Normal Women, page 28
A woman’s currency: a halfpenny token minted by Mary Long at the sign of the Rose in Russell Street, Covent Garden, 1669
Halfpenny token of Mary Long at the sign of the Rose in Russell Street, Covent Garden, 1669 (Folger Shakespeare Library)
The restoration of the monarchy allowed the reopening of theatres, fairs and entertainments, and women returned to their work as entertainers, dancers, acrobats and musicians. At the 1698 Bartholomew Fair, in London’s Smithfield, female tightrope walkers and aerialists were much admired.72 In the 1720s in the capital, a young woman was known as the European Championess for her prizefighting – boxing – which was probably contested with few rules and bare knuckles.73 Women appeared for the first time on stage in women’s parts, and there was an outpouring of women’s creativity. Women writers produced plays, poems and books; women artists produced popular paintings – Mrs Mary Beale charged £10 for a full-length portrait in 1671.74 Mary Beale was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. She became the main financial provider for her family – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Explorer Celia Fiennes (1662–1741) took advantage of the new freedoms to travel thousands of miles on horseback and on foot in England as a single woman, accompanied only by servants. She wrote a private journal of her travels but did not publish.
The only work open for a lady without loss of genteel status was governess to elite children in a private house, or companion to an upper-class lady. These gruelling and humiliating posts of ‘companions’ were created by the requirement of the ladies of the family to show delicacy and fragility: they now had to be attended, chaperoned, guarded or served. Poor middling- and upper-class single women or widows, trying to retain their status, might find themselves at the whim of an employer, producing nothing of value, virtually unpaid. Some posts were literally without pay, as sought in the Daily Advertiser on 7 July 1772:
A Widow lady about 40, of Family, Character and Education, would like to superintend a single Gentleman’s family that is but small and who is a Man of Good Morals and not under the same Age. The lady expects to be treated as a Friend and Companion as no Salary is required unless the Gentleman has children and should like the Lady to act in the capacity of a Governess, being properly qualified to undertake the Care of Young Ladies; has no objection to Town or Country.75
Women had positions of authority and were leaders of their communities, in local institutions, in public health and on their private estates. Anna Maria Garthwaite, the silk weaver, acted as executor of her father’s estate when she was 27 years old.76 Respectable lower-class women reported illicit sex, illegitimate children and infanticide, making up ‘juries of matrons’ at the request of the court to rule on pregnancies and impotence. Women juries and ‘watchers’ aided the detection and prosecution of witches. Women taught in free schools and supervised pauper apprenticeships, served as keepers and matrons for the poor. During plague years, they searched the dead and dying for signs of the disease and kept the lists of the dead of the parish.77
Between 1688 and 1755, a quarter of British jails had a widow as a keeper.78 Often a widow would inherit the post from her dead husband. Eliza Prince, widow of John at a Berkshire house of correction, remarked rather pointedly to the authorities that she could continue in the family tradition of keeping the jail or she could fall on the parish which would then have to support her and her eight children, as well as pay the wages of a new jailer.
That your petitioner’s husband and his father and grandfather have been keepers of the house of correction at Abingdon for a great many years, and your petitioner has a brother and a brother in law very well qualified and willing to assist her in the future management of that prison, and she can find sufficient security, if required, for her faithful discharge of the office of Bridewell keeper. Your petitioner therefore humbly prays to be continued in the office of keeper of the house of correction, that she may be thereby able to provide bread for her family, which must otherwise be unavoidably thrown on the parish for maintenance.79
Sextons – employed by parish churches to keep the graveyard and ring the bells – were often women, especially in London.80 A woman appointed to a London church as sexton in 1739 took her case to the King’s Bench when parishioners tried to replace her with a man. The court stated that there were ‘many’ women sextons in London. A ruling later in the century decreed that a woman could undertake the post since it was ‘a private office of trust’,81 reflecting a growing feeling that women could do ‘caring’ work. At the Quaker burial ground near Bunhill Fields, Deborah Morris inherited the post of sexton and gravedigger from her father for twelve years from 1745 to 1757, and then handed it on to her husband.82
Women served as overseers of the poor – an important and demanding task that affected public order and dispensed local charity. The continuing uncertainty about women under the law in the eighteenth century was exploited by Mary Jacques of Derbyshire who successfully wriggled out of her civic duty by explaining ‘She, as a woman, was not capable of the office nor by law compellable to serve it.’83
The female governor of the Chelmsford workhouse was confirmed in her role despite legal challenge. But the court noted that although women were freeholders and contributed to the public charges, they could not vote for members of Parliament or coroners, and they could not hold public office.84
The late seventeenth century saw the deliberate exclusion of women from civic posts.85 Increasingly, women had to choose a deputy – a man – to publicly do the work. Only if no man was available could a woman take up the responsibility that had previously been an automatic part of her elite social position. Legal opinion volunteered that it was ‘inappropriate’ for women to take office.86
The squeezing out of women voters from the electorate started in 1640 and was mostly completed by 1690 when it was generally accepted that women did not vote.87 In a 1739 King’s Bench case, the judges agreed that women could legally vote, but advised that they should not do so: since women ‘lack judgement’ on public issues.88
Education
Women were hired as teachers – but mainly teaching girls. Elite young women received their education from governesses – whose low status and pay were the subject of hand-wringing sermons and poignant novels; but no improvement. Some home schooling for girls could be of a high standard. Anthony Cook’s daughters were highly educated in a deliberate experiment to test female abilities; Lucy Hutchinson (b. 1620) was bilingual in French and English and could read at the age of four. In 1698, Viscount Hatton’s daughters were said to be ‘good Latin scholars’.89
Girls of the middling sort were increasingly sent to school, creating a community of educated women in the residential schools, a helpful development for single women of the middling classes who did not want to marry or work as a housekeeper or companion. Mary Ward’s Roman Catholic convent at Mickelgate Bar, York, expanded into a boarding and day school, surviving constant harassment from no-popery mobs. The mother superior was imprisoned in 1694, the house attacked in 1696, and the convent was only saved by a spectral St Michael riding a horse through the mob – according to legend.
