‘now a poor Woman, perhaps a Mother of
many children, must work very hard to gain Three Pence, and Three Pence Farthing
per Day. The Misery of these Poor Creatures and their Families, is inexpressible.’
 Poor rate assessments indicate, unsurprisingly, that female-headed households are
significantly more likely to be poor than male headed ones.
 Very entrenched social beliefs with respect to the importance of male labour
compared to female labour, so much so that working women were provided with
fewer calories as well as being paid less.
 Training; many girls did not receive it, for those that did it was often inadequate for
work outside the home, and for those trained in crafts beyond the domestic they were
 often bound into occupations of permanent poverty (Institutionalised exploitation?
-n terms of ‘importance’ was the systematic underpayment of women’s labour
actually important for the economic viability of some sectors and the
maintenance of the traditional social order?)
 By the 1563 Statute of Artificers, all unmarried women between 12 and 40 could be
ordered into service – interesting that there was such unease around women’s work
yet it could be legally enforced; again might speak to that institutionalised
exploitation point
 Serving was one very important avenue of work for women; it provided food, lodging
and pay and thus one could live by it; it also often meant engaging in a range of tasks
so as to build out a repertoire (though there were still legally enforced fixed upper
bounds on pay) – they might also be left shit in their master’s will or be helped with
weddings and such like; serving did have massive disadvantages in potential sexual
harassment and rape, and the probability of being turned out if such things were
uncovered
 A point about how we view labour - As wives they performed many tasks similar to
those for which as single women they had received wages (ie only if it has monetary
value)
 Particularly in poor rural areas, women’s work was extremely important in
generating enough food for subsistence; growing legumes, producing cheese and
butter, tending to a cow, selling eggs, scavenging shellfish along the coast etc
 Poor women sold their labour to those of higher social status. Large households
required a range of miscellaneous and seasonal labour – see this section for the
institutional exploitation theory (though seasonal work often went to men and was
paid better if it did)
 Stock-knitting and bonelace making an important occupation for working women, as
was marketing (flogging foodstuffs in markets),
 Shift into the rural areas over time, as agricultural labour became increasingly male
and servant work, washerwomen and shoe shiners became increasingly demanded
with urbanization
 Women more likely to fall to poverty and destitution; this makes women’s work
important in the sense that they were in greater need of it than men owing to their
reduced capability to get additional employment (the poorer the household, the greater
the relative value of women’s work)
 Parishes sought to enable a woman to provide for her own family by her own labour,
even if they disapproved of her – again, the inconsistency between societal
expectations around a woman’s labour and those of her provision for the family – this
is also captured quite nicely in the payments women received to look after children;
meshing of the motherly expectations with those of labour and economic substance
 Teaching was another employment opportunity, particularly for more educated
women who had fallen on hard times – as was caring the destitute; some more good
examples of the importance of exploited female labour in facilitating vital
societal functions
 More examples of the above - the poorest women could be forced to undertake some
of the most unpleasant and dangerous work. At the embalming of a body, there was ‘a
 woman to attend the surgeons with water, mops, cloths and other things’. Women
dressed the corpse after (p.288) embalming – other examples include the vital and
dangerous work of ‘searchers’ during plague epidemics; they were paid meagre wages
(4s weekly in 1625) and sometimes coerced into such labour to avoid workhouses
 Women required some form of respectable reputation in order to be eligible for poor
relief; men did not
 Goes into some detail about female crime and prostitution; I’m not sure how the latter
fits into the ‘importance’ narrative, but it certainly is indicative of the broader culture
around exploitation of female labour, in the raw, physical bodily sense
 Family economy also ties into this narrative of institutionalised repression of
women’s labour; by limiting work opportunities, offering little training,
underpaying that work which was available, making better paying work of the
undesirable sort and yet expecting women to be providers and homemakers
(involving work which was not economised), the image of a women’s incapability
to provide economically and the associated independence and agency that came
with it was curbed. (breeding dependence)
 Extending the above - Although a more organized system of poor relief developed
during the period, and women and their children received a larger share of it than
did men, nevertheless the Poor Laws created a new kind of dependence in women.
Only the ‘good’ poor received relief, and they were forced to comply with the
expected norms of female dependence: to be content with little, conform to
patriarchal authority, and be grateful. 

Subsection 2 – occupational identities and social roles

 Considers the work of middling and upper rank women; subject to a lot of the same
issues as women of lower class; relative access and pay compared to men of the same
‘rank’, expectations over family care and household provision etc
 Main differences
o Upper class women had more economic options
o Reproductive work of higher class women was more important
o Higher up you go, less likely the woman is to engage in menial housework
o More likely to have occupational/professional identity
 The ‘typical’ middle class woman was the wife of a well-off farmer; she ran the
household, employed maids and servants, milked, grew, tended, and came as close as
it was possible to come to self-sufficiency (some of this work was economically
delineated, a lot wasn’t)
 Higher up mistresses of the house were often responsible for social aspects, educating
servants, organising lodgings, estate management etc
 Institutionalisation against women’s work also apparent in scripture and religion;
pious women seemed to question their own labour
 Very wealthy women often had blurred lines between duty and work, especially in the
areas of poor relief
 One strong area of female professional identity was in medicine, particularly
midwifery. Though again the institutions were turned against them; they lacked the
power to control their own conditions of work (though midwifery could pay fairly
well)
  There were a number of licensed female surgeons, and even non-licensed ones; some
were employed by hospitals and commanded generous wages. Though the absence of
licenses, niche specifications, dodgy apprenticeship credentials etc etc weakened the
occupational identity of medically trained women – nursing another option, which
could be combined with household expectations
 Teaching was another big area of potential employ for middle class women; indeed,
the number of female teachers enjoyed significant growth during the 17th century,
especially with the growth of charitable education institutions (often religious – many
were instructed to combine religious values with educational content which,
ironically, would have stressed the relative inferiority and unimportance of female
labour)
 Diversity and a willingness to turn to a variety of tasks characterized female labour
in the town as well as in the country.
 Big point of this section is the scattergun, dynamic nature of women’s work; weaving,
shopkeeping, adapting to a husaband’s death etc – this fluctuation also feeds the
absence of institutionalised control narrative, since women were not defined by
an occupation those occupations they took up held less meaning
 By the early eighteenth century, single women were responsible for about 10 per cent
of London businesses – services were another common route for middle-class woman;
tavern keeps could be quite well off, though alehouses had some unsavoury
connotations
 Obviously right at the top end we’ve got royal household employ, particularly
prevalent during the reign of a female monarch – a lot of the wealth here came from
patronage
 Makes the point about work being defined by economic value insufficient to capture
the work of women; many assisted their husbands in their occupation and were thus
working, but did not appear so, but this also extended to civilic duties
 Most changes over the period were wrt middling women; they gained new
opportunities in services but got shifted out of medical practice (as both midwifes and
physicians, the latter of whom became more stingy in protecting the value of their
license)

