Ingenious Trade is a welcome addition to the historiography on women's work and is the social history we needed on female apprenticeship, the relationship of women to London's guilds, and women as mistresses in trade. While most scholars have characterised women's work as informal and undocumented, Gowing shows that female apprentices and mistresses in London trades were governed by formal records, rules, and training.
Gowing begins with the exchangewomen who sold goods on London's Royal Exchange. Many were apprentices, or had been, and some were mistresses who hired and trained girls. Much of the scholarship on the Royal Exchange has come from an artistic or literary angle, but Gowing inserts the women who leased shops and sold wares in the upper balcony back into the building's story. Women took over shops from parents and husbands, of course, but Gowing uncovers sisters, mothers, daughters, and female friends who held leases and worked together.
A chapter on female apprentices begins with the indenture because, as Gowing notes, paperwork both validated and challenged gender norms. The presence of girl apprentices is evidenced by companies such as the Drapers and the Merchant Taylors pre-printing forms with feminine pronouns or others like the Haberdashers leaving the pronoun blank to fill in. Girls’ terms varied more than their male counterparts, from 3 to 7 years, and they could marry without penalty. From the mid-1600s London companies were regularly enrolling girls as apprentices, but they were often apprenticed to the freemen's wives to learn another trade (a person's occupation did not have to match their company in order to gain freedom of the city).
Gowing shows that more women were involved with London's livery companies than we have recognised because the guilds under-recorded female apprentices and many apprentices did not serve full terms and thus gain their freedom. Much of Gowing's evidence for these female apprentices comes from the Mayor's Court, which heard cases brought to dissolve apprenticeship contracts. She finds that although almost all the girls who appeared before this court were indentured in city companies, almost 80% (79 out of 103) do not appear in company registers or records. However, Gowing acknowledges that they and their families may have been more interested in receiving training than gaining freedom through a formal apprenticeship.
Gowing also derives a ‘different chronology for the growth of female apprentices’ based on the Mayor's Court cases vs. the company registers (79), concluding that female apprenticeship was much more extensive and consistent over the seventeenth century than once thought, with only a modest increase in the 1660s-80s. One caveat to these findings that Gowing introduces is that when the clothing trades moved out of the City and into the West End, they were no longer regulated by the companies. Since so many women worked in the textile trades further research will be needed on this.
Gowing provides several reasons for the increase in registered female apprentices. One is the decline in power of London's companies, which led to more opportunities for women. (This could also be read as the usual story of women accessing opportunity only when men leave an occupation or there is a decline in status). Two, disasters such as the Civil Wars, the Plague and the Great Fire all increased the need for labour in London. And three, numbers of lifelong single women were high in the late seventeenth century and women who never married needed a way to maintain themselves. It is telling that gentry parents began to apprentice their daughters as high-end shopkeepers and milliners right at the time that numbers of them were remaining single. Gowing avers that ‘apprenticeship was not an alternative to marriage’ but her evidence seems to contradict this (90).
In an excellent chapter on mistresses, Gowing argues that a focus on ‘mistresshood’ provides a new perspective on women's work (102). Mistresses operated a ‘parallel system’ of training. Most were wives who obtained their freedom through widowhood or patrimony, but unmarried mistresses usually obtained their freedom through apprenticeship, whether in the high-end companies like the Grocers or low status trades such as Pinmakers. Single women were more likely to establish themselves in business than single men and were heavily involved in clothes making (including milliners, exchangewomen, and children's coatmakers). Single mistresses also often lived with other women in similar trades, or were lodgers, which begs the question where did their apprentices live.
Gowing devotes a chapter to what girls learned during their apprenticeships. Like service, this was a ‘life-cycle experience’, but one that provided training in marketable skills and not just domestic ones (138). Apprenticing in a trade might also include learning to read and write as well as education in arithmetic and accounting. To work in a shop an apprentice must learn how to evaluate and cost goods, bargain, sell them (usually on credit), and manage customers. Gowing shows how in the genteel trades of shopkeeping and millinery women's ‘hands were a commodity’ as well as a tool and had to be kept smooth and clean to handle luxury fabrics and trimmings. Building on her past scholarship, Gowing provides illuminating analysis of ‘the body in service’ (182).
A chapter on discipline and resistance shows how masters and mistresses contested with their apprentices. While male apprentices were accused of gaming, drinking, and rowdiness, female apprentices were accused of vanity and frivolous spending. Female apprentices also lacked any collective identity or activities, in contrast to male apprentices. Gender was not always the salient point, sometimes it was social status. Gowing posits that some conflict was due to the increase in genteel daughters coming from the provinces to London to serve apprenticeships in mercantile households. Illness, cleanliness and neatness, and food were all flashpoints in the master-apprentice relationship. Gowing notes that many of these examples sound like typical ‘adolescent resistance’ (199), but she is careful to say that ‘diet, nurture, parental presence and caring style, and a historically specific sense of the self’ mean that teens in the past are not the same as those today (202).
The final chapter examines women's relationship to their freedom (to trade in London) and how middle-aged women engaged in citizenship and civic life. In the later seventeenth century Gowing finds an increase in women claiming the freedom to trade through patrimony. Such women were usually older (in their mid-20s to 40s) than those who claimed through apprenticeship, and frequently were never married. Women claimed their freedom by patrimony more than their brothers. Redemption (or monetary payment) was another avenue to the freedom which shows up in women's petitions to the Chamberlain. Gowing finds hundreds of women who asked to be allowed to take up the freedom, to pay a lower fee to do so, or at least to be allowed to trade. These women, many of whom were widows with children, strike me as an example of the city extending economic aid to the deserving poor. Nevertheless, it does indicate that London's governors were open to extending the freedom, even when women did not technically merit it, to help them remain economically independent. Gowing shows that women's access to the freedom was always contingent. Ingenious Trade reveals that women were commonly apprentices and mistresses, but how much status they enjoyed is more difficult to determine.