Women who preferred the company of other women were attracted to the new schools that opened in London and the bigger towns. The new girls’ schools were all single sex, and the curricula varied from the highly scholarly – Henry Purcell wrote Dido and Aeneas for the famous pupil choir at Josiah Priest’s Girls’ School to perform in 168890 – to little more than preparation for married life: decorative hobbies, amateur music, light reading and above everything else, etiquette.
From 1670, academies for non-Church of England Christians called ‘Dissenting Academies’ were allowed to offer a university-standard education for religious radicals who would not take the oaths required at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Some Dissenting colleges allowed women to attend – but no woman could graduate.91
After 1660, a small group of women including Bathsua Makin, Elizabeth Elstob and Mary Astell publicly criticised the English education system, linking the poor education of women with women’s lack of status. The times were against them and their comments were mostly ignored. As Richard Brathwaite pronounced, in a tract of 1642, ‘a proper gentlewoman desired not the esteem of any she-clerks; she had rather be approved by her living than learning.’92
Exclusion
From the 1700s, women were excluded from more and more areas of life: voting, community leadership, work, entrepreneurship and even as inventors: no more women registered their patents after 1660.93 Women were squeezed out of paid, high-status or professional work, or any work that required a formal education or high-level skills. This was justified by the new ‘science’ about women’s bodies and women’s nature. No longer would philosophers argue that men should speak for women and rule over them because they had authority from God in the Bible and men could represent women: they were the same sort of beings. Now, men should speak for women because they were completely the opposite of women: capable where women were incapacitated.94
Even upper-class women were excluded from public life, and from profitable work. The sisterhood of women’s sex was subdivided by class and working-class women were demonstrably inferior to everyone. The idea that ladies should lead very different lives from other, lower-class women was vigorously promoted from 1760.95 Dr John Gregory wrote A Father’s Advice to his Daughters, an immediate bestseller, capturing and describing the mood of the times that defined ‘a lady’ as emphatically non-productive. Even a lady’s hobbies must be valueless. Dr Gregory recommended needlework, netting, knitting, art and handicrafts. Activities were designed to fill up hours spent at home. Even going out was discouraged.96
By 1730, 42 per cent of London wives claimed they had no paid employment and were almost all kept by their husbands.97 The work of running the home – maintaining the outward appearance and the smooth functioning of the household, networking with clients or customers, supervising servants, ordering and controlling food and services to the household, producing children, educating and raising them, managing and maintaining the family social life and its presentation to the world – all this, and much more, was done by middling and upper-class women, but was defined as leisure, done as part of her daily life by the lady of the house; unpaid in families who wanted to appear so genteel that the women of the family were idle.
The all-male professionals waxed loudly critical of experienced but unqualified women. Women doctors, nurses and surgeons now found themselves excluded from the professional guilds, which demanded a university degree when no woman could attend a university.98 Patients, who had been persuaded that prescribing medicine and surgery had to be learned at university and licensed by a guild, came to choose male doctors, and women healers were pushed into poorer patients or nursing. In 1650, only about 65 per cent of health practitioners claimed to be professionally qualified and registered; ten years later, this had risen to 75 per cent.99
Elizabeth Cellier (?1640–after 1688), an experienced midwife, described the dangers for women in childbed when they were attended by a highly qualified but inexperienced male doctor, ‘especially such as confess they never delivered Women in their lives, and being asked “what would they do in such a case” Reply “they have not yet studied it but will when occasion serves”.’100
Cellier argued that there should be a college of midwives, so that women could increase their traditional skills, obtain certification and form a working guild. She published A scheme for the foundation of a royal hospital . . . and for the maintenance of a corporation of skilled Midwives.101 No corporation was founded, and midwives were employed by poor patients while qualified but inexperienced men attended and billed the middling and upper classes.
