Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London

The series promotes world-class scholarship that concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, class formations, politics and war. Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been treated as disconnected fields, while in recent years historical analyses in these two areas have synthesised, creating new departures in historiography. By linking genders and sexualities with questions of religion, civil society, politics and the contexts of war and conflict, this series will reflect recent developments in scholarship, moving away from the previously dominant and narrow histories of science, scientific thought and legal processes. The result brings together scholarship from contemporary, modern, early modern, medieval, classical and non-Western history to provide a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history. In Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London, Tim Reinke-Williams uses the wealth of overlapping sources that the capital provides to allow us multiple perspectives on the cultural position of early modern women. Historians have long noted the difficult, often conflicting and ambiguous, expectations that women of this period were expected to fulfil. Reinke-Williams takes the analysis deeper, to demonstrate the various ways in which women did manage to negotiate the different parts they were asked to play, looking at women's active roles in the home, at marriage, at motherhood and in particular at work. He argues throughout that whilst sexual honour was an important facet of female respectability, it was far from the This is the first work to explore how women from the middling sorts and the labouring poor fashioned identities as honest individuals of good repute. Using depositions, interrogations and trial reports from the London church courts, the Bridewell hospital and the Old Bailey, alongside ballads, jest-books, pamphlets and plays, this book outlines how women's working roles as mothers, housewives, servants, domestic managers and retailers, as well as their social interactions with their fellow Londoners, shaped their reputations in a growing metropolis which was to become the largest city in Europe by 1700. By paying equal attention to both paid and unpaid forms of work, and by covering the whole of the seventeenth century rather than solely the decades before 1640 or after 1660, this book provides the most holistic study to date of early modern notions of female honesty, credit and worth. -- From publisher's website Drawing On Legal And Literary Sources, This Work Revises And Expands Understandings Of Female Honesty, Worth And Credit By Exploring How Women From The Middling And Lower Ranks Of Society Fashioned Positive Identities As Mothers, Housewives, Domestic Managers, Retailers And Neighbours Between 1550 And 1700. By Tim Reinke-williams. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-14 Motherhood....Pages 15-43 Housewifery....Pages 44-73 Domestic Management....Pages 74-102 Retailing....Pages 103-126 Sociability....Pages 127-156 Conclusion....Pages 157-164 Back Matter....Pages 165-225