B. Capp, When Gossips Meet. Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern
England (2003)

 There was no patriarchal system, rather an interlocking set of beliefs, assumptions,

traditions, and practices, and the largely informal character of patriarchy enabled
each generation to adapt it to changing circumstances
 Goes into some detail about the history of patriarchy; its basis in religious scripture,
medical science, family economy, enshrined in law, culture and such like (ignoring
the obvious point of physicl strength)
 Arguments based on individual merit were judged irrelevant in the context of divine
authority, for to grant equality to a woman, however capable and virtuous, would
flout God’s own decree
 Such entrenched beliefs generally entrenched women in the home, where scripture
and history placed them – women were not allowed in local government, they
couldn’t vote, they couldn’t work in legal professions, they were allowed no role in
the church and were marginalised in medicine
  Women’s position in economic life was similarly marginal As conditions worsened in
the sixteenth century, they were increasingly excluded by guild regulations from
trading independently, except as widows. Girls could still serve apprenticeships, but
few were able to pursue their craft independently thereafter. If some opportunities
remained open, mainly in retail and victualling, or as milliners, it is clear that women
were firmly excluded from the most important and profitable sectors of the economy.
 Goes into some stuff about turning misogyny into humour in order to better
disseminate it
 Women had equally few positive role models through whom they could challenge the
traditional view of female inferiority. Queen Elizabeth I, like Margaret Thatcher,
liked to present herself as a unique phenomenon, not a model for others to emulate
 Interestingly, those women that were ‘radicals’ campaign for very modest outcomes;
no legal, political or economic change but rather a shift I attitude towards greater
sympathy for women; this did not really challenge the social order
 By the 17th century there were some more fiery denunciation of the patriarchy,
particularly wrt the institution of marriage (some likening it to slavery)
 Seems a widespread sense of anxiety surrounding Tudor and Stuart Englishmen and
the gender order (some believed it ws under threat; there isn’t much evidence of this
being the case)

Subsection – women as citizens; public and political life

 Spends quite a bit of time on how disgrace upon an individual could extend to
disgrace upon the community
 Gossips played a key role in mediating public opinion (and disseminating
information); the term became associated with women (out of a fear of subversion)
but could apply to either sex
 Sense of collective responsibility played a significant part in women’s scrutiny of
their neighbours
 Women played quite a direct role in the translation of scandal and accusation into
legal affairs; taking shit to court, playing detective and prosecutor (in the absence of a
police force) – some of this was coercive, some was in defence of fellow women or
the poor
 Goes into more foamlised politics – explosion of female involvement around the civil
war, with petitioning, pamphlets,

R.B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate

Spheres (1998)

 Opens with the observation that has been mentioned a couple times now and is
important to the narrative; work is defined by that which receives earns monetary
income, thereby excluding housework and inherently undervaluing female labour –
the question of duty vs occupation?
 Opens with a little discussion about the shift in female work over time; some believed
that there was a ‘golden age’ of female labour where employment opportunities
overlapped with those of men, which became marginalised with the growth of
capitalism and industrialisation – author rejects this notion on the basis that women’s
work has always been underpaid and underappreciated
 Basically argues that one needs to assess the work of men in order to appropriately
assess that of women (which seems fairly obvious)
 Notes the problems associated with capturing the extent of women’s work; women
were not defined by occupation in the same way men were, much of their work was
sporadic, seasonal, geographically mobile or part of a household unit, all making it
difficult to measure and unlikely to be recorded
 All this is reflected in the census, which was composed by the household head (likely
to not report female labour) and asked for those ‘regularly employed’ – meaning
women’s work was not captured, and methods that attempted to capture it varied from
region to region
 Agriculture in 1650 – men typically performed more of the physical labouring tasks,
but women were not averse to hard labour; they sowed, planted, and watered. They
grew vegetables in gardens for consumption. They milked and made butter and
cheese, controlled the farms finances and organised the selling of its produce. Their
role was essential and versatile.
 However, there was significant overlap, especially among farm servants and
farmhands who could be male or female. Reaping, carting, shearing, ploughing and all
else saw little division of labour by gender.
 Disparities seen in wages – women farmhands typically paid between 37% and 60%
of the wages of their male counterparts
 Some marginalisation over time as a result of the scythe (which only strong men
could hold), although this did free up opportunities for other more menial agricultural
tasks
 Enclosure was bad for woman – without common land they had weaker access to
property rights, and were consequently excluded from raising livestock and such
 Increasing agricultural productivity in the period decreased demands for farm labour,
which affected women more than men, and the practice of sending young women
from parish schools to work on farms also stopped.
 Interesting point about women’s loss of control over dairy production owing to the
introduction of science into cheese and butter production (a field dominated by men)
and rejection of female practises as tradition-based
 Some evidence of middle-class women moving out of agriculture and into domestic
service (particularly in the south), but overall the author argues for broad continuity
with respect to the sexual division of labour in agriculture, albeit with some
marginalisation of women towards lower-skilled tasks that resulted in a decline in
their wages
 Manufacture and industry – prior to the main period of industrialisation (some call
it protoindustrialization) expansion of putting-out systems and consumption of
consumer goods created lots of employment opportunities for women, particularly
around textiles – spinning is the textbook example, and suited women for it could be
performed in the home
 That said, a subset of the more important tasks in the textiles industry were performed
by men, leaving women’s work criminally underpaid – though there was some
 overlap, generally, men’s work tended to occupy the workshop while women worked
from home
 Metalwork was very male-dominated; though women were more prevalent in areas
like Birmingham, where there were no guilds. They were also involved in a variety of
quite physical labour in the early period; coal mining, smelting and ironworks, boat
loading etc etc – though tasks were often quite accessory in nature, they were also
varied
 Industrial revolution; women cut out of textile work due to mechanisation, the
requirement of strength and then loss of craft knowledge (when strength requirements
ebbed again) – that said, mechanisation did open the for for many women to take up
hand weaving, though they were not paid as well as men
 Most of the women working in factories were very young (sub 21) and unmarried
 A lot of space for the expansion of women’s work with industrialisation; especially
via the putting out system (which subdivided manufacturing into tedious simple
processes to be performed in the home) – though this resulted in ‘sweating’, whereby
wages contracted as a result of task simplification and thus excess labour supply
 Some contractions – notably the 1842 Mines act which forbade women from going
underground
 Concludes that industrialisation didn’t change gender work dynamics that much,
besdies th significant growth in manufacturing employment for women (which
subsequently declined rather rapidly during the 19th century)
 Similarly, the technological and organisational developments which occurred during
the later phases of industrialisation caused numerous changes in the actual tasks
performed by men and women, but the more skilled tasks invariably continued to be
allocated to men, and the new jobs women performed often resulted from the
breakdown of complex tasks into simpler, lower-paid processes.
 Trade – street selling and hawking was well-represented in the female department,
particularly prior to the 19th century and in areas of edible produce and small items of
interest (newspapers and haberdashery) – though such industry was of very low social
status and poorly paid
 Markets were less diverse, mostly because they required a license to trade, and
became less so over time (capitalist middle men, changing cultural attitudes etc)
 Shopkeepers and small industry had female presence, but the existence of high
upfront capital costs and suchlike kept gender diversity at bay – indeed, those with
sufficient capital were also likely put off by changing middle class attitudes towards
the gentility of shop keeping
 Service – majority of domestic servants were woman, and this proportion only
increased over time (generally due to low barriers to entry and increasing demand
from a wealthier and fatter middle class)
 Male servants tended to be more expensive indicators of status, even if their work
required less skill than the female servants
 Servants were very age specific – tended to be young single individuals, who left the
occupation after getting married. Pre-servants girls were likely to go into nursing,
catering, shopkeeping, laundry and other such positions
 Women did pretty much anything service related, 'it can almost be saidcthat there is
no work too heavy or disagreeable to be done by women, provided it is also ill-paid.
 Professions – male-dominated owing to educational requirements, formal regulation
and expectation of a life-long vocation. Women were completely disbarred from
clerical, legal and army positions.
 Some existence of women in medical care, though much of it was informal and
‘expected’ as part and parcel of the housewife category – men monopolised the higher
social status paid positions, besides a few more lowly positions such as nursing and
midwifery
 The story of female exclusion from midwifery is retold and interesting; argues that
developmental of new medical practises from which women were institutionally
excluded, paying for male midwives as a form of conspicuous consumption and active
male attempts to defame female midwives contributed to this phenomenon
 Only medical practice left open to women was nursing – generally underpaid and
undertrained until FN
 Teaching was big cheese for women; generally because it was the least regulated of
these professions and tied to motherly occupations. The expansive growth in the
number of children undertaking primary education led to an explosion of female
teachers (71% of them by the 1851 census)
 Very few women employed in ‘white collar’ work

