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Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Drawing on legal and literary sources, this work revises and expands understandings of female honesty, worth and credit by exploring how women from the middling and lower ranks of society fashioned positive identities as mothers, housewives, domestic managers, retailers and neighbours between 1550 and 1700.

The purpose of this article is to estimate the workforce involved in spinning from the late sixteenth century until the eve of mechanization. In addition, the potential contribution to family earnings from spinning will be examined. Just about all of the millions of yards of woollen yarn that went into making English cloth had to be spun by women and children, but this activity has not been investigated to the extent that it deserves. Spinning was a skilled occupation where there was a great demand for the best quality product. Sources exist which make it possible to make general estimates of the amount of spinning needed in the economy, and its cost. This evidence shows that employment in spinning increased dramatically from the late seventeenth century, and continued to increase until there were probably over one million women and children employed in spinning by the mid-eighteenth century. In addition earnings increased to the extent whereby earnings from spinning could contribute over 30 per cent of household income for poorer families. This has implications for looking at trends in real wages over time, as well as for the concept of the industrious revolution.

This book surveys women and work in English society before its transition to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The time span of the book from 1300 to 1800 allows comparison of women's work patterns across various phases of economic and social organisation. It was originally published in 1985. Several important themes are highlighted throughout the individual contributions in the book. The most significant is the association between home and work. Not only was trade and manufacture in the pre-industrial period carried out in close proximity to domestic life, many household activities also overlapped with commercial ones. The second key theme is the importance of the local social and economic environment in shaping the nature and extent of women's work. The book also demonstrates the similarity between certain aspects of women's work before and after industrialisation. The industrial revolution may have made sexual divisions of labour more apparent but their origins lie firmly in the pre-industrial period.

This article explores how the reputations and agency of middling and plebeian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were affected by what they wore. Compared with provincial England, markets for women's clothes in the capital were more diverse and accessible. Ambiguous moral judgments were made of women based on their dress, but many sought to acquire good, fashionable attire as the right clothes would improve their options in terms of courtship, sociability and employment, as well as facilitating their ability to negotiate the metropolitan environment and providing them with a ready store of capital. Clothes were thus contested commodities which helped define the limits of the possible for women in early modern London. L'ambition de cet article est de rechercher comment la réputation et l'action des femmes ordinaires ou de milieu très populaire, vivant à Londres aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, étaient affectées par les vêtements qu'elles portaient. Si l'on compare avec la province anglaise, le marché du vêtement féminin était, dans la capitale, plus varié et plus accessible. La valeur morale des femmes était, de façon ambiguë, souvent estimée à l'aune de la robe qu'elles portaient. Mais beaucoup cherchaient à acquérir de bons atours qui soient à la mode, étant donné que des habits comme il faut ne manqueraient pas d'améliorer leurs chances de se faire courtiser, de se socialiser et d'être employée. Tout autant, un vêtement convenable les aiderait à s'adapter à l'environnement métropolitain et leur constituerait un capital immédiat. