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 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 Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy written by Iman Sheeha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.
Download or read book Women in Service in Early Modern England written by Jeannie Dalporto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the wealth of textual material about female servants, The author has chosen four representative texts for inclusion in this volume. They have been chosen to illustrate how books addressed to female servants evolved and to show that women in service and the ordering of the household were integral to the way labour and gender structured early modern socio-economic ideals. Of the four texts reproduced here, two are manuals explaining the duties of female servants, while two are critical, in some respects, of such books addressed to servants..
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 338 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 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 Dangers written by Laura Gowing and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first examination of women's experiences and gender relations in the diverse, mobile society of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London.
Download or read book Household Servants in Early Modern England written by R. C. Richardson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively socio-cultural history examines household service, one of the largest, multi-layered, mobile and most indispensable sectors of employment in early modern England. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural sources including literary depiction and self-representation, this study brings into sharp focus individual life stories of Britain’s servant class. Exploring the relationships between servants and between employers and servants; it depicts the differences between patterns of employment in London and the provinces, and the juxtaposition of servant vulnerability and servant power. This book places new importance on the household servant as a major agent in cultural change and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of servitude in London and the provinces in the two centuries following the Reformation.
Download or read book Travel and Travail written by Mary C. Fuller and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.
Download or read book Gender and Space in Early Modern England written by Amanda Flather and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2007 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A nuanced re-evaluation of the ways in which gender affected the use of physical space in early modern England. Space was not simply a passive backdrop to a social system that had structural origins elsewhere; it was vitally important for marking out and maintaining the hierarchy that sustained social and gender order in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Gender had a considerable influence on its use and organization; status and gender were displayed physically and spatially every moment of the day, from a person's place at table to the bed on which he orshe slept, in places of work and recreation, in dress, gesture and modes of address. Space was also the basis for the formation of gender identities which were constantly contested and restructured, as this book shows.Examining in turn domestic, social and sacred spaces and the spatial division of labour in gender construction, the author demonstrates how these could shift, and with them the position and power of women. She shows that the ideological assumption that all women are subject to all men is flawed, and exposes the limitations of interpretations which rely on the model and binary opposition of public/private, male/female, to describe gender relations and theirchanges across the period, thus offering a much more complex and picture than has hitherto been perceived. The book will be essential reading not just for historians of the family and of women, but for all those studying early modern social history. AMANDA FLATHER is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex.
Download or read book Knowing Their Place written by Lucy Delap and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have traditionally seen domestic service as an obsolete or redundant sector from the middle of the twentieth century. Knowing Their Place challenges this by linking the early twentieth-century employment of maids and cooks to later practices of employing au pairs, mothers' helps, and cleaners. Lucy Delap tells the story of lives and labour within British homes, from great houses to suburbs and slums, and charts the interactions of servants and employers along with the intense controversies and emotions they inspired. Knowing Their Place also examines the employment of men and migrant workers, as well as the role of laughter and erotic desire in shaping domestic service. The memory of domestic service and the role of the past in shaping and mediating the present is examined through heritage and televisual sources, from Upstairs, Downstairs to The 1900 House. Drawing from advice manuals, magazines, novels, cinema, memoirs, feminist tracts, and photographs, this fascinating book points to new directions in cultural history through its engagement in innovative areas such as the history of emotions and cultural memory. Through its attention to the contemporary rise in the employment of domestic workers, Knowing Their Place sets modern Britain in a new and compelling historical context.
Download or read book When Gossips Meet written by B. S. Capp and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how women of the poorer and middling sorts in early modern England negotiated a patriarchal culture in which they were generally excluded, marginalized, or subordinated. It focuses on the networks of close friends ('gossips') which gave them a social identity beyond the narrowly domestic, providing both companionship and practical support in disputes with husbands and with neighbours of either sex. The book also examines the micropolitics of the household, with its internal alliances and feuds, and women's agency in neighbourhood politics, exercised by shaping local public opinion, exerting pressure on parish officials, and through the role of informal female juries. If women did not openly challenge male supremacy, they could often play a significant role in shaping their own lives and the life of the local community.
Download or read book New Books on Women Gender and Feminism written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Books on Women and Feminism written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Day at Home in Early Modern England written by Tara Hamling and published by Association of Human Rights Institutes series. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Download or read book A Visitor s Guide to Victorian England written by Michelle Higgs and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-02-12 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “utterly brilliant” and deeply researched guide to the sights, smells, endless wonders, and profound changes of nineteenth century British history (Books Monthly, UK). Step into the past and experience the world of Victorian England, from clothing to cuisine, toilet arrangements to transport—and everything in between. A Visitor’s Guide to Victorian England is “a brilliant guided tour of Charles Dickens’s and other eminent Victorian Englishmen’s England, with insights into where and where not to go, what type of people you’re likely to meet, and what sights and sounds to watch out for . . . Utterly brilliant!” (Books Monthly, UK). Like going back in time, Higgs’s book shows armchair travelers how to find the best seat on an omnibus, fasten a corset, deal with unwanted insects and vermin, get in and out of a vehicle while wearing a crinoline, and avoid catching an infectious disease. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book blends accurate historical details with compelling stories to bring alive the fascinating details of Victorian daily life. It is a must-read for seasoned social history fans, costume drama lovers, history students, and anyone with an interest in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England written by Kari Boyd McBride and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a varied and rich array of perspectives on a wide range of early modern English social roles and relationships as well as cultural norms and areas of contestation. It demonstrates the many ways in which the attitudes and activities that pertain to the domestic sphere are not in any way peripheral to the study of the period -- domestic arrangements are political arrangements. This rich collection of 11 essays illuminates the many ways in which the domestic sphere served as a stage for playing out the pressing questions that perplexed the writers and thinkers of early modern England -- questions about family (householding, marriage, children and parenting), as well as questions about emerging political realities. While 'home' may seem to invoke blood ties-the mother with a child at her breast or siblings at play -- it is finally the bonds that replace blood that demand the mythos of domestic arrangements in all their variety -- from the legal, social, economic and cultural ties of marriage, sealed by the exchange of women from man to man and house to house, to the relationships of stepparents and stepchildren, to the even more tenuous ties that bind class to class and citizen to citizen.