Note that the above is likely to significantly underestimate female work still
  Argues that overlap between male and female occupations ‘suggests that the line
between male and female work was sufficiently fluid tht changes in the sexual
division of labour could occur’
 Overall a ‘sharpening’ of the sexual divisns of labour, with women performing more
typically ‘motherly’ and ‘feminine’ occupations and men more physical masculine
ones
 General decrease in the skill level of women’s employment?
 Institutionalised gender differences in work; women had reduced access to education
(and that education they did receive was different to that of men, mostly domestic),
apprenticeships were fewer and shorter for women and again focused on
‘housewifery’ (though by 1800 the apprenticeship institution was in serious decline),
property law (which prevented women from owning property, making contracts or
suing, thus making them ineffective independent economic agents – though there was
plenty of circumvention), guilds (which did not formally ban women but in practice
did; one could not obtain freeman status as a woman without knowing someone),
maternal duties and the breadwinner model – thus argues that customary practice is
the greater explanatory factor behind differing gender roles, not formal exclusion
 Argues that industrialisation led to an increase in the demand for female labour due to
exploitation of its low cost and the notion that reducing female socialisation would
make them more docile
 Argues that period saw an increasing volume of criticism aimed at women’s work
(though it was mostly heeded only by a middle class that could afford it)
 The ideal of a breadwinner wage served two purposes for male workers: it justified
demands for higher wages from their employers, and it kept lower-paid women from
competing with them for jobs
 Although the restrictions imposed by the unions and parliamentary legislation were
largely ineffective, they contributed to the increasing articulation of ideas which
sought to define women in terms of domestic duties, and to privilege further men's
work through the growing emphasis on occupational identity in male self-definitions
and through the concept of the breadwinning wage.

A.Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003)

 Central thesis of the book is that manhood and patriarchy were not equated in early
modern England – patriarchy attempted to discipline men as well as women, it was a
messy ideology not bound by simple rules, it was privileged for men as well as
women etc
 Effectively argues that gender differences need to be understood within sexes as well
as between them – gender means different things for different men and women at
different stages of their life
 Continues to argue that patriarchy effectively means the running of households by
male heads, within which it was also expected that servants would obey masters and
children their parents, thereby meaning women were not unilaterally subordinated by
such a model and that males did not always benefit from it
 Masculinity makes socially crippling distinctions between not just men and women
but just men – particularly anxiety with respect to meeting the expectations of a
modern man
  For those men who did not meet or conform to the patriarchy were still men, they
were simply pursuing different codes of manhood that often ran in opposition to
patriarchal ones
 First looks at texts such as books, plays and advice regarding the role of a man – a
few points; argues that it implicitly assumes wealth and education levels (and thus a
class perspective) that was not always shared, that its notions of patriarchy were
distinct from those of manhood, with the fomer being defined mostly by relation to
women and the latter:
o Considered often from an age perspective, with ‘manhood’ being some period
of peak physicality
o From a marriage standpoint, quite patriarchal but also referring often to a
man’s rationality, sensibility and compromise
 Notion that men primarily sought affirmations of their masculinity via each other
(male social networks)
 Uses a lot of university court records, specifically from Cambridge, which obviously
come with some serious representation issues. Argues that such issues are actually
informative, and that University interpretations of masculinity and manhood were the
‘idealized bastions’ established by the high-ups
 Argues that notions of manhood are most hotly contested by youths, with their
drinking, gambling and sexual promiscuity – all opposed to typical refined
‘gentlemanliness’
 Argues that violcen both bolstered and undermined notions of patriarchy and
manhood – I’m definitely inclined to think that violence is typically masculine,
whether wielded against other notions of masculinity or not doesn’t change that
 Argues that slander and defamation shows that men were more concerned with
maintaining their status among other men than women; though this can definitely be
interpreted as an absence of concern with the female perspective and thus an
embodiment of the patriarchal system into the manhood one.

Conclusion

o Strength, thrift, industry, self-sufficiency, honesty, authrority, autonomy, self-

government, moderation, reason, wisdom, and wit were all claimed for patriarchal
manhood, either as duties expected of men occupying patriarchal positions or as the
justification for their associated privileges. - however, such notions applied
differently to different men (of different class and status), were weighted differently
by different men and could be selectively invoked dependent on circumstance
o Plenty of contradiction –
o Also active counter-cultures; drinking, nightwalking, illicit sex – violence, bravado,
debauchery could all be ascribed as typically masculine for certain groups – indeed,
rejections of such forms of manhood as ‘common’ implicitly suggests different types
of masculinity for different social strata
o The differences between men were as central to the practice of patriarchy as the
differences between men and women
o Argues for two longer-term shifts in patriarchy and manhood over the period – one,
far fewer men and women were being married, leaving gender definitions less
affected by householder status; two, more men were becoming wage labourers with
less steady incomes, and thus slipped more into the aggressive, patriarchal form of
masculinity
I think overall this book is right but that there was never any contention as to its rightness –
patriarchy and manhood are not the same, but they are inevitably tied up and inter-woven
such that distinctly categorising each is very difficult. I think it fairly easy to argue however
that the patriarchy had a greater effect on notions of manhood in early modern England than
it does now, and that class identity has as much to say about gender roles as does gender
itself.

