Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pennington, David Steven

Titel

Women in the market place: Gender, commerce, and social relations in early modern English towns

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation explores the commercial roles of early modern market women. Women workers faced significant disadvantages vis-à-vis men in the sectors of production and wage labor, but patriarchal prejudice hardly prevented townswomen from seizing the new commercial opportunities of the time. The involvement of many women in shopkeeping, huckstering, and tending market booths gave them influence not only over the household economy but also over their immediate neighborhoods. Drawing on town records and evidence from the Cambridge and Oxford university courts, I argue that many urban households depended on the commercial activities of women. Male householders and authorities accepted the necessity of female commercial activities. A study of literary sources indeed reveals an acceptance of the necessity of female assertiveness in the household, fair, and market place. Commonly held notions of female reputation scarcely revolved only around the virtues of obedience; a close look at evidence from university courts suggests that neighbors judged female consumers and retailers in terms of economic as well as sexual honesty. Because most market women were excluded from membership in regulated trades, and were charged with provisioning the household, scholars have claimed that they were stalwart defenders of a premodern "moral economy," which placed the needs of poor neighbors above individual profit. Women were prominent in food riots and neighborhood charity networks which helped mitigate the harsher aspects of commercialization. But concern for one's neighbors hardly precluded an eye for profits; female consumers and retailers often drove hard bargains, most notably in their dealings with wealthy neighbors or strangers. Although overt challenges to patriarchy were rare, townswomen protested against authorities who placed restrictions on their access to markets. Market women were thus at the center of inevitable social tensions which arose as townspeople confronted the opportunities and pressures of economic change. An analysis of their commercial opportunities, dealings, and mentalities reveals much about early modern notions of the gendered order, and what it meant to confront the commercial revolution.