Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century

by Alice Clark

First published in 1919 "Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century" was one of the first books to engage with the problem of women's history. In it Alice Clark documented the day-to-day lives of women from all socio-economic groups in both town and country who combined work with the responsibilities of domestic life. Now republished with a new introduction by Amy Erickson, who addresses Clark's historiographic significance and provides an overview of present scholarship, the book remains a resource for modern day historians and feminist critics. Using memoirs, letters and household accounts, it documents the activities of gentry women who managed vast households and supervised the administration of family estates; it also draws on less accessible sources such as quarter sessions' petitions, court records and parish accounts, to uncover the reality of poorer women's working lives.

Genres: History, Feminism, 17th Century

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

Reviews

[Frederick]

I found this book absolutely fascinating and filled with information that simply amazed me as it was backed up by primary source references and intensive study. “In the seventeenth century the idea is seldom encountered that a man supports his wife; husband and wife were then mutually dependent and together supported their children.” (12) There are very interesting facts and conclusions drawn from those facts in this book. For instance, Agriculture labor that is just now being opened to women again, like sheep-shearing, was commonplace in the seventeenth century. (62)

There is also a great amount of information on social change and custom and I learned that until the 17th century most people were affected by common law and custom enforced by local nobles and tradition which covered men and women. Law became dominant in the 1600s and excluded women from its practice and administration. These laws destroyed the collective idea of the family and the property rights that custom and tradition had afforded women and even children. Legal codes became more dominant in enforcing men’s roles in their families and marginalizing the rights of women and children under previous customs.(236) I also learned that upper class women did not appreciate idleness as the hallmark of a lady in the 1600’s and were active in teaching their children and servants every branch of the domestic arts, particularly medicine and nursing, due to the prevalence of sickness in all classes.(253)

The author explains explains how the theories of the state in the 1600’s excluded the family and women and made the state a function of men only. Professions that included women in the Middle Ages became professionalized and restricted to men. Women had tremendous influence in the community and professions until then but after that had little influence or access to knowledge outside of the family unit and because of external cultural presses even less in the family than they had. The modern world then presents a struggle to return not only to wages and working conditions of earlier times but of women’s rights and power and influence. The whole modern conservative ideal of the man “bringing home the bacon” and women not even knowing how much the husband earned being given an allowance sometimes is a modern contrivance.(286)

Capitalism changed women’s economic position by the substitution of an individual for a family wage making men the focus of bread-winning and excluding women from many professions, taking the wage-earner from home industry and removing them to the premises of the employer making child-care an issue where children were too young to actually work themselves, the rapid increase of wealth for the upper classes which allowed upper class women to move from management to idleness in the family’s affairs, all of which worked to remove married women from productive life outside of the home and for the wealthy to a state of virtual idleness. (295)

Finally, speaking only about England the author shows how Capitalism regards the individual and not the family as its basic unit of production and modern states began with the conception that they were concerned only with male individuals. Every interest of women was then considered a private interest of the husband and father and her interests bore no relation to the interest of the State. Although women had never been equal political partners with men they had enjoyed a distinct and durable participation in the economy of the culture. This ended with Capitalism and over the next two hundred years a struggle ensured for women to gain back the rights they had enjoyed prior to Capitalism. The resultant feminism afforded them the political rights they did not have prior to Capitalism as well so that the modern women not only has gotten her economic rights back but is stronger politically than ever in history. The author’s work ends with the idea, and I’m adding a little to what she literally says, that while Capitalism has produced wealth far beyond the dreams of the most greedy person of the time prior to 1800 it has destroyed the joy of wealth creation for the common man, the self-reliance he or she felt, and has only recently permitted women to assert a role in its production. (307)

Outstanding work and insight. I recommend it for students of social history.

[Mel]

Written in 1919 this excellent book looks at the different type of work women did in the 17th century and basically comes to the conclusion that capitalism is to blame for the weakened position of women in the early 20th century. The book draws on a wide variety of sources, mostly original records. As an early history it is more a list of how things were than analysing what that meant. For instance it includes women as apprentices and members of guilds, but not how they actually particiapted in the guilds compared with men. But it does go a long way to showing the variety of work women had in the past and how limiting it had become. It is also interesting to see how women at the time of the suffragettes were looking to the past to find justification for their arguments that women could and should do all kinds of work, and that their natural place was not in the home, but that was in fact a modern invention by capitalism.

[Marilyn]

Read ASAP; it’s an ILL book

[Michelle Graham]

Chapter 1 - Introductory

[Iqra Tasmiae]

Pg 261, part 10, ch 1, "Of Woman Born"