This volume is the latest entry to the ongoing debate on the nature of women's work done for wage or profit during the premodern period. On the one side are those, stretching back to Alice Clark's 1919 study of working women in the seventeenth century, who see a significant decline in the range of and value accorded to the remunerated work done by women between the medieval and early modern periods. More recently, medievalists such as Jeremy Goldberg and Caroline Barron have posited a kind of “golden age” for working women in the later Middle Ages, when postplague labor shortages and higher wages combined with lower rents and prices to create more opportunities for working women, particularly in towns, although they disagree about the exact timing and causes of this upsurge. On the other side are historians, such as Judith Bennett, who emphasize the continuity of women's work across centuries despite changes in politics, society, or the economy. Deeply ingrained patriarchal structures kept most women in low-paid, low-status jobs with little social credit. McIntosh claims to take a stance between these two positions, arguing that women's choices were always limited by the patriarchal institutions of a society that privileged the work of the male householder and imposed legal restrictions on women's economic activities. Yet she also argues that “the atypical demographic conditions that pertained between 1348–9 and around 1500 allowed (or forced) some women to take a more active and independent part in the public economy than was to be true by 1620 and than had probably been true in 1300” (251). And, indeed, the rhetoric of change is emphasized throughout the volume, particularly in the author's insistence on the growing difficulties that working women faced by the sixteenth century.

Making good use of recent case studies of women's work, McIntosh paints a rich picture of the different types of work pursued by women, while also keeping in mind how interpretations of the sources she uses can vary. Since her focus is on the market economy, she dwells largely on work in towns by discussing, first, the services women provided as domestic servants, as boardinghouse keepers, as creditors, as landlords, and even as prostitutes and brothel keepers, and then their role as producers and sellers of goods, particularly food and drink but also cloth and other craft goods. As a result, she hardly touches upon women's work in the countryside, where female labor revolved heavily around the household and involved fewer money wages. In fact, she says little about wages at all, nor does she explore women's participation in life-cycle service, which was taking off in this period and flourished alike in cities, small towns, and the countryside.

McIntosh adds considerably to our understanding of the variety and character of women's work in the premodern period by presenting new evidence from two different types of sources. She draws first on narratives in Chancery court petitions to illustrate not only the everyday working lives of female servants, shopkeepers, and employers but also the problems they encountered in the marketplace, the importance of their marital status (many petitioners were married women), and regional differences in their market involvement, particularly between northern and southern England but also between smaller and larger towns. She attempts to quantify this material to illustrate change over time, but her conclusions are limited because of the scarcity of data from before 1500 (when no fewer than 60 percent of the cases came from London) and because the costs of using the equity courts precluded its use by most working women.

The second new type of evidence she employs comes from a quantitative study of the presentments made in the courts of five small market towns against brewers, ale sellers, and bakers from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. The long span of the data is most valuable and forms one of the main supports for her claim that women's opportunities in the marketplace declined significantly in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Because interpreting these sources is fraught with problems—for instance, did the relative absence of women from the lists of brewing fines in some towns reflect their lack of involvement or was it a function of a record-keeping style that fined the head of household rather than the individual brewer?—McIntosh offers a careful rationale of her methodology and a full discussion of different interpretations of the data. She also explores the possible reasons for regional differences, attributing, for example, the higher profile of women brewers in the port of Minehead to the steady demand for kegged drink from visiting ships. In the end, however, her emphasis is more upon the “unusual autonomy of some women during the post-plague generations” (181) compared to the early modern period.

This book's chief virtue is its thorough survey of the different types of paid work premodern women performed in market towns, particularly the discussion of women's involvement in keeping lodging houses, lending money, pawning goods, and renting out property, about which there is relatively little in print. The Chancery petitions and court roll material add lively details to the story, while the quantitative analysis of the brewing data allows us to track long-term changes in women's work in this crucial industry. Also welcome are the market-town case studies that allow us to see the different demographic, social, and economic factors that could open up or close down opportunities for certain types of women's work. More problematic, however, are McIntosh's continual assertions of significant and universal change, which tend to rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, or on evidence drawn from the later period for which there are no medieval parallels, or on uncorroborated speculation. These include her comments about the worsening conditions of domestic service in the sixteenth and seventeenth century (57–61), about the increasingly rare appearance of women as major lenders by 1600 with the implication that there were more such lenders in the Middle Ages (99), about the scant instruction given to female apprentices by the late sixteenth century (133), about the declining presence of women within the malt trades by the sixteenth century (145), about the “mounting sense that drink work was not suitable for respectable women” by the sixteenth century (156), about the increasing difficulties faced by women involved in overseas trade by the mid-sixteenth century (226), and about the newness of the consumption discourse that she finds in the sixteenth century (244–48). McIntosh could be right about many of these changes, but firmer evidence is required.

I look forward to assigning this book next year and to the stimulating discussion that it will surely produce. The openness of this material to varying interpretations, along with McIntosh's methodological discussions and her richly detailed examination of the types of work townswomen did for wage or profit, makes this an excellent book to assign for students in courses on women, towns, or Britain.