Published in 2021, Laura Gowing’s Ingenious Trade explores the world of female domestic crafts during seventeenth-century London. An accomplished scholar, Gowing is a Fellow of the British Academy and a professor of early modern England at King’s College London. Her research specifically examines female bodies, sexuality, crime, and she specializes in London as a geographic focus.
Using an extensive search through Mayor’s Court records, tax lists, and “other administrative records,” (8) Gowing reconstructs the model of female apprenticeship and labor through a lens that contrasts with most of the historiography of female labor in seventeenth-century London. As she writes: “Histories of women’s work customarily frame it as under-recognized, informal, flexible and unregulated,” (8). Contrasted with Mansell’s Female Servants, who argues that female servile labor was often fluid and contingent, Gowing argues that female apprenticeships were different; apprenticeship contracted women to one another with “legally significant” expectations for both parties. She finds that not only were women employing another but also that the mistress was fundamental to the training of the apprentice (136). This initial point leads to two arguments that form the backbone of her book.
First and foremost, that female apprentices entered skilled positions through the same means as their male counterparts. And were in fact substantial contributors to London’s ever-growing economy. This is especially true in the textile trade, which Gowing spends the majority of her book covering. Second, and a point that she admittedly does not spent as much time discussing as I would have thought, that apprenticeships were a phenomena that transcended socio-economic boundaries. She states that female apprenticeships were “a well-established route to independent work, practised in parishes and towns around the country as well as in guilds…and drawing girls from the poorest to the gentry..” (1).
Family and connections play a large role in Gowing’s overall arguments as well. Several times the families of both apprentice and mistress become heavily involved in the business negotiations of contracting a girl’s labor. This could often take a dubious turn as seen through the court case of Mary Jones, whose mistress her family sued alleging a failure to train their daughter. Gowing writes signed on as an apprentice for Frances Carey and her husband, only to be left mostly untrained and instead used by the couple for tedious labor of keeping their failing shop. Apprentices also feature as the guilty party, as in the case of Ann Gray, whose unpaid debts and breach of trust by selling goods on credit landed her in debtor’s prison. In both cases, the families of both apprentices and mistresses become known through mentions in court records. The returns of premiums by masters to the girls’ families serves as one piece of evidence that seventeenth-century London was a highly litigious society.
Chapter 1 focuses on the Royal Exchange before the Great Fire destroyed most of it. Uniquely for this chapter, Gowing reconstructs the Exchange through spatial arrangements of shops and its networks. The upper levels where female shops typically were, Gowing highlights as a place that apprentices would have been learning their trade daily. Chapters 2 and 3 focus less on space and more on the girls as apprenteices and the women who trained and mentored them. It is here that Gowing identifies the late 17th century as a massive watershed moment in England (and Europe overall), as the number of female apprentices began to grow. Chapter 4 covers the skills that girls learned. Meanwhile the most humanizing chapter arguably comes in the fifth section, which covers discipline and how masters played a role in conforming girls to society. She writes that part of the training for an apprentice was to “fashion themselves into the likeness of masters and mistresses,” (183). While both boys and girls were disciplined to conform to patriarchal authority, the discipline they were to receive could vary, as well as what set in motion their discipline as well. Resistance plays a large role in this chapter too, and serves as a means for her to reinforce the agency of a group that is otherwise largely ignored in the records. The final chapter of substance covers how women received the “freedom” (the right to trade within the City). The freedom was an important function since it acted as both a gateway into a male-dominated merchant class, and it also was the very thing that limited them. Gowing highlights the importance of marriage among released apprentices and many times throughout the book, states that girls married soon after their apprenticeship ended and never again applied the trade. Gowing writes that “Living with and woring round those rules reminded women of the legal weight of marriage as well as the potential for using custom and petitioning to negotiate it,” (242).
Like many social histories that have been written, Gowing balances the agency of these women with the constraints that would have been placed on them for their gender. While apprenticeship did indeed give young girls training for independent work and adulthood like it did for young boys, social limitations more often than not constricted what independent work they could take up. This work typically came in the form of the booming textile trade. Most of the girls who were trained as apprentices in this book worked in some fashion of the textile trade. Gowing agues that “Women’s work in the textile trades trades of early modern London was critical to the expansion of those trade in the service of new patterns of consumptions, which included quicker, cheaper fashion, often bought off the peg, with numerous ready-made accessories, alongside more disposable household goods,” (3).
An unsung aspect of this book is Gowing’s methodology. As is the case in several books we have read this semester, Stoyle’s Murderous Midsummer comes to mind, there are inherent biases and silences within the very sources she uses. For example, the paperwork of apprenticeship oftened concealed the part that women played in training girls. The documentation often recorded the married mistress under the name of their husband rather than their own name. But despite the “minimal historical and contemporary discussion,” Gowing’s findings through legal testimonies and these previously mentioned documents reveal “an established set of specialized skills and shared understandings of what, and how, young women learned,” (137-138).