Records of medical spending in Kent show wealthy patients transferring their spending from nursing care (mostly women) to physicians (mostly men).102 Those women physicians who hung on to their practice moved to the care of women patients and children. Of 43 payments to women for assistance during illness in the Kent records, 2 were for serving as messengers, 7 were for tending children and 13 were for dealing with minor ailments. Only 21 payments were made to women for performing surgery or prescribing for patients; compared with 1,756 payments to male physicians and surgeons.103
In this period, banking and international money-dealing grew very quickly and women, who already dominated small-scale credit and moneylending businesses, should have been well positioned to join the massive global expansion. But they were unable to expand because of their lack of legal status. No woman’s loan or mortgage could be enforced by a court. Women were limited to small loans that they could personally cover and collect, and to a clientele that they knew could be trusted. Women were not able to expand their credit and pawn businesses to work with strangers, let alone international finance.
Jewish women proved the exception, specialising in international trade and moneylending, as their word was uniquely reliable. Oliver Cromwell’s encouragement of the return of Jewish people to England for the benefit of international trade meant that by 1660 there were 35 Jewish families in London alone. The original settlers from Spain and Portugal were followed by Jewish families, mostly from Amsterdam and the Low Countries. The Ashkenazi Jews formed their own congregation in 1690 and acquired a synagogue in Duke’s Place. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews may have had two synagogues: one in Creechurch Lane and another at St Helens.104 By 1690, there were around 400 Jews in London and the 1695 census list showed 48 of 110 parishes in the capital with Jewish inhabitants; most of the population were in All Hallows, London Wall; St Andrew, Undershaft; St Helen, Bishopsgate; St James, Duke’s Place; St Katharine Cree, Aldgate; and St Katherine, Coleman.105 The safety of the Jewish community had been guaranteed by the returned king himself, desperately short of money, needing moneylenders.106 Their success prompted one commentator, William Erbery, to ask if Muslim people should not also emigrate to England: ‘This Christian Common-wealth, appearing so favourable to the Jews, why not to the Turks?’107
The Bank of England was established in 1694, while Child’s, Coutts and the partnership that would become Barclays Bank started to hold large reserves of cash and lend internationally. Banker Edward Blackwell had 1,000 clients and held £500,000 on deposit.108 Interest rates averaged 5 per cent in the middle of the seventeenth century.109 The expansion of trade to the Far East – and, above all, the global trade in slaves – meant that banking in all its forms took off in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but women – without legally enforceable contracts to their name – could not join it.
The trade of printing was widely hit by the restoration of Charles II. Religious and instructive tracts had seen a boom in the civil wars and Cromwell years: there were 132 women printers in the century before the return of the monarchy,110 but the market for Puritan sermons plummeted under the new pleasure-loving king. To reduce the number of printers, the Stationers’ Company in London refused licences to the poorest printing houses, all of which were run by widows – the survivors of husband-and-wife printing teams. Only the most substantial widow printers survived.111
Guilds and professional associations of all sorts continued to close their doors to women members and women apprentices, to exclude them from the most profitable work, leaving them the least rewarding parts of the business. While widows and wives of tradesmen might still be admitted as a gesture of respect to the more important man, still important even though deceased, single women entrepreneurs found themselves banned. They were literally on their own: Jane Zains had to pay a fee up to 30 times more than that of a male trader or a widow, when she opened her linen drapery business in Southampton in 1680.112
From 1731, English men and women of African ancestry were excluded from training in London by a proclamation from the lord mayor: ‘No Negroes or other Blacks be suffered to be bound apprentices, at any of the Companies of this City to any freeman thereof’.113 When laws against ‘gypsies’ were repealed by Queen Anne in the early eighteenth century, it disrupted the campaign of Northumberland magistrates against bands of men and women who they did not name as ‘gypsies’ but as ‘Baleys Shaws Falls or ffawes have of late to come into this country and keep themselves together . . . threatening to burn houses and are suspected of burglaries theft and other evil practices and ride armed to the great terror of her Majesty subjects.’
A ‘large number’ were arrested but most of the men broke out of prison, leaving the women and children behind. The women were whipped and the children kept in the poor house until apprenticed. In later years, some of them would be recaptured and transported as indentured servants – servitude – to Virginia.114
Even the little business of selling fresh foods in the street became more hostile towards women at the end of the eighteenth century. Women traders walking the streets and in the outdoor markets came under increasing pressure, blamed for disorder, false measures, selling stolen goods and blocking the highways. In London especially, local bye-laws were passed to limit and control women vendors. Street trading had been the marketplace for those who could not afford to buy and rent stalls or shops, but now even the streets closed to women.
Craftsmen and women who made their products at home – such as tailors or cobblers – opened their front windows to the streets and traded with passers-by, and in the mid-1700s all sorts of retailers opened in the front-facing rooms of domestic houses. As domestic premises, they were officially owned by the male householders; a woman might be the only shopkeeper, she might own all the stock, she might have made everything herself, but officially it was not her shop: only 6 per cent of shops were recorded as being kept by women, and only 4.5 per cent as owned by women.
