Normal Women, page 29
Even spinning – the constant occupation of all working women – was threatened by a new invention. According to the origin legend, James Hargreaves, a hand-loom weaver, saw his wife’s spinning wheel fallen on the floor with the wheel still turning and the spindle still winding thread in their home at Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. He realised that a wheel mounted sideways could feed many threads to many spindles – and the spinning jenny with multiple spindles was invented. The machine broke the home-based trade that had been the economic foundation of almost all women. The first machines were set up (sometimes hired) in homes and in workshops and operated by women at low pay; but when they became bigger and heavier, from 1720 onwards, they were moved into factories powered by water. Spinning became mechanised and industrialised: hundreds of new machines were housed in the new buildings known as mills – after the earlier corn mills – and women were transformed from individual craft workers into factory ‘hands’, working in shifts at the speed that suited the machines, forced out of a craft that had been known as ‘women’s work’ for thousands of years. In the early years of high pay in the industry, women were even squeezed off the machines as male spinners tried to have them excluded from well-paid work.
The trade of silk weaving, threatened by cheap foreign imports, became increasingly unfriendly to women. Most male silk weavers in the 1600s had owned the family looms and employed family members: children to watch the threads, a wife to set the threads and weave beside him or spin the thread. Apprentices were brought into the family home for training, and worked and lived with the family, setting up their own family workshops when they qualified as master weavers themselves.115 By the 1700s, the guild was discouraging the family business, preferring men to qualify as weavers, join the guild and then train a limited number of male apprentices. The master weavers now aimed at keeping trained apprentices in the business, holding wages down and maximising profits. A gulf developed between workers and the masters, and they both tried to exclude women. The Weavers’ Company, which had accepted the extraordinary talent of Anna Maria Garthwaite, was now urged by its members to exclude women from the trade. A ballad of the 1720s complained bitterly against the company admitting women:
But now we find the Masters another way has ta’en,
For to admit the Women for to increase their gain,
For since they hear from home, so many Men are gone,
They think it fit, for to admit the Women in their room,
. . . You Widows, Wives, and Maidens, that hath a mind to be,
Admitted as free Weavers into our Company,
Three Pounds it is the Price, then take my kind advice,
Your Money tender they’ll a Member make you in a trice,
And so to assure you they take it not amiss,
The Masters will discharge you with a kind loving kiss,
For now you have a call, from the Masters of the Hall,
For to admit, if you think fit, your Boys and Girls and all.116
In 1769, six men broke into the house of a pattern drawer, Daniel Clarke, demanding ‘where the B——h his wife was, saying they would murder her directly, and they would cut his ears off, if he did not come up and show them where the work was’.
Clarke agreed that his wife had drawn the patterns for the silk that was on his loom, but ‘they might depend upon it, she should make no more of it’. The men went upstairs to where the loom was kept in the Clarke family home and cut the half-finished silk from it, a two-coloured flowered satin, or ‘Leopard spot’. As Elizabeth Clarke said later, ‘I did it, they were offended because it was a work too good for a woman to have a hand in.’ Daniel Clarke was later suspected of giving evidence against rioting silk weavers and was lynched by a mob of 3,000 people and drowned in a pond.117
As foreign imports introduced new fabrics like calico and cottons from India, hardship in the silk trade spread. Women consumers were blamed for preferring foreign cloths, and women workers were blamed for entering the trade.
For seamstresses, the arrival of the ‘mantua’, a new form of dress, offered an opportunity to move into tailoring. A loose-fitting gown that came into fashion in the 1680s, originally as an overgown, without any internal boning or corsetry, the mantua could be made by someone without a lengthy professional training as an apprentice under a master and without a large workshop or lots of different materials. Women petticoatmakers easily transferred to mantua-making, exploiting the opportunity. As soon as the Tailors’ Guild realised that mantua gowns were a profitable, and booming market, they started to campaign for laws to prevent ‘Manto-makers’ from working. The guild pursued relentless prosecutions against seamstresses, often poor single women working alone, arguing that they were trespassing on tailoring work.118 The Mercers’ Company, which included tailors, haberdashers, milliners, grocers and ironmongers, also prosecuted single women traders. The seamstresses were trapped in a no-win situation – not allowed to work without guild membership but not allowed to apply for membership of the men-only institution. Ann, an Oxford Milliner, published this letter in Jackson’s Oxford Journal in September 1771:
The Mercer’s (but more properly the Merciless Company) threatening me with an immediate Distress, if I do not leave off my Business or purchase a Freedom of the Company which would cost about £20; a Sum almost equal to the whole I possess.119
Women banned from the guilds were forced into working for themselves, without any protection of a trade association. If the work could be done with small capital outlay, or in a small workspace, or fitted into domestic work at home, they worked alone. If they could find a guild member prepared to bend guild rules for the profit of exploiting unregulated workers, they might work for a master in his workshop, without training, without regulation and without guild membership. When economic conditions worsened in the 1700s, the women workers were without protection, and their poverty forced them to accept poor wages. This confirmed the guilds’ suspicion: that women workers would bring down the wage rate for everyone.120 Matters became so dire for the mantua-makers that the job title ‘mantua-maker’ was understood to signify prostitute; most woman mantua-makers had to perform sex acts to earn money or food to survive.121
Prostitution
The mantua-workers were one trade of many where women workers moved into sex work to supplement their earnings, and moved out again as soon as they could. In London and in provincial cities, there was a wide range of prostitution – from women street walkers and beggars to high-class brothels and privately ‘kept’ mistresses. Some brothels could be elegant and expensive, copying the style of gentlemen’s clubs, and were visible and tolerated for the years from 1660 to the early 1800s. Some were specialist: seven young women established a house in London’s Covent Garden during the Commonwealth and served as ‘confessors’, offering absolution as Roman Catholic priests, alongside sexual services122 – both roles equally troubling to the Puritan mentality.
