Download or read book Domestic Service and Gender 1660 1750 written by Tim Meldrum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exciting new study Tim Meldrum explores the "real lives" of domestic servants. From close examination of court records and other documentary evidence, he has reconstructed the lives of ordinary domestic servants in London. A revealing account of life below the stairs, the gendered nature of domestic service, how different members of the household interacted with one another, it makes a valuable contribution to the "separate spheres" debate.

Download or read book Domestic Service for Women in London 1660 1745 written by Paula M. Humfrey and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines the working lives of female servants in early modern London. Domestic service was the dominant form of wage labour for women in the pre-industrial metropolis. While some historians of domestic service have maintained that a term in service was primarily a pre-marital phase of women's lives in this period, it is argued in this thesis that female servants in London could also rely on service as a means of getting income throughout their adult lives despite social strictures against their so doing. Individual servants' stories taken from ecclesiastical and criminal court depositions and parish settlement examinations reveal that despite broad disparity in the work they were hired to do, women in service experienced poverty and its attendant insecurities in common. As a result, domestics sought ongoing work in service despite the prescribed incompatibility of service with marriage and maternity. Women in London service tended to be highly mobile, and because the demand for their labour was market driven, they were able to leave places and take up new ones at their own discretion. At the same time, their mobility generated concern in a patriarchal and paternalistic society. Contemporary writers and legislators stressed that female servants should be better controlled, and manifest these concerns by challenging female servants' virtue and proposing that domestics were enmeshed in London's criminal subculture. Female servants undertook a range of strategies in order to get paid domestic work in an urban society in which that work was always available, but only to women who successfully protected and defended their reputations.

Download or read book Domestic Service and Gender 1660 1750 written by Tim Meldrum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exciting new study Tim Meldrum explores the "real lives" of domestic servants. From close examination of court records and other documentary evidence, he has reconstructed the lives of ordinary domestic servants in London. A revealing account of life below the stairs, the gendered nature of domestic service, how different members of the household interacted with one another, it makes a valuable contribution to the "separate spheres" debate.

Download or read book Venereal Disease Hospitals and the Urban Poor London s foul Wards 1600 1800 written by Kevin Patrick Siena and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how London society responded to the dilemma of the rampant spread of the pox among the poor. Some have asserted that public authorities turned their backs on the "foul" and only began to offer care for venereal patients in the Enlightenment. An exploration of hospitals and workhouses shows a much more impressive public health response. London hospitals established "foul wards" at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century. Reconstruction of these wards shows that, far from banning paupers with the pox, hospitals made treating them one of their primary services. Not merely present in hospitals, venereal patients were omnipresent. Yet the "foul" comprised a unique category of patient. The sexual nature of their ailment guaranteed that they would be treated quite differently than all other patients. Class and gender informed patients' experiences in crucial ways. The shameful nature of the disease, and the gendered notion of shame itself, meant that men and women faced quite different circumstances. There emerged a gendered geography of London hospitals as men predominated in fee-charging hospitals, while sick women crowded into workhouses. Patients frequently desired to conceal their infection. This generated innovative services for elite patients who could buy medical privacy by hiring their own doctor. However, the public scrutiny that hospitalization demanded forced poor patients to be creative as they sought access to medical care that they could not afford. Thus, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor offers new insights on patients' experiences of illness and on London's health care system itself. Kevin Siena is Assistant Professor of History at Trent University.

Download or read book Never Married written by Amy M. Froide and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England investigates a paradox in the history of early modern England: although one third of adult women were never married, these women have remained largely absent from historical scholarship. Amy Froide reintroduces us to the category of difference called marital status and to the significant ways it shaped the life experiences of early modern women. By de-centring marriage as the norm in social, economic, and cultural terms,her book critically refines our current understanding of people's lives in the past and adds to a recent line of scholarship that questions just how common 'traditional' families really were.This book is both a social-economic study of singlewomen and a cultural study of the meanings of singleness in early modern England. It focuses on never-married women in England's provincial towns, and on singlewomen from a broad social spectrum. Covering the entire early modern era, it reveals that this was a time of transition in the history of never-married women. During the sixteenth century life-long singlewomen were largely absent from popular culture, but by the eighteenth century theyhad become a central concern of English society.As the first book of original research to focus on singlewomen on the period, it also illuminates other areas of early modern history. Froide reveals the importance of kinship in the past to women without husbands and children, as well as to widows, widowers, single men, and orphans. Examining the contributions of working and propertied singlewomen, she is able to illustrate the importance of gender and marital status to urban economies and to notions of urban citizenship in the early modernera. Tracing the origins of the spinster and old maid stereotypes she reveals how singlewomen were marginalized as first the victims and then the villains of Protestant English society.

Download or read book Unquiet Lives written by Joanne Bailey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this 2003 book is a pioneering account of the expectations and experiences of married life among the middle and labouring ranks in the long eighteenth century. Its original methodology draws attention to the material life of marriage, which has long been dominated by theories of emotional shifts or fashionable accounts of spouses' gendered, oppositional lives. Thus it challenges preconceptions about authority in the household, by showing the extent to which husbands depended upon their wives' vital economic activities: household management and child care. Not only did this forge co-dependency between spouses, it undermined men's autonomy. The power balance within marriage is further revised by evidence that the sexual double standard was not rigidly applied in everyday life. The book also shows that ideas about adultery and domestic violence evolved in the eighteenth century, influenced by new models of masculinity and femininity.

