City women Sex, money, and the social order in London 1570--1640

This dissertation explores the lives of ordinary women in early modern London, with particular attention to the cultural factors that empowered, protected, and restricted them across the life cycle. It is based primarily on the deposition books of the London consistory court: a database of roughly 2,500 female witnesses provides quantitative evidence of migration, marriage, and work patterns, while case studies of domestic service, courtship, unwed pregnancy, household and neighborhood politics, work, widowhood, remarriage, and old age are drawn from testimony. Ballads and prescriptive texts provide additional context. Attracted by London's relatively high wages and advantageous marriage market, thousands of Englishwomen migrated to the capital, where they served as maidservants before almost universally marrying. As adult women, they strove to keep precarious household economies afloat and to compete for status in the neighborhood. Widows, the beneficiaries of favorable inheritance laws, were also often able to remarry, and demonstrated a preference for younger husbands. The importance of economic order in the lives of women is a key concept of this study. While male anxieties about women as sexual agents are well known, insufficient attention has been paid to the economic anxieties that often trumped sex as a source of concern. Not only was preserving a fragile material order a constant preoccupation for women, but the choices of magistrates and neighbors show that they cared more about maintaining economic stability in households and neighborhoods than they did about enforcing a sexual double standard. This economic focus could work to women's advantage: widespread unwillingness to pay through poor rates for other men's misdeeds meant that pregnant maidservants could legally assign the paternity of their unborn children and demand support, while the wives of thriftless, violent drunkards could often count on the sympathetic intervention of disapproving neighbors. However, when economic concerns went hand in hand with a rigid gender order, women faced strict limits. Women's work was highly circumscribed, not by social discomfort with women in the public sphere, but by the perception that their participation in the regulated trades menaced the stability of male workers' households.