E.A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (1999)

o Argues for the importance of men’s power over women in shaping the identity of
men, but that the existence of the patriarchy had costs for men as well as women
o Goes into some detail about the history of patriarchy- religious attitude (eve’s greed,
men as gods in the household etc)
o Argues that male domination both in the public and private sphere was very important
to the male identity
o Argues that men sought to dominate women and assert masculinity via sexual control
– specifically exclusive hetero relationships. Evidence is the widespread use and
humiliation associated with the term cuckold
o Basically arguing that systems of manhood and honour were inherently tied to
upholding the patriarchy, with the latter defined in terms of the dominance of men
over women – interesting to see how this contrasts and intersects with the previous
work
o Has this very loosely defined phrase ‘honour’ that she keeps referring to – seems a
mix of pride, social standing, economic wellbeing etc etc, and how it can all be
affected by slander and defamation. Indeed, author acknowledges the vagueness of
this term by highlighting that its use was restricted to the upper echelons, and that
‘credit’, ‘reputation’ and ‘good name’ were more common for lower social strata
o Strongly argues that male sexual activities, and the lack thereof, were central to
notions of honourable and dishonourable manhood (and I think they still are)
o Goes into some detail about sources, mostly court cases for defamation and libel –
courts have a unique advantage because they get insight into what comments and
actions were considered most damaging to male honour and identity; repetition of
such themes likely belies a pattern
o Seeks to use fictional sources to get at the ‘inner man’, since a majority o literature
and plays were written by men. Obviously, disentangling the iner thoughts of men
from literary devices, themes, distillation and everything else is extremely difficult
o High incidence of male sexual honour in plays indicative of its prevalence as a theme
of social dynamics? (questionable to say the least)
o Books structure runs – sexual relationships with women important to becoming an
honourable man; married men clung to this belief and felt undermined by
female independence; shame befell those who could not maintain sexual honour;
those who befell shame tended to litigate
o Argues in the conclusion that these themes represented more continuity than change;
things hung around, but in only through constant action on the behalf of men (not
accepted deference on the part of women)
 o Argues the themes laid out here are not timeless in that they changed during the 18th
century – with scientific advancements in the study of the body, men began to
diminish women on the basis of their physiological differences (and less heed was
paid to the scripture) – particularly brought about by a middle class – also concerns
over sexual threats from men themselves (masturbation, pornography,
homosexuality etc) replaced anxieties over female chastity

T.Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds), English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (1999)

 Makes very distinct that this is a book about diversity of the masculine experience
 First up – sexuality – argues by historians of homosexuality that sodomy pre 1750
was considered a sin but not its own sexual identity. Men did not define themselves
in terms of their sexual behaviour. Effectively argue that sodomy was just like pride,
greed etc – a sin one might fall into
 18th century brought about a more defined homosexual sub culture, evidenced by
the ‘molly’, and as a consequence heterosexual masculinity began to define itself in
terms of such a sub culture (ie not being it)
 That said, the association between effeminacy and sexuality is not so distinct owing to
the broad spectrum of things one might be called effeminate for (slander, devotion to
politeness, immaturity, even emulation of the French)
 Stuff about biology – prior to the 18th century was the ‘one body’ approach, wherein
men and women were thought to possess the same bodily characteristics on a
spectrum and as such gender was more of a social and political construct as opposed
to a scientific one
 Medical science created new forms of gender discrimination upon discovering that
women’s bodies were fundamentally different to those of men – thus gender began to
viewed more as ‘naturally’ or ‘predeterminedly’ different
 This new construction of gender entailed that, as men and women were now
'naturally' opposite sexes, men should and would desire women, and women alone.
While sodomy had previously been seen as a part of a broader libertine sexuality, it
appeared increasingly as a perversion of a new 'naturalised' heterosexuality.
 Highlights that this view is a very elite-construct, and that these new machinations on
gender and sexuality were very slow to permeate to broader society (although
pressure over sexual performance did seem to catch on quick)
 1650-1750 shows a period of remarkable sexual constraint for men – a significant
minority never married, the average age of marriage was 28 and bastardization
was very low. How does one construe ideas of masculinity
 Post 1750 the inverse was true – the author notes that some portion of this was likely
due to changing attitudes around construed masculinity; ‘enforced’ heterosexuality
that encouraged more out of marriage sex (author also notes it as ‘increasingly
problematic’ – evidence of increased sexual violence and rape)
 Stone has argued that the period was one whereby marriage became increasingly
companionship-focused, and thus there was more intimacy – the author highlights that
his evidence is concerned mostly with the upper-middle class, and that class identity
changes the picture with respect to masculinity
 Talks a little of honour and reputation – I think a lot of this stuff is quite flimsy
 General polarisation of reputation – men’s reputations became less connected to their
sexual behaviour, while women’s reputations became more so (and more frailly so)
  On Davidoff and Hall’s 18th claiming of the ‘public sphere’ by men and the relegation
of women to the domestic sphere; author argues effectively that private and public
masculinity, patriarchy and feminism were expressed differently, and that the blurring
of the lines between the two makes it difficult to assess the extent of women’s
influence on the latter
 The observation that women were not just increasing the variety and number of their
public activities but that they were central to cultural production, and that the
mutuality of the companionate marriage required the active engagement of men at the
heart of the domestic sphere, combined with the contradictions for male identity and
behaviour in the practice of civility and politeness, makes any simple linear model of
the historical development of masculinity difficult to sustain.
 Masculinities varied and continually contested, as might be expected of a conclusion
– interesting point between, however, a man’s conduct and public notions of
masculinity (can we say that if a man practises some form of conduct then it is
inherently some form of masculinity?)

Conclusion

 Gender identity and class – on the one hand it would seem to be quite distinct;
bourgeois masculinity as a rising theme in the 18th century, breadwinner ideology for
the working class. Under scrutiny it seems less clear – bourgeois masculinity was
varied and diverse, working class ideals might always have been breadwinner inclined
and there was much overlap between the two
 Shift away from ideals of manliness tied to military might and bearing of arms?
 Argues for many continuities in masculinity – most notably the idea of private
patriarchy and mastery over the home. Also argues that the pursuit of sex and
early sexual encounters is a time honoured tradition of manhood (I’m inclined to
agree)

T. Reinke-Williams, ‘Misogyny, Jest and Male Youth Culture in Seventeenth-Century

England, Gender and History, 21 (2009)

