The Gendered Place Narratives of Billingsgate Fishwives

This article examines the pervasive gendering of Billingsgate, an unofficial fish market and London slum area. A diverse sample of early modern texts associates Billingsgate with the bawdy, vociferous fishwives who hawked their wares on the streets of this ward. Reacting to and enabling a prevailing ideological order that consigned fishwives’ trade to the margins of the industry, these works use metaphors of bodily incontinence to connect fishwives to seedy Billingsgate haunts and thus intensify the ill repute of both the women and the neighborhood.