One of the first guides to prostitutes in London was published in 1691: A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks & Prostitutes, Nightwalkers, Whores, She-friends, Kind Women and other of the Linnen-lifting Tribe lists the women available at Bartholomew Fair. Among the 21 women listed, it noted Mary Holland – ‘tall, graceful and comely, shy of her favours’ – who was said to be available for £20, and her sister Elizabeth, who was said to be ‘indifferent to Money but a Supper and Two Guineas will tempt her’.
Prostitution, especially in London, was widespread and there were post-Restoration calls for sex work to be legalised in specific areas, but these were opposed by another wave of Puritanism, which came in with the Protestant House of Orange (William and Mary) in 1688. From then, prostitutes could be publicly whipped in the streets, and societies to persecute brothel-keepers and prostitutes were formed in London and many provincial towns. It was the new moral associations – not the traditional JPs – which brought most of the prosecutions against prostitutes: in London, there were more than 1,000 a year.123
Men, as clients, were never prosecuted for prostitution. A rare man appeared in court in 1721. Thomas Brass admitted soliciting a woman in the street, using her for sex and paying her, but was accused of nothing. He appeared as a witness for her prosecution as a prostitute. His evidence persuaded the magistrates to send her (her name not listed) to the Middlesex House of Correction for ‘picking him up in the streets and carrying him into a tavern and agreeing to let him lie with her for 4s 6d’.124
It was widely believed that it was best for everyone if elite men restrained their sexual appetite in the elite domestic home and used poor women for sex. Enlightenment beliefs about the healthy balance of humours dictated that men should avoid sexual frustration.125 Pornography was widely available for literate men after the end of the Licensing Act in 1695,126 and mostly described male lust and female passivity,127 for use by men to masturbate – which was not considered unhealthy or a social evil until the nineteenth century.128
Poor women could also be used as an outlet for homosexuals. Lady Saville was said to have converted her son, Sir George, from homosexuality in 1750 by taking him away from a male lover, a waiter at Mount’s coffee house, into the country to have sex with servant girls and agricultural workers. Henry Harris reported the cure: ‘Lady Saville has taken her younger twig of Sodom into the country, and by way of weaning him from that unnatural vice, takes great pains to cocker him with every Abigail in her house and all the milk maid cunts in the neighbourhood.’129
Slaves and Slave Owners
Wealthy English women were involved in the growing trade in slaves as owners. Queen Catherine of Braganza bought shares in her husband Charles II’s company, the Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, founded in 1660 to kidnap and ship enslaved people from the continent. Charles’s mistress Louise de Kérouaille had a portrait painted of herself with her arm around an apparently adoring page.
The women of the slave-trading Morice family took the compliment of having slaver ships named after them: Anne, Katherine, Sarah and Judith. Other slave merchant and sugar plantation daughters consolidated slaving fortunes with advantageous marriages.130
The royal court contained African-born slaves, including one man bought for £50. James II continued investing in the slave trade and his daughter Queen Anne signed a contract worth £7.5 million for Britain to supply slaves to the Spanish West Indies, taking 20 per cent for herself.131
Slaves were not only traded across the Atlantic to the plantations in the New World, but imported into Europe. In England they were mostly used for domestic service and it became fashionable to have African-born page boys and girl companions. An eight-year-old Black girl was publicly auctioned in Liverpool in 1765: ‘To be sold by auction at George’s coffee house betwixt the hours of 6 and 8 o’clock a very fine Negro girl about eight years of age, very healthy, and hath been sometime from the coast. Any person willing to purchase the same, may apply to Captain Robert Syers, at Mr Bartley Hodgett’s, Mercer and Draper, near the Exchange where she may be seen till the time of sale.’132
An enslaved six-year-old girl with white skin, brought from Jamaica, was exhibited as a novelty at Charing Cross in 1756. Spectators paid a shilling each to see her. The offensive language of the time said she had ‘all the features of an Ethiopian with the flaxen woolly head, a skin and complexion as fair as alabaster’.133
Slaves were brought to England with their returning colonial owners, who continued to exploit them as slaves in England, though there were doubts about the legality of slavery in England. An enslaved woman – Katherine Auker – won partial freedom in the Middlesex court in 1690. She told the court that she had been brought to England by her master Robert Rich, a planter in Barbados, six years earlier. She had managed to get religious instruction and baptism at St Katherine’s Church, near the Tower of London. Some people thought that baptised people were automatically freed, but the Rich family did not free Katherine Auker. They physically abused her – her statement says she was ‘tortured and turned out of doors’ but they did not officially discharge her from slavery. When the family returned to Barbados, they kidnapped her and threatened to cut off her nose and ears, but she managed to get away. Nobody would employ a woman enslaved to another owner, so she was destitute. It was probably her poverty which might be a charge on the parish that earned her a sympathetic hearing at the court, which ruled: ‘Order for Kath’ Auker a Black to be at liberty to go to service until her master shall return from Barbados and provide for her.’ She was not freed from slavery, but she was allowed to work as a servant until her slave owner returned, when she would return to slavery and become his responsibility. Probably, she was able to disappear into work in London and take her own freedom.134
