[SCA-BMDL] TMR 06.02.13, McIntosh, Working Women (Farmer) (fwd)

Wed Feb 15 14:43:05 EST 2006

Another interesting book.  I've found it as cheaply as $22.34 for
paperback at abebooks.com (which is just a good source if you're looking
to find books for a bit on the cheap side).

Odriana

"Do not dismiss the dish saying that it is just, simply food. The blessed thing is an entire civilization in itself!"
- Abdulhak Sinasi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:31:18 -0500
From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu>
To: tmr-l at wmich.edu
Subject: TMR 06.02.13, McIntosh, Working Women (Farmer)

McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston.  <i>Working Women in English Society,
1300-1620</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.  Pp. xiv,
291.  24 cm. $75.00 (hb), $32.99 (pb).  ISBN 0521846161 (hb),
0521608589 (pb),

    Reviewed by Sharon Farmer
         University of California, Santa Barbara
         farmer at history.ucsb.edu

Focusing on women in urban settings, Working Women in English
Society, 1300-1620 provides both an up-to-date synthesis of
current scholarship on women's work in medieval and early modern
England, and new material drawn from archival sources. Those sources
include lists of food and drink workers from five market towns, and
narrative accounts from royal equity courts, for which records survive
from 1470 on. By looking at evidence from a varied sampling of market
towns, McIntosh pushes the discussion of pre-modern England's working
women beyond its 38 cities (the focus of most of the scholarship) to
its 600-700 market centers, where about half of its working women
lived. Her use of equity court cases--which did not fit the
categories of common law courts--is especially valuable for the study
of working women because the equity courts allowed married women to
present their own cases, which women could not do in the common law
courts, and because the equity courts recorded the narratives of
plaintiffs and their opponents, thus enabling us to get inside the
everyday relations of servants and masters, shopkeepers and their
employees, consumers and retailers, boarders and their landlords. As
McIntosh warns us in the introductory section of the book (but then
sometimes fails to take into account later on), the accounts cannot be
taken at face value, since plaintiffs would exaggerate their cases in
their pursuit of the money that was at stake, and their opponents
would do the same in order to hold onto their resources.

Despite the inevitable distortions that people brought to the courts,
what emerges from the equity records is the rich murky realm of
everyday transactions, which frequently relied on unwritten agreements
and delayed payment. In such a world, both parties to a business
agreement were vulnerable, but women, who had the entire weight of
male power and gender stereotypes working against them, were
especially vulnerable, even when they had written contracts to back
them up. In 1588, for instance, Elizabeth Pearson claimed in equity
court that her son, who had accrued some large gambling debts, had
stolen two written bonds for a total of 36 pounds owed to her by two
sets of borrowers; he then persuaded the borrowers to pay smaller sums
to him rather than to his mother (92). In 1512, Agnes Delfe held a
bond for a debt owed to her for over nine pounds. The debtor, a
draper named Henry Palmer, failed to pay, so Agnes took him to court,
winning her claim, with damages. When Henry still failed to pay,
Agnes attained a writ of capeas against Henry. At first, the
sheriff of Coventry acted in compliance with the writ, throwing Henry
into jail, but he then assisted Henry in leaving the county with his
personal goods and three cartloads of merchandise (92).

In her introductory section (chapters one and two) McIntosh discusses
the historiography of women and work in England and highlights the
ways in which her book provides new material and analysis, thus
expanding our understanding of women's contributions to the economy.
Especially important are her discussion of women's roles as providers
of lodgings and credit, and the fact that her book bridges the late
medieval and early modern periods.  McIntosh's discussion of the
historiography highlights two schools of thought among historians now
working in the field: those (such as Jeremy Goldberg and Caroline
Barron) who stress a golden age for women in the period after the
depletion of the labor pool by the onset of the Black Death, and those
(such as Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett) who emphasize that
women's legal and social disadvantages always tended to push them to
the bottom of the economic hierarchy.  McIntosh agrees with both
schools: women were always at a disadvantage, but in the period after
the onset of the Black Death more opportunities were available.
In chapters three and four McIntosh discusses women who provided
services--live-in servants, providers of room and board, sex workers,
health care providers, providers of credit and rental property.
Regarding servants, the equity court cases add nuance to the previous
historiography of English servants, which has stressed that service
was a form of life-cycle employment, in which young women worked for
several years before marrying.  In the equity court cases McIntosh
finds that there were also women who remained single and in service
throughout their adult lives, and that others returned to service as
widows.  In late sixteenth-century Ealing (a suburb of London),
fifteen percent of women described as servants were 30-49 years old
(47).