 Some stuff about the non-specificity of patriarchy; about how for some it entailed
mostly domestic affairs, some rejected it for it went against their own notions of
masculinity, how some never sought to become patriarchs and defined their manhood
via homo-social networks of drinking and sex etc
 Age structure of the patriarchy – most control was in the hands of older men, who saw
youths as just as significant a threat on notions of proper male conduct as were
women. Captured through fraternal relationships formed by apprentices
 Goes into a little detail about what jest books were and their intended audience
(collections of stories, jokes and comics that promoted certain ideals and were sold
very cheaply everywhere) – they were often set in rowdy, poorer locations and had
lower class protagonists – lots of slapstick and shit humour at the expese of some fool
(usually a man)
  Jests set in alehouses and whorehouses rather predictably pictured women as
flirtatious and sexually available – makes the point that women could thus be
accepted in drinking culture only as objects of desire
 Generally, Male sexual promiscuity and the commodification of women were
central to much jest-book humour, and ‘jesting’ was a nebulous term that
encompassed intimate behaviour such as flirting, kissing and heavy petting –
continues with the still-relevant notion that sexual conquest was an important notion
of masculinity and pride
 However, the adultery of wives was far more damaging to patriarchal sexual
reputations than the sexual misdemeanours of men themselves – all the typical stuff
about the social stigma of cuckoldry leaking over into jest books; age divide? (gave
younger men some sense of superiority over the married because it was not possible
for them to be cuckolds)
 Argues that much of the cuckoldry content is anti-marriage, both by framing
cuckoldry as the ultimate slight upon one’s honour and by glorifying the bachelor
lifestyle of non-commital sex
 Argues that jests promoted violence against spirited women – reading the stories, I’m
not so sure as to whether they promoted violence or made villains of the men who
enacted it
 All this stuff can be interpreted differently – some of the witty sexual promiscuity of
women would be interpreted differently by a female or young male audience (erotic
mostly) as it would by patriarchs and misogynists (absence of dominance led to
cuckoldry)

E. Hubbard, City Women. Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London
(Oxford, 2012).

 Wives were enjoined to avoid extravagance and to save household wealth: they were
endowed with responsibility but not with power.
 Main source = London consistory court; one of the few sources that provides solid
insight into the lives of poor and middling women
 A lot of cases of matrimonial dispute and defamation, which is why women appear so
frequently
 Overall, in cases originating in the City and the suburbs, including the eastern
parishes along the Thames, nearly 66 per cent of all 2,765 litigants were female

The ‘her honest labour’ subsection

 Argues that hostility toward female competition in the labour market was the
primary reason behind keeping women out of work, not ‘sexual anxieties’ (mobility,
independence etc) – they were readily construed as a threat to male income,
particularly in periods of difficulty such as the end of the 16th century
 Sort of brushes over the notion that women were serially underpaid owing to the lack
of opportunity and the excess supply of female labour – institutional misogyny is also
surely a factor, for as we have seen women were paid less than men when they
performed the same operations (not a supply issue)
 Women were not afraid to ascribe significant weight to their labour in terms of
economic wellbeing – likely because their work was essential for subsistence in many
cases
 Profession and labour was important from a social perspective too, for the word of
those who relied on charity was deemed less truthful – women commonly avoided
admitting that they received alms
 Women were often quite mobile in their labour, both in the sense of shifting from
occupation to occupation and that it often involved actual movement – many
contemporaries looked upon this as synonymous with sexual dishonesty and
unwarranted social mobility
 The variety of female labour is captured in the table presented as part of this chapter,
though even this will not capture the full extent of women’s work – lodging was not
included, as were a number of menial tasks such as washing and carrying which
women frequently performed but were not significant enough in answer to the
question ‘how do you maintain yourself?’ (also no one would claim to do illegal work
like prostitution)
 Competition for work was fierce, and women who restricted themselves to one
occupation risked finding themselves unemployed. – taking it from the more
economic perspective of scarcity – again returns to this point on the finishing of
goods once England’s trade opened up (could be something interesting to think about
for presentation?)
 Nearly all early modern London women were at least occasionally engaged in
sewing, mending, knitting, making lace, winding silk, or spinning, much of which
could be done while minding children and keeping an eye on a husband's shop if he
were absent
 Could start compiling a list of female labour – spinsters, weavers, washerwomen,
nurses, midwives, marketwomen, fishwives, hucksters, maids, servants, victualling
house work, tavern hostesses, farming, teaching, porter, waterbearer etc etct etc
 Women dominated sale of produce, and often trekked from well beyond the city to
hawk stuff all day (gruelling and tiresome work) – significant social and economic
disparity between hucksters and market women, the latte of whom ran stalls and paid
rent
 Fishwives and other female hawkers symbolized the irrepressible growth of consumer
London in a way that the stately aldermen, bedecked with beards and gold chains, did
not. 
 For victualling wives work was something of an extension of the domestic
responsibilities – after all, the alehouse was likely where she lived – victualling also
represented something of an opportunity for women if the husband died; they often
kept the alehouse
 Washerwomen and charwomen were among some of the poorest and of lowest credit
– they worked as hard as maidservants but without board and food, and had to socially
degrade themselves by referring to their employers as ‘mistress’. Laundressing was
physically arduous, paid poorly and came with very low social status (despite it being
an essential service)
 The nursing of sick people—the provision of warmth, company, cleanliness, and
digestible foods—may have been the single greatest factor in their relief. – and was
conducted in large part by women
 Some women performed more specialised medical roles, particularly surrounding
disease such as the pox, but as we have seen they were filtered out with the
 formalisation of the profession and increasing barriers to entry (training and
education)
 Stuff about midwifery – one of the more respected and well-paid female roles
available

T. Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (2014)

 Outlines how many women were successful and reputable retailers - ‘world of casual
and seasonal employment in which women were able to compete as equals with men’
(not sure this Susan Wright quote is accurate)
 As we’ve seen before, retailing of foodstuffs was quite female dominated; both from
the Hawker perspective and from more established shopkeeps and retailers (who
tended to live on premise) – this was despite concerted efforts at regulation of the
city’s market spaces stretching back to the 13th century, though these efforts were
stepped up at the end of the 16th century (particularly targeting casual mobile retailing
by which many women earned a living)
 Argues that such measures were ineffective given that it seems the number of women
working in retail actually rose between the 14th an 18th centuries; however,
composition of such women appear to change over the period, with the increased
respectability of the craft inviting more from middle and upper class backgrounds the
ability of female retailers to stand their ground and deal plainly, honestly and
effectively was much admired in early modern London – is this not something of
misogyny itself; ie. it’s surprising for men to see women acting so competently,
implying they expect their base state to be something less – I think this theory is
confirmed by stuff like and being a quick and industrious woman, in a little time she
understood and managed the trade as well as any man cou’d do’.
 A lot to do with honesty and reputation – was a woman’s ability to work more
closely tied to her credit and reputation than for men? – slightly different angle;
could one boost honesty and reputation via engaging in some form of industriousness
makeshift craft? (indeed, negative connotations of parish dependency might be
lessened by reference to independent labour)
 Between 1695 and 1725 only 31.4 per cent of wives deposing before the church
courts declared that they were wholly maintained by their own employment, whilst
24.7 per cent claimed they were maintained by a mixture of their own paid labours
and the resources of their husbands – pretty indicator of two things; female labour
was so underpaid as to often make it unviable on its own, and owing to this fact
marriage was a desirable prospect for many women
 Victualling – generally a story of decline; in late medieval England almost all
alehouses were run by women, but increasing institutionalisation of brewers,
metropolitan growth that created fears over women’s employment replacing men’s,
increasing anxiety around the repute of the occupation and requirements for licenses
all restricted the ability of women to pursue such occupations (although many still
did, often in conjunction or on the behalf of their husbands) – though that said the
numbers seem to suggest that women’s employ in such occupations actually
increased, probably owing to the explosive growth of alehouses
  The cultural representation of the Brewster is somewhat ambivalent; they’re friendly,
fun, offer comfrots etc but also depicted as luring people into sin and misuse of
money
 As one of the most advanced capitalist economies of the age, London thus offered
women a greater range and number of employment opportunities, as well as the
ability to earn what were on average slightly higher wages than their provincial
sisters

F. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550-1700

(1994)

 Has a good point about the role of legal scripture in dictating culture and defining
concepts of order and disorder – culture shapes law, and laws shape cultures
 Argues that threats of domestic crime and abuse most often stem from the ‘familiar’
rather than the invader; an insider, women or servant, who threatens the established
male order, but who mostly constitute the victims of such violence as opposed to the
perpetrators
 Seems to focus on domestic violence as committed by women – the account is written
in such a confusing and overly academic way that I struggle to see the point
 Chapter summaries (and thus view sumaries) – popular literature on husband murder
attempted to restore order threatened by wifely insubordination, a theme put on the
extreme with murder, but that in doing so it revealed anxieties as to the female
position in the home
 Also looks at women who lie outside traditional patriarchal boundaries, arguing that
their criminalization (as witches and child killers) represents further anxiety as
regarding non-traditional household structures – interestingly, such accounts also
depict women scheming with other women (which does not occur inside the
household structure), belying fears over ‘secret’ social spaces for such women
 Attributing power to unmarried women ‘criminalising’ poverty?
 Seems to conduct lots of analysis of plays, which I don’t give a shit about

A.Bayman, ‘Cross-Dressing and Pamphleteering in Early Seventeenth Century

London’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (ed.), Moral Panics, The Media and the
Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009).

 A piece about a cross-dressing phase of early modern London (1620ish) wherein a

number of women began dressing up as men and cutting short their hair – argues that
the pamphlets regarding such matters simultaneously voice and mock the moral
outrage of the time
 The first pamphlet had everything you’d expect; thinly veiled misogyny, threats of
sexual promiscuity, fear over aping one’s betters, class divides etc – the third one is
even more derogatory, and apparently loses its focus so much as to slip into general
complaints regarding degeneracy and the loss of decency
 Interestingly, seems the pamphlet gave space for women to defend their decisions,
which they do so more effectively and coherently than the criticism (which
undermines the validity of such criticisms and makes the writers seem foolish)
  ‘I was created free, born free, and live free: what lets me then so to spinne out my
life, that I may dye free? … Are we then bound to be the Flatterers of Time, or the
dependants on Custome? … Custome is an Idiot’
 to cash in on the interest in censuring lewd dress; and to challenge the imperatives
behind that censure and to undermine the moralizing discourse on which it drew – not
sure how I missed this switch but oh well

I. W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social relations in Elizabethan London (1991), ch.
6

 Argues that determining the extend of petty can casual crime is extremely difficult,
but that we can be fairly sure there was not a lot of organised crime (which was
picked up easier by the sheriffs)
 Shifting liaisons and alliances in the criminal fraternity
 One of the most organised sectors of crime was prostitution; came in many forms,
from formal bawdy houses, employed and rent-paying prostitutes, rooms in houses of
ill-repute, causal prostitution etc – a lot of evidence of fairly networks between
bawdy houses, prostitutes and pimps, who shared resources, information and clientele,
though each was certainly independent and competing with the others (shared
networks usually ad-hoc)
 much crime, in London as elsewhere, was casual and opportunistic, and liaisons, even
among the professional criminals, short-term
 Most important institution of order was the household and the culture within it –
subservience, honesty and the like were deeply rooted in the scripture and expected to
be passed from parent to child and (equally importantly perhaps) from master to
apprentice – archer argues that full internalisation of values among the young never
occurred (obviously) due to a lot of evidence to the contrary (like the existence of
crime in any capacity)
 Goes into some largely unimportant details as to the more formalised systems of
regulating crime (courts and constables)

Question is how repressive was the sexual regime?

M. Ingram, Carnal knowledge: regulating sex in England, 1470-1600 (2017)

 As will be seen, secular tribunals of various kinds, ranging from tiny borough courts
and the meetings of local justices to King’s Bench, the most exalted common-law
court in the land, had an important part to play in sexual regulation – the extensive of
such court networks used to punish sexual misdemeanours points to two possibilities;
the such misdemeanours were very common or that they were prosecuted with fervour
(or perhaps both) – the question as to how repressive the sexual regime was depends
in large part upon this distinction
 Short-lived colony experiment circa 1650 that made adultery a crime punishable by
death
 Certainly a ratcheting up of penalisation on sexual transgression under the
protestant reformists, who were a bunch of virgins lol
  The difference between ‘top-down’ sexual repression and ‘bottom-up’ – s system
imposed from above or policed by society as a whole? (certainly both – though
determining primary directions and influence is basically impossible)
 Context – makes the important point that sexual regulation is in some sense inherent –
shame, ostracization, guilt and everything else existed prior to institutional
embodiments of these notions. That said, the extent to which they are enforced and
followed does depend on such institutions, both informal and formal
 Reformation changes – increased importance placed on the sanctity of marriage,
rejection of celibacy, stricter laws around adultery and any out-of-marriage sex,
crackdown on prostitution – all this reinforced by the ntroduction of ‘marriage
courts’ in many European cities
 The distinctiveness of Britain – the ‘reformation of manners’ (better translated as
reformation of morals) had a tangible impact on both culture and institutions – this is
captured nicely by the ecclesiastical courts that dealt with moral offences (though not
exclusively sexual) – wee see this starting with the Yorkist and early Tudor kings
 Ian Archer has drawn attention to the role of Protestant reformers from the 1540s in
appropriating the rhetoric of sexual reformation by spearheading an attack on vice
 A demographic regime that self-imposes reduced fertility? (Malthus is pretty accurate
pre IR so I think not) – European marriage pattern? High rates of non-marriage?
Expected independence of young couples? – a very economic as opposed to cultural
perspective. Problem with such analysis is that period comparisons are hard to
make owing to data availability (on bastardization rates and such)
 That said, the marked hostility to fornication, bastard-bearing, bridal pregnancy and
even to the marriage of poor people that is visible in the early seventeenth century is
much less evident in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth, whether in popular
attitudes or those of legal officers
 To summarize in a few words, in the century before 1570, ‘adultery’, ‘keeping a
whore’ and ‘promoting bawdry’ were of more concern to the authorities, and also
to ordinary people, than simple ‘fornication’ between unmarried youngsters or
courting couples
 The dichotomy of blame and loss – women more punished than men for sexual
transgression, but the blame was a sliding scale and not absolute
 Quite striking paucity in same-sex prosecutions and allegations in the court records –
likely to do with high penalty for being caught

