While the long-held belief that women didn’t work in the early modern period—or, at least, didn’t engage in paid work outside of the home—has been effectively and conclusively challenged in recent scholarship, there has existed at least one aspect of paid work in this period that has continued to be perceived as the domain of men. This was early modern guild work, and while some historians have been able to show that women were involved in guilds and may have even formed their own (notably, the work of Marian K. Dale for the London silkweavers), the prevailing narrative has been that women’s paid work and guild work were mutually exclusive, and the only women who were allowed to breach this boundary were the widows of masters—but only for a short time, usually until they remarried.

Coupled with this is the argument that women’s work was low-skilled, low-status, and low-pay, and, as a result, that work left behind little evidence (such as, for example, apprenticeship records) and so evidence of women’s work had to be teased out of court records, church records, and wills. Like other aspects of women’s work in the early modern European past, however, this long-held assumption has come to be challenged, most recently by Laura Gowing in Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London. Gowing confronts these assumptions and, as she proves, misconceptions head-on, using suits proved at the London Mayor’s Court and the Records of London’s Livery Companies, among others, to show that women were, in fact, enrolled as apprentices in the guild records of early modern London, particularly in the textile trades of the late seventeenth century. At the same time, Gowing also reminds her readers that women’s experiences do not always mirror men’s experiences directly. Female apprentices, for example, were trained by company members and their wives, but were expected to conform to female ideals of diligence, modesty, and submissiveness, and were often expected to live in households headed by women and to carry out domestic tasks as part of their apprenticeships. In keeping with restrictions elsewhere, female apprentices also faced impediments to trading independently, especially after marriage.

The book is a careful balance of personal stories and the wider implications of those individual accounts—to which those familiar with Gowing’s earlier work will no doubt be accustomed. The first chapter of Ingenious Trade lays out the physical parameters of the London Royal Exchange, pointing out that the Exchange “was not only the original Stock Exchange but the first of London's shopping galleries,” bringing together the concepts of “urban style, consumption and sociability” (14, 16). Women were important actors, as producers, sellers, and consumers, in the Exchange, as Gowing makes clear in this chapter; yet, as she notes:

Gowing dives deeper into this dimension in the ensuing chapters that explore, in turn, the circumstances that caused girls to enter apprenticeships (chapter 2), women as mistresses (chapter 3), what girls learned as apprentices (chapter 4), how these girls resisted the constraints placed upon them (chapter 5), and what happened after these girls finished their apprenticeships (chapter 6). These next steps are mainly discussed through an examination of the petitions by which women sought the freedom of the city of London. The freedom of the city “brought political privileges as well as the right to trade there. Fewer than half [of apprenticeships] got this far, because so many apprentices left before completing their contracted terms, and women, again, were much less likely to become free than their male counterparts” (213). As a result, “[a]mongst those claiming the freedom in seventeenth-century London, women were a tiny proportion of the whole,” and were often further disadvantaged by marriage, all of which serves to underline that “[a] woman's place in the City was, above all, contingent” (217, 242).

The experiences of these women who were apprenticed remind us that we still have much to learn about early modern work arrangements, and particularly how sex and gender influenced these arrangements. In each of these chapters, despite presenting a considerable (yet never overwhelming) amount of information about each topic, Gowing never loses sight of the individuals who made up these agreements—and the wider picture. Each chapter opens with a vignette of an individual female apprentice, and the book’s appendix is a literal “Who’s Who” of these female apprentices and the experiences they navigated. Their experiences as apprentices were often similar, but also importantly different, from those of male apprentices. Accordingly, this book is valuable to many—historians of women’s work, of course, but also those concerned with the history of work in general, as well as historians of business, urban history, law, and gender. Ingenious Trade highlights that while women's work and men's work have often been treated as functioning independently of one another (even if ultimately complementary), these spheres are, in fact, intertwined, and their study helps to broaden the definitions and experiences of what we thought we knew. “Seeing women in guilds, as mistresses, and in shops changes the picture of work, of the city and of the economic and social structures of the nation,” Gowing writes (250). With this study acting as a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and paradigm-shifting example, it is exciting to consider what other reconceptions of the early modern world of work lie ahead.