Download or read book Labour History Review written by Society for the Study of Labour History and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Domestic Service and Gender 1660 1750 written by Timothy Meldrum and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London written by Tim Hitchcock and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London in the eighteenth century was the greatest city in the world. It was a magnet that drew men and women from the rest of England in huge numbers. For a few the streets were paved with gold, but for the majority it was a harsh world with little guarantee of money or food. For the poor and destitute, London's streets offered little more than the barest living. Yet men, women and children found a great variety of ways to eke out their existence, sweeping roads, selling matches, singing ballads and performing all sorts of menial labor. Many of these activities, apart from the direct begging of the disabled, depended on an appeal to charity, but one often mixed with threats and promises. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London provides a remarkable insight into the lives of Londoners, for all of whom the demands of charity and begging were part of their everyday world.

Download or read book Accounting for Oneself written by Alexandra Shepard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounting for Oneself is a major new study of the social order in early modern England, as viewed and articulated from the bottom up. Engaging with how people from across the social spectrum placed themselves within the social order, it pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts when answering questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, and with a broad geographical coverage, this study explores how men and women accounted for their 'worth' and described what they did for a living at differing points in the life-cycle. A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout the social scale. A culture of appraisal was central to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own and others' social positions. For the majority it was not land that was the yardstick of status but moveable property-the goods and chattels in people's possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Such items were repositories of wealth and the security for the credit on which the bulk of early modern exchange depended. Accounting for Oneself also sheds new light on women's relationship to property, on gendered divisions of labour, and on early modern understandings of work which were linked as much to having as to getting a living. The view from below was not unchanging, but bears witness to the profound impact of widening social inequality that opened up a chasm between the middle ranks and the labouring poor between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. As a result, not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition, from the later-seventeenth century there was also a gradual yet fundamental reworking of the criteria informing the calculus of esteem.

Download or read book The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London written by Paula Humfrey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented here describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern London. Domestics' court depositions offer qualitative evidence that female servants were an important support of emergent capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital phase of women's lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour. While some women left service once they married, others relied on domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in London had considerably more agency than has earlier been recognized. Female servants who deposed before London ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and distinct as they present information about their working and personal circumstances.

Download or read book City Women written by Eleanor Hubbard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City Women is a major new study of the lives of ordinary women in early modern London. Drawing on thousands of pages of Londoners' depositions for the consistory court, it focuses on the challenges that preoccupied London women as they strove for survival and preferment in the burgeoning metropolis. Balancing new demographic data with vivid case studies, Eleanor Hubbard explores the advantages and dangers that the city had to offer, from women's first arrival to London as migrant maidservants, through the vicissitudes of marriage, widowhood, and old age. In early modern London, women's opportunities were tightly restricted. Nonetheless, before 1640, the city's unique demographic circumstances provided unusual scope for marital advancement, and both maids and widows were quick to take advantage of this. Similarly, moments of opportunity emerged when the powerful sexual anxieties that associated women's speech and mobility with loose behaviour came into conflict with even more powerful anxieties about the economic stability of households and communities. As neighbours and magistrates sought to reconcile their competing priorities in cases of illegitimate pregnancy, marital disputes, working wives, remarrying widows, and more, women were able to exploit the resulting uncertainty to pursue their own ends. By paying close attention to the aspirations and preoccupations of London women themselves, their daily struggles, small triumphs, and domestic tragedies, City Women provides a valuable new perspective on the importance of early modern women's efforts in the growing capital, and on the nature of early modern English society as a whole.

Download or read book Women Work and Sociability in Early Modern London written by T. Reinke-Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Women s Roles in Eighteenth Century Europe written by Jennine Hurl-Eamon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise historical overview of the existing historiography of women from across eighteenth-century Europe covers women of all ages, married and single, rich and poor. During the 18th century, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, protoindustrialization, and colonial conquest made their marks on women's lives in a variety of ways. Women's Roles in Eighteenth-Century Europe examines women of all ages and social backgrounds as they experienced the major events of this tumultuous period of sweeping social and political change. The book offers an inclusive portrayal of women from across Europe, surveying nations from Portugal to the Russian Empire, from Finland to Italy, including the often overlooked women of Eastern Europe. It depicts queens, an empress, noblewomen, peasants, and midwives. Separate chapters on family, work, politics, law, religion, arts and sciences, and war explore the varying contexts of the feminine experience, from the most intimate aspects of daily life to broad themes and conditions.

Download or read book Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis 1700 1850 written by Samantha Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Samantha Williams examines illegitimacy, unmarried parenthood and the old and new poor laws in a period of rising illegitimacy and poor relief expenditure. In doing so, she explores the experience of being an unmarried mother from courtship and conception, through the discovery of pregnancy, and the birth of the child in lodgings or one of the new parish workhouses. Although fathers were generally held to be financially responsible for their illegitimate children, the recovery of these costs was particularly low in London, leaving the parish ratepayers to meet the cost. Unmarried parenthood was associated with shame and men and women could also be subject to punishment, although this was generally infrequent in the capital. Illegitimacy and the poor law were interdependent and this book charts the experience of unmarried motherhood and the making of metropolitan bastardy.

Download or read book Domestic Service written by C. Violet Butler and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fashioning Adultery written by David M. Turner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2002 book provides a major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Bringing together a wide variety of literary and legal sources - including sermons, pamphlets, plays, diaries, periodicals, trial reports and the records of marital litigation - it documents a growing diversity in perceptions of marital infidelity in this period, against the backdrop of an explosion in print culture and a decline in the judicial regulation of sexual immorality. In general terms the book charts and explains a gradual transformation of ideas about extra-marital sex, whereby the powerfully established religious argument that adultery was universally a sin became increasingly open to challenge. The book charts significant developments in the idiom in which sexually transgressive behaviour was discussed, showing how evolving ideas of civility and social refinement and new thinking about gender difference influenced assessments of immoral behaviour.