Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century

Alice Clark and Amy Louise Erickson

ISBN 10: 0415066689 / ISBN 13: 9780415066686

Edité par Other, 1993

A propos de cet article

N° de réf. du vendeur 924

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
• Éditeur: Other
• Date de parution: 1993
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0415066689
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780415066686
• Reliure: Paperback
• État de l'article: New
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • A15 BLCK PB 5.22

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

First published in 1919 "Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century" was one of the first books to engage with the problem of women's history. In it Alice Clark documented the day-to-day lives of women from all socio-economic groups in both town and country who combined work with the responsibilities of domestic life. Now republished with a new introduction by Amy Erickson, who addresses Clark's historiographic significance and provides an overview of present scholarship, the book remains a resource for modern day historians and feminist critics. Using memoirs, letters and household accounts, it documents the activities of gentry women who managed vast households and supervised the administration of family estates; it also draws on less accessible sources such as quarter sessions' petitions, court records and parish accounts, to uncover the reality of poorer women's working lives.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Working life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, originally published in 1919, was the first comprehensive analysis of the daily lives of ordinary women in early modern England. It remains the most wide ranging introduction to the subject.

Clark uses a variety of documentary sources to illuminate the experience of women in the past. Gentlewomen left memoirs, letters, and household accounts detailing administration of their family estates; craftsmen's wives and widows figure in the apprenticeship and licensing records of guilds and towns; the wives of yeomen, husbandmen and labourers are glimpsed in court evidence, petitions and the registers of parish poor relief. Alice Clark's evidence dates from the later sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, and her analysis addresses a broad transition, from a medieval subsistence economy to the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Clark's conclusions about the effects of industrial capitalism on women's working conditions and contribution to the economy were controversial in her own time and remain so today. Her vivid portrayal of the everyday lives of working women - and all women who worked - in seventeenth-century England remains unsurpassed. This book was first published in 1919.