Girls on forms: Apprenticing young women in seventeenth-century London

Laura Gowing

doi:10.1017/jbr.2016.54

Girls on forms: Apprenticing young women in seventeenth-century London

Laura Gowing^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

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Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

375 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The 1650s saw an influx of young women to skilled apprenticeships in London's companies. Apprenticed to women through the names of their husbands, they practiced seamstry and millinery in a wide range of guilds. The preprinted forms by which these girls were indentured demonstrate the means by which a long-established city institution both made room for women, incorporating them into the culture of company, and kept them marginal. A series of print and manuscript adaptations marked out girls' forms, paying particular attention to the rules around marriage, and resulting, by the late seventeenth century, in a new trend towards non-sex-specific forms. This article argues that record keeping was both symbolically and concretely important for women's work and that the material culture and context of these print objects can shed a new light on gender roles at a key juncture in the histories of work, contracts, and the city.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	447-473
Number of pages	27
Journal	JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES
Volume	55
Issue number	3
Early online date	10 Jun 2016
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2016.54
Publication status	Published - Jul 2016

Keywords

Forms
Gender
Guilds
Labour
London
Milliners
Print
Stationery
Women
Work

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10.1017/jbr.2016.54

Girls on Forms_GOWING_Online 10Jun2016_GREEN AAMAccepted author manuscript, 289 KB

Cite this

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Girls on forms: Apprenticing young women in seventeenth-century London

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