P. Griffiths, ‘The structure of prostitution in Elizabethan London’, Continuity and

Change, 8, (1993)

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, contemporary accounts of prostitution are very exaggerated in

expressing its potency, pervasiveness and ill-repute – the depth of their concern is
manifest in Bridewell, a London hospital set up with special (and extensive)
powers to examine and seek out vagrants and vagabonds and admit then for
some form of cleansing or punishment
 The last public/municipal brothel was closed in 1546 – didn’t realise they had those at
all
  There is a lot of diversity in prostitution systems – more formal bawdy houses, rooms,
the self-employed harlett, street whores etc – some prostitutes moved between
bawdy’s, soe were there for some time and others just a few months
 Whorehouse keeping was a primarily female activity (circa 70% - indeed the
contemporary literature refers to such keepers exclusively in the female context),
while pimping was typically male
 Lots of range in fees but all findings typical – rates higher the more formalised the
prostitution, apprentices paid less than merchants, virgins commanded significantly
higher fees
 Only occasional links with other forms of crime
 Quite a common story is the girl ‘lured’ into prostitution by some manipulation or
misinformation – how easy is it to get out of prostitution? (could be an interesting
question to pursue) – though sheer necessity seems the most common route in,
particularly for migrants who had nothing to their name (necessity probably also made
it hard to leave – how do we distinguish between necessity and more institutional an
cultural factors preventing leave?) - Lawrence Stone has argued that most eighteenth-
century prostitutes viewed commercial sex as a short-term option until a husband
came along (See Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-
1800 (London, 1977), 617-18. For some potential info on that bolded question)
 though the literary sources often reported another sort of occupational progress: the
spent and lonely whore is either left prematurely aged and alone, or she sinks ever
deeper into a quagmire from which there is no escape, always straying further from
civil society and salvation. – literary sources a good potential source for this
question too
 Argues that London’s bawdy’s survived and thrived irrespective of the post-
reformation ban on commercial sex and the heavy language – prosecutions were a
trickle rather than a stream, indicating toleration; indeed, immunity might have been a
function of protection by clients from high social positions
 Author argues that the social composition of bawdy clientele (mostly young non-
wealthy men) might negate the above argument; I’m inclined to be more suspicious,
as powerful individuals constitute a much smaller portion of the population anyway
and you only need one or two for effective control (cronyism doesn’t need lots of
people but lots of toleration)

Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977),
617-18

The prostitution stuff

 Talks a little of the very low bastardization and illegitimacy rate of the late 16th and
early 17th centuries, much of which likely had to do with puritanism
 In 1681 it was reported that Norwich swarmed with ale houses and that ‘every one of
them, they tell us, is also a bawdy house’
 Argues that although prostitution was centred in the urban areas, there is not
insubstantial evidence of semi-amateur prostitution in villages (with come families
letting out rooms to a whore and even married women indulging in ‘casual
fornification’ in a field for 4d) – see the letters of Humphrey Prideaux 1674-1722 and
F.G. Emmerson, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts pg 20-2 and 295
 Prostitution to serve the increased demand stemming from apprenticeship in the city?
  Makes some assertions regarding why and how women became prostitutes (which
seems the more common route of assessment) – poverty, abandonment, illegitimacy,
preference over back-breaking labour etc
 Defoe wrote in 1725 that the large number of maidservants who were temporarily out
of employment were forced to ‘prostitute their bodies or starve’
 Interestingly, in 1724 one Bernard de Mandeville led a protest against the closing of
brothels and attacks on prostitution, arguing that it significantly increased unregulated
and thus more dangerous prostitution (for both the women and the client), spread
more disease, tempted adultery etc etc – he argued for a publicly regulated bawdy
house wherein quality and pay could be better controlled (pleas fell on deaf ears)
 1758 – Survey of 25 prostitutes conducted by Jon Fielding – aged 15 to 22 (so young)
with the median age of 18 – eighteen had been on the job more than a year, the other
seven presumably using prostitution as a temporary financial solution
 None still active after the age of 22 and none for more than 6 years, most only three
years – Stone makes two assertions, one more concrete than the other – that
prostitute careers were very short, and that this was presumably as they dropped
out to get married or became so diseased as to be unemployable (presumably
dying) – For a French comparison see if there’s a translated J-B Parent-Duchatelet,
De la prostitution de la ville de Paris (1836)
 Three ‘layers’ of the profession – street prostitute, selective call-girl with her own
rooms, and a mistress set up in her own apartment (misses out the bawdy house girl)
 Argues that prostitution continued to rise – problem was particularly bad in University
towns – as early as 1676 Cambridge contained now fewer than thirteen ‘disorderly
houses’
 See E.M Sigsworth and T.J Wyke – ‘A study of Victorian prostitution and venereal
disease’

A little on Stone’s double standard piece

The how easy was it to get out of prostitution question;

 Barriers to exit come in two forms;
o Social ostracization – early modern obsession with honour and reformation
ideals around the sanctity of marriage deeply vilified prostitution and whoring;
‘once a whore always a whore’ sort of mentality that would have made exiting
the industry difficult and an an increasing function of notoriety
o Economic concerns – some women, especially migrants, may not have had a
choice – in the absence of any other forms of work or marriage one is quite
stuck
 https://www.londonlives.org/browse.jsp?div=BBBRMG20201MG202010033 – as a
source – could try to link/track certain prostitutes over time. Note that the actual list of
 crimes starts on page 33 (probably similar for the other periods too) – possible to link
to marriage records?
 There is some potential here – See Dorothy Cooper, a ‘lewd idle woman’ who shows
up three times in the Bridewell Royal Hospital minutes of the Court of Governors
1689 to 1695; in 1689 and 1690 for being a woman of the night and in 1691 for
‘Pilfering a large sance pan’ and being ‘lewd and idle’ 1 – she also appears in the
records of the old bailey for grand larceny, having stolen a Scarfe, a Hood, one Sheet,
11 s. in Mony, and several small wearing Apparel 2. Generally crime and birth are
quite trackable, and if we were able to distinguish between types of prostitute we
might be able to see which were more or less likely to commit crime etc etc

P. Griffiths, ‘Meanings of nightwalking in early modern England’, The Seventeenth

Century, 13 (1998)

 Basically argues that connotations surrounding the term nightwalker shifted into a
gendered one; from describing any such vagrant who lurked about at night to
becoming heavily associated with female prostitutes in the 16th and (mostly) 17th
centuries

How important was the work of women?

Things to think about for this question;

The vagueness of the phrase ‘important’

 Is it referring to importance wrt the overall economy of the period?

 Importance with respect to the household budget?
 Importance with respect to female agency?
 Importance with respect to defining male agency and masculinity?

Perhaps all of these things?

Lets deal with the first one

The overall economy;

First consider a top-down perspective – since output is defined very purely in terms of
payment for goods and services, it is evident that such calculations feature women far less
prominently than men.

