Policing the Monopolizing Women of Early Modern Nantes

This article examines the labor of women in the Breton city of Nantes during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It focuses on lower-class workingwomen: the small-scale street vendors, shopkeepers, and innkeepers, who were the stalwarts of the flourishing subeconomy. City officials regularly arrested these women and charged them with various infractions of the municipal ordinances regulating retail commerce, the most serious offense being forestalling the market. The records of these cases offer tantalizing clues as to how lower-class women in early modern Nantes thought about themselves as women and as workers. Women's work, the evidence suggests, was a condition of class as much as of gender. Moreover, these lower-class women developed "professional" identities similar to those of women who belonged to corporations such as guilds.