Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London

Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London: Gendering the City analyzes depictions of non-elite, working women in relation to specific London neighborhoods and sites in early modern drama and culture from primarily the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. The women laborers explored in this book, who worked on the fringes of masculinized commerce, elicited anxious discursive responses to their ubiquitous public presence.

This book investigates these discursive strategies, or gendered place narratives, in dramatic works such as Ben Jonson’s Epicene, the unattributed play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, and Shackerly Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer, as well as a variety of early modern pamphlets, poems, ballads, and prose works. By rhetorically associating working women with contested urban commercial neighborhoods and locales, these works attempt to minimize, control, or delegitimize the agency of laboring women.

An examination of these narratives exposes underlying social and economic inequities in early modern London, which affected the conditions of women’s labor.