1 https://www.londonlives.org/search.jsp?
form=persNames&_persNames_surname=Cooper&match_sur=exact&_persNames_given=Dorothy&match_giv
=exact&_persNames_div0Type=BR_MGfile&fromMonth=&fromYear=&toMonth=&toYear=&submit.x=53&s
ubmit.y=13
2 https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?name=16910422
Though estimates as to the number of women working are squiffy (which we’ll talk about in
the household and agency section), even inaccurate figures are sufficiently indicative of the
low prominence of female labour in the market

The above figures (from Shoemaker) are likely to significantly underestimate female work,
but they illustrate that a significantly larger portion of women were unoccupied than men

Furthermore, women were confined to low-paying jobs within these industries; the cleaning
of bodies following surgery processes, door-knocking during periods of plague, the
physically demanding and underpaid washerwomen services etc

Even those jobs in which women were employed alongside men they received lower pay,
thereby curbing their ‘contribution’ to overall output levels

There are evidently exceptions; some women made healthy livings as midwives, victuallers,
retailers, money-lenders and teachers, but generally these were just that, exceptions.

This nicely captures the issues with the ‘top-down’ approach to importance; conference of
economic value is a far from comprehensive measure of total value or ‘importance’

It is clear that women were firmly excluded from the most important and profitable sectors of
the economy. – (Capp, 2003)

The household

Two aspects of primary importance from the household perspective

 The contribution to subsistence

 The role of non-economic work
First the former – for many households, female labour was vital in maintaining subsistence
levels and ensuring there was food on the table; this could come from spinning and weaving
from home, washing laundry of more well-off neighbours, or particularly important non-
waged work in rural areas, such as growing legumes, churning butter, selling milk and eggs
and even scavenging for shellfish on the coast (P. Crawford and S. Mendelson, 1998).

Furthermore, it is important to note that the value of such additional activity increased in
relative importance the poorer was the household. Female headed households (an estimated
20% of the total in the late 16th century (Capp, 2003)) were funded by such labour and that of
their children (had they any) and potentially parish relief systems.

The husbandry-adjacent activities mentioned above point to the second function of female
labour in the household perspective; the non-waged work associated with maintaining a
household. The very sex-delineated occupational roles confined women to the house wherein
they were not idle - housekeeping, cooking, cleaning, mending, spinning, budgeting, etc all
absorbed time and often physical labour on the part of woman, but without the exchange of a
wage we do not deem it work. In female headed-poor households they were forced to
combine normal labour and domestic responsibilities, and in some industries domestic
requirements were in great excess of time they might spend in a waged job (particularly
colliery wives). Indeed, this double standard is perhaps best reflected by domestic servants
and maids, who once married typically performed many of the tasks for which they had
previously received a wage free of charge. 3

Female agency

Simple fact that economic and labouring independence breeds agency – indeed, fears
surrounding women’s agency resulted in restrictions upon their labour and effective
exclusion via the institutionalisation of professions like brewing and midwifery – wealth
belies power

Female labour also reinforced female social networks – much of women’s labour was denied
institutionalisation and formalisation because of its inconsistency, which served to limit
female social networks (alongside vilification of the ‘gossip’) and thus restricted agency and
comradery.

Male agency and masculinity?

By limiting work opportunities, offering little training, underpaying that work which was
available, making better paying work of the undesirable sort and yet expecting women to be
providers and homemakers (involving work which was not economised), the image of a
women’s incapability to provide economically and the associated independence and agency
that came with it was curbed, which was important to contemporary notions of
masculinity and male agency

This male domination in the public sphere complemented that of the private sphere –
religious-toned notions of the man as ‘king’ within his household.

3 Not just in terms of domestic service – many women assisted their husbands in their paid labour (particularly
in agriculture, brewing, tanning etc etc) and middle and upper-class women were engaged in a number of non-
waged civilic duties (often associated with poor relief)
Thus an absence of female labour contributed to the male identity of the period

Conclusion

How important was female labour?

Very

Not just in the pure utilitarian sense of providing a means by which women could live, but as
a political bargaining tool and target of male insecurities. The ability of a subset of
individuals to find work has always and will always extend beyond the bounds of human
necessity into more political discussions over equality.

R. Trumbach, ‘London’s sodomites: homosexual behavior and Western culture in the

18th century’, Journal of Social History, 11/1 (1997), pp. 1-33

 Basic argument is that European anxiety and fear over homosexuality was uniquely
European (at least in the 18th century) – that in other parts of the world such behaviour
was institutionalized, in some places even when the male was taking on the typically
‘female’ role
 This confuses me a bit, because now Europe is far and away the most sexuality-
accommodating geography in the world, while homosexuality is outlawed in he
middle east, latin America and asia – what happened? Is it then perhaps a non-linear
function of development; that the more developed a place becomes the more
institutionalized becomes fears over homosexuality, and subsequently liberal
movements within very developed societies remove this institutionalisation?
 Arguable that the above represents a function of implanting of European ideals via
colonialism, but this faces two hurdles – why should such ideals be any slower to be
phased out in societies where they were not traditionally apparent? And what can we
say of societies where there was very little western influence? (particularly the Islamic
world, China and Japan)
 Homosexuality as a ‘variation’ of human sexuality in the rest of the world?
 Basically just goes int lots of detail regarding one report, Ford and Beach, which
found that homosexuality was a fairly common practice (especially in youth) and not
really a divergence from heterosexual norms for the rest of the world – a result even
more concrete when one examines that geographies that the researchers regarded as
intolerant of homosexuality (it seems lots of them weren’t)
 Lots of stuff about homosexuality in asia between men and pre-pubescent boys (uhhh
not good)
 In lots of non-European societies having a male concubine or prostitute or lover was a
sign of wealth and class
 Goes into the history of why sodomy was so looked down on in Europe – it’s pretty
much all to do with religion
  Unsurprsingly, many men convicted of sodomy were married or had children; they
came from all walks of life (all occupations represented)

In what ways was metropolitan masculinity contested?

Manhood and patriarchy were not equated in early modern England – patriarchy attempted
to discipline men as well as women.

I think overall this book is right but that there was never any contention as to its rightness –
patriarchy and manhood are not the same, but they are inevitably tied up and inter-woven
such that distinctly categorising each is very difficult. I think it fairly easy to argue however
that the patriarchy had a greater effect on notions of manhood in early modern England than
it does now, and that class identity has as much to say about gender roles as does gender
itself.

Shepard’s base notion of patriarchy is the running of the household by the male head – I
struggle to see how by this definition he can argue that such a system did not unilaterally
subjugate women – the successes of some women were in spite of patriarchy not owing to it

Ideas of an ‘idealized bastion’ or ‘typical’ masculinity don’t make a lot of sense to me –

seems to me that a lot of Shepard’s argument sort of goes ‘there were lots of contested forms
of masculinity and manhood and thus there were a lot of contested forms of masculinity and
manhood’