McIntosh's discussion of women as providers of credit is especially
rich, because, as the equity cases reveal, credit was a potential
aspect of virtually every kind of financial transaction, and the
lender could even be the less wealthy person. By entering into
contracts of service, which delayed payment for a year or more,
servants lent money to their masters, and they could add to that
"loan" by entrusting inheritances and possessions to the masters for
safe keeping. Similarly, virtually every retailer extended informal
credit to his or her customers. In all cases, McIntosh argues, the
ability to gain credit (or employment) rested upon an individual's
"social credit," which was a matter of reputation and trustworthiness.
Married women were disadvantaged in this sense because they could not
legally enter into contracts without their husband's permission;
however some husbands (and wives) were able to manipulate this legal
ambiguity, refusing to pay debts to which the husbands claimed they
had not given consent (24, 105). Erika Rappaport has highlighted a
similar pattern of legal manipulation in nineteenth-century London
(Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West
End [Princeton University Press, 2000], chapter 2).

The equity cases reveal a variety of ways in which informal credit
ended in broken relationships of trust.  Sometime around 1600, for
instance, Maryann Finckle worked as a servant for a woman named
Elizabeth, to whom she entrusted a five-pound inheritance that she
received from her father.  When Elizabeth died, Maryanne claimed,
Elizabeth's son, John Hosier, delayed payment on the five pounds, and
borrowed another fifteen pounds from Maryann.  When John died, his
widow claimed she had already repaid the five pounds that Maryann had
entrusted to her original employer, and she denied owing the
additional fifteen pounds, claiming instead that Maryann could never
have accumulated such wealth working as a servant, and that it was
she, widow Hosier, who had helped the other out financially (104).

In chapters 5-8 McIntosh discusses women as producers and sellers of
goods.  Here the arguments are largely similar to those of earlier
scholars.  Nevertheless, her examination of women and drink work,
which draws on the new evidence from the five market towns, adds
nuance to Judith Bennett's chronology of the decline of women's role
as brewsters in the later middle ages.

In a few places, McIntosh's discussion reveals a deeper understanding
of the early modern period than of the medieval. In a discussion of
health care providers, for instance, she argues that in the sixteenth
century, as a result of new concerns about poor relief, communities
began to hire poor women to care for sick people in their homes (84).
However, she provides no discussion of the women--both professed
religious and married--who provided nursing care in medieval hospitals
(a good introduction to medieval hospital nurses who took vows of
chastity is that of Carol Rawcliffe, "Hospital Nurses and their Work,"
in Daily Life in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Richard Britnell
[Sutton Publishing, 1998], 43-64; Sharon Farmer has discussed married
women who worked in continental hospitals: "The Leper in the Master
Bedroom: Thinking Through a Thirteenth-Century Exemplum," in
Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval
and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal
[Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005], 79-100).
Similarly imbalanced is McIntosh's suggestion that owning and renting
out property emerged as a new pattern among well-to-do urban women in
the sixteenth century (114). Medieval scholarship as far back as that
of Sylvia Thrupp (The Merchant Class of Medieval London
[University of Chicago Press, 1948], 118-130) has highlighted
bourgeois men's and women's investments in annuity-producing
properties in the high and late Middle Ages.

These are, however, only minor omissions from a book that makes a
valuable contribution to the field.  McIntosh's keen analyses and new
sources, which provide "on the ground" evidence for the world of
working women, assure that this book will be read by specialists, and
her broad synthetic discussion, clear prose and lively narratives will
be welcome in the classroom.