Women Alone

Statistics on marriage rates, single mothers and levels of divorce are of ongoing concern to policymakers in the present, and were no less important in the past. The three monographs reviewed here, which together cover the period c. 1550–1800, have similar themes: never-married women; lone mothers; and marriage breakdown. Each author sets out to challenge one or more of the prevailing orthodoxies in the field, in the process endowing the women under investigation with a good deal more agency than their images might suggest.

Amy Froide's Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England focuses on the urban never-married woman, as she extends the doctoral work she undertook on Southampton with insights from the cities of Bristol, Oxford and York. Her monograph makes some significant claims. She outlines a transformation in the lives of never-married women between 1550 and 1750, and in particular challenges the notion that all woman of middling status withdrew from work during the eighteenth century: single women, she claims, were instead able to extend their occupational range over the same period, and benefit financially from the experience. The significant difference was not, in her view, between those that were married and those that were unmarried, but rather between the ever-married (wives and widows) and their never-married counterparts; a willingness or ability to enter the matrimonial estate therefore becomes a key way in which women were understood.

By downplaying the historiographical emphasis on the nuclear family, Froide allows us to rediscover the strength of wider female kin networks, arguing that never-married women may have been more closely connected than their married counterparts to 'relatives other than parents, siblings and siblings' children'.¹ While this may not be unexpected, it does bring new facts to bear on historians' debates about the relative importance of kin versus family, not least because Jim Johnston's recent claims about the declining importance of kin in the lives of individuals between 1567 and 1800 drew heavily on the wills of married men.² Froide also seeks to locate never-married women within a female-centred world in which their most significant relationships were with their mothers, sisters and nieces. This too seems highly plausible, but should not be taken too far – to make patterns of testamentary giving a proxy for daily interactions can be problematic. While Joyce Jeffreys, Hereford moneylender extraordinaire, may have named more female than male legatees in her will, her accounts show that she was no stranger to masculine company. Indeed her considerable economic activities appear to have given her more of a foothold in the 'male' sphere than many of her married counterparts. The bulk of her business acquaintances were male, she had a number of male employees, and along with other spinsters was not afraid to use the Mayor's Court in Hereford to pursue defaulting male debtors.³ Joyce, as a spinster householder, was unusual; nonetheless never-married women often supported existing households, and not infrequently those of male relatives, by acting as housekeepers, accountants, and managers.

In addition, single women as providers of credit may have had much wider economic significance than historians have recognized. Froide notes their considerable contribution to the urban credit market, but their involvement went even deeper. The development of less restrictive legal attitudes to interest-bearing lending from 1571 offered middling women with capital everywhere an opportunity to invest, and a rising proportion chose to do so; by the eighteenth century never-married women had diversified into bank stock, company shares and lottery tickets.⁴ Few lending spinsters, it is true, would have been as successful as Joyce Jeffreys, whose income in 1639–40, the bulk of which was interest, exceeded £600. But levels of investment...