This book aims to reclaim agency for the women of London, in the period 1570 to 1640, by showing how they negotiated the opportunities for employment offered by the city (albeit in restricted sectors), the opportunities for marriage and the risks accompanying courtship (including unwanted pregnancy), and the vicissitudes of widowhood. The principal source for this study is the depositions in the London Consistory Court relating to cases of defamation, broken marriage contracts, and marital separation.

The subject at issue in most of these suits was defamation, normally where one woman sued someone (usually another woman) who had called her some variant of “whore.” For Hubbard, defamation cases arose because “[n]eighbours of both sexes, . . . especially women, stressed by endless battles against urban filth, poverty, and illness, were too often overcome by unquenchable irritation and anger that tore at the fabric of neighbourhood harmony” (149), and, “[a]nxious about their status and their children, London women were all too apt to speak sharply” (174). The fact that virtually all of this stress and anxiety took the form of sexual insult, according to Hubbard, has been overemphasized by feminist historians: in her view, it was money and social order that was at issue, rather than patriarchy. The historiography on the elision of sex, social order, commerce, and public space is not discussed. For this reviewer, Hubbard's book reads like Laura Gowing's Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (1996), but with the feminism, the linguistic analysis, and the numbers taken out.

Hubbard writes fluently, but she quotes from depositions without distinguishing who is speaking—whether claimant, defendant, or witness, and for which side. Reporting testimony as fact may surprise readers accustomed to subtler interpretations of the language before the courts, such as Tim Stretton's Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998) or Julie Hardwick's Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2009). In addition, in treating printed texts, both didactic and satirical, as evidence of how city women behaved, the text is innocent of the reflexive literary approach of Michelle Dowd's Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009) or Natasha Korda's Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania, 2011).

The significance of the missing numbers may be less immediately apparent than the use of language, but it can be illustrated with two examples from the discussions of work. First, when Hubbard finds girls in the depositions being formally apprenticed in lacemaking and sewing, she dismisses them as “essentially unpaid servants” and states that there were “few licit alternatives to service for unmarried women” (43). The obvious way to support this statement is with the proportion of unmarried women testifying in this court who described themselves as servants. But the author does not provide that figure. Thanks to earlier studies of the same material, we know that of the roughly 500 women in these depositions who had never married, only half were described as servants. On the face of it, this figure does not appear to support Hubbard's claim that service was near ubiquitous, because it is implausible that the other half of the women testifying in a church court were in illicit employment. A discussion of the occupations that the other 250 unmarried women professed to follow, and what that said about employment, would have been a welcome addition to the literature.

A second numerical problem arises with sex ratios. London around 1600 was unusually male dominated, and Hubbard uses this as evidence that women came to London to marry and that even impecunious maidservants could hope to make a good marriage. But when she comes to discuss employment, she follows Peter Earle's 1989 article (“The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 42, no. 3: 328–53) in describing women's work as oversupplied and poorly paid. However, Earle was writing about London around 1700, when the city's population was heavily female dominated. Throughout, a great deal of urban work was only performed by women, including nursing, cleaning, washing, and childcare. Surely this type of work would have been more available and better paid in a population that was short of women than in a population with a surplus of women. Hubbard is in an ideal position to offer a direct comparison with Earle's findings: she is using the same type of source, in the same city, a century earlier. Not recognizing the significance of the sex ratios, she fails to grasp that opportunity, and thereby she undermines her contention that women's social position was determined by economic considerations (in this case, supply and demand).

There is still a great deal to be learned from these depositions about work, about living situations and urban space, and about the relations between spouses or courting couples, and those between servants and their masters and mistresses, but sadly, it is not in this book.