Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London
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andrew
Blackwell Hall Factor
British legal records
Category=DSB
Category=GTM
Category=N
Category=NHD
court depositions analysis
Deponent Hath
early modern social history
Edward Penny
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
examination
Fellow Witness
female
female economic agency
Female Servants
france
gendered labour mobility in London
holborn
james
James Street
Late Husband
margaret
Mary Butler
Mary Young
Mr Cross
Outward Doors
Parish Taxes
petty
settlement
Settlement Examinations
St Andrew Holborn
St Andrews Street
St George Hanover Square
St James Westminster
St Lawrence Jewry
St Margaret Westminster
St Paul Covent Garden
Thomas Cotton
urban poverty studies
Wash House
westminster
William Knight
women's wage labour
Yearly Wages
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754661559
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Mar 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Paula Humfrey teaches history in the online programs of Eastern Oregon University, USA, and Laurentian University, Canada.