Eighteenth-century newspapers often included advertisements for the return of runaway slaves – many threatening sympathisers not to hide or protect them:
Run away from her Master at Black-Heath, A Negro Woman, aged about 25 Years, pretty fat, (went by the Name of Cælia) and is indented by the Name of Cælia Edlyne, and has several Years to serve. She has a Cross, the Mark of her Country, on one Cheek, just under her Eye, and walks lame, being a little inclinable to the Dropsy: She Washes, Irons, Clear-starches, and remarkably Darns well. Whoever secures her, and gives Notice at the Bar of the Jamaica Coffee-House, so that she be brought to Justice, shall have Two Guineas Reward; but whosoever entertains her, shall be prosecuted with the utmost Rigour.135
Clearly, runaway slaves found a welcome and a refuge in white working-class communities. Christmas Bennett ran away to Whitechapel – a working-class area of London:
RUN away last Thursday Morning from Mr. Gifford’s, in Brunswick-Row, Queen-Square, Great Ormond-Street, an indentur’d Negro Woman Servant, of a yellowish Cast, nam’d Christmas Bennett; she had on a dark-grey Poplin, lin’d with a grey water’d Silk, mark’d under each Ear with having an Issue, and a Seeton behind her Neck, and suppos’d to be conceal’d somewhere about Whitechapel. Whoever harbours her after this Publication shall be severely prosecuted; and a Reward of a Guinea will be given to any Person who will give Information of her, so that she may be had again.136
Historian Peter Fryer said there was an awareness in both white and Black communities that they should unite: ‘They saw black people as fellow victims of their enemies, fellow fighters against a system that degraded poor whites and poor blacks alike. With their help, London had by the 1760s, become a centre of black resistance.’137
Black men and women developed their own communities in England: a London newspaper reported a party at which people ‘Supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments, at a public house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present for all the performers were Blacks.’138
In remote areas of England, ex-slaves were both more isolated and visible; but there were friendships and marriages between white and Black people. The apparent ‘disappearance’ of thousands of African and Caribbean people brought into England as slaves and runaways was caused by intermarriages for love between the immigrant population and the indigenous people.
Literary Work
There was an extraordinary growth of women writers and an explosion of book production in the seventeenth century: between 1616 and 1620, only eight new books written by women had appeared but in the later years of the century women would be producing hundreds: 653 new titles by 231 named authors, some of them writing multiple books.139 This boom in publishing was powered by women authors writing to keep their families together after the civil wars, recording their extraordinary times, and gaining confidence to publish their practical, spiritual and political insights. This is the time that women publish themselves.
Quaker women, whose theology taught that women could bear witness, were especially prominent, contributing 20 per cent of the women’s publications for the century, and women prophets from other religions also wrote and published their visions. Widow Joan Whitrowe published her advice to Queen Mary in 1690,140 telling King William: ‘Take this Counsel, though from a woman. The Lord is no respector of persons.’141
The philosopher Lady Anne Conway developed a theory of religion, reading the Kabbalah, the Quran and Quaker texts.142 But few prophetesses enjoyed the accuracy of Lady Eleanor Davies, who predicted that her husband would die within three years of an argument in which he burned her manuscript. He died in the same week that he destroyed her manuscript.143 (Rightly so.)
Practical advice books by women for women became popular from 1640, with women publishing medical books and books of recipes. The numbers of women authors may have been underestimated because male editors, male publishers and male readers did not always acknowledge women’s authorship of science and medical works. Opuscula Philosophica by Anne Conway was not credited to her, but to the man who translated her Latin text into English. Anonymous books were attributed to men if they were not thought suitable subjects for a woman author. Readers of non-fiction preferred their books to be authored by men, but women authored medical researches and recipes for medicine, including: the Countess of Arundel, Althea Talbot; Viscountess Ranelagh, Katherine James; the Countess of Kent, Elizabeth Grey; Hannah Woolley; and the Countess of Cumberland, Margaret Clifford, and her daughter the Countess of Pembroke, Anne Clifford.144
Ladies like Mary Sidney and Anne Conway wrote philosophical and natural science treatises. Best known of the polymath ladies, singled out by contemporaries and then historians for her eccentricities, was the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish.145 The uncompromising duchess, writer of plays, an autobiography and a biography of her husband, studied and wrote about science. Known as ‘Mad Meg’, she believed female ignorance came from lack of experience:
