Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (review)

With its broad focus, simultaneous publication in hardback and paperback, and inclusion of illustrations, one might think on first picking up this book that it is a survey of what is known about women and work in England, 1300-1620, intended for a student audience. However, it is much more than this, while also not quite filling that particular niche. The book is based on a lot of new research, chiefly on equity court petitions for the period 1470-1619 and micro-historical studies of five market centres predominantly for the period c.1280—c.1570. The former enable McIntosh to discuss areas that have not had much attention paid to them before, such as women's involvement in keeping lodging houses and pawning goods, and to include vivid stories about individual women's working lives. The latter allow her to enter the debate about when and why women were pushed out of the brewing trade, as well as to compare this form of work with women's role in the food trades. McIntosh's focus, then, is on paid work and thus on urban life, although there are occasional comparative asides to rural examples.

The book is divided into three parts. The first is her introductory section, which sets out to place women's work in its social setting (Chapter 1), before discussing the source material, the historiographical arguments, and her own thesis about continuity and change over the period 1300-1620 (Chapter 2). McIntosh thus intends her study to contribute to the lively debate about whether women's working lives saw a marked improved after the Black Death until around 1500 (P.J.P. Goldberg and Caroline Barron) or whether patriarchal assumptions about gender difference meant that women's work was always comparatively low-status and low-paid (Judith Bennett and Maryanne Kowaleski).

Part II is concerned with the provision of services and consists of two chapters, one on domestic and personal services and one on money lending and real estate. The focus in both chapters is affected by the source material examined (largely the equity court petitions,) and McIntosh seems particularly concerned here to discuss new areas rather than to summarize existing scholarship. For example, her discussion of service begins with a brief overview of life-cycle service, but—rather than replicate previous studies' emphases on the young—she then uses the equity court petitions to discuss older women who had either remained in service or had returned to it later in life. The section on sex-work is deliberately brief as McIntosh states that "prostitution has been extensively considered in other studies" (76). Chapter 4 is very clear on the various ways in which money lending worked in this period, but the 'real estate' part of the chapter consists of just two pages on the renting out of property. There is much of value in this new material, and McIntosh is right that the petition narratives give a richer picture of women's work than sources such as tax listings, but at times her earlier cautions about how these sources can be interpreted seem to be left to one side.

Part III, on the production and sale of goods, is the longest section in the book. The approach taken in each chapter varies according to the material used. Chapter 5 discusses the general features of women's work as producers and sellers, which is set up as background information for the following chapters, but also covers apprenticeship. Chapter 6, on drink work, is one of the most interesting in this section. Although the debate about continuity versus change in women's work is a strong thread throughout the book, it is here that McIntosh is able to test directly Bennett's thesis about women's work in the brewing trade. Using her analysis of court records from five market centres, McIntosh agrees with Bennett that as brewing got more commercialized women were pushed out, but...