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

Nearly a century ago, Alice Clark published her classic study of female occupations in the early modern period, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919). Animated by Fabian ideals, Clark made use of new methods and sources to attack her subject with passionate intelligence. Her monograph remained virtually the sole authority on the topic for the rest of the twentieth century. It was the first book I was told to read when embarking on my own studies of early modern women's history at Oxford in 1973.

Despite the many virtues of Clark's pioneering work, historians of women have long yearned for an updated version that would take account of methodologies and archival sources that were unknown or unavailable to Clark, such as the records of the ecclesiastical and equity courts. Now at last their prayers have been answered. Marjorie McIntosh has taken it as her mandate to investigate female activity in medieval and early modern England in every circumstance where women interacted with the economy, whether as producers, sellers, or consumers. Her most recent book, the product of many years of hard labor in the Public Record Office and other archives, is not only a worthy successor to Alice Clark but a groundbreaking achievement in its own right. It is also a most useful and accessible resource for scholars at every level.

Alice Clarke brought with her a clear agenda: on the one hand, to find out as much as she could about women's working lives in the seventeenth century; on the other, to ask probing questions about the nature of women's occupational identity and the historical factors that determined its limitations in the European context. From a socialist perspective, Clarke found it easy to discover evidence for a decline in women's work status from the Middle Ages up until her own time. According to Clarke, medieval women of all ranks had experienced a golden age in which they enjoyed relative autonomy and a strong and respected work identity. By the early modern period, women had either opted out or been kicked out of the more profitable sectors of the economy. Elite women of the eighteenth century had been reduced to idle parasites, while their plebeian counterparts were pushed into the most labor-intensive and poorly paid employments.

Clarke's thesis has been debated ever since she first stated it, but no one until now has had sufficient evidence to confirm or refute it. Historians of women, like their colleagues in other fields, seemed trapped within the confines of preset chronological bounds. Medievalists knew little about early modern women, and early modernists did not have the tools to compare seventeenth-century conditions with those prevailing in earlier times. It is one of the great achievements of McIntosh's book that she has managed to bridge the gap between medievalists and early modernists, constructing a study which spans the key period of contention from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Using new material from underused sources like the records of the equity courts, McIntosh even offers statistical data to support impressionistic evidence about economic trends. She has further bolstered her argument with a group of local studies from five market towns spaced throughout England. McIntosh is thus able to make comparisons between North and South, showing significant indications of the connections between women's work, men's work, regional economies, and demographic fluctuations.

Like Alice Clarke before her, Marjorie McIntosh has come to her material with probing questions. What has she discovered? Always scrupulous about drawing conclusions, McIntosh is careful to point out the limitations of her evidence. She is attentive to the difficulties of comparing sources from different periods, well aware of the possibility that some apparent trends may be mere artefacts of changes in record-keeping. Yet there are suggestive indications that emerge from every area of McIntosh's research. From the evidence presented here...