Why read Ingenious Trade?

Book cover of Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London

Book description

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…

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Topics

Women
London

Genres

European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Ingenious Trade as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Bernard Capp

Author

I found this book fascinating. The guilds of early modern London were a male-only ‘closed shop’. But Laura Gowing’s pioneering study shows how resourceful women found ways to exploit loopholes and carve out a role in the world of skilled trades and crafts.

A guild member’s widow was permitted to continue her husband’s trade (provided she didn’t remarry), and she might take on a female apprentice and use the signing-on ‘premium’ to grow her business. Once the apprenticeship was completed, the young woman would now have the skills to set up on her own in the suburbs or provinces where…

From Bernard's list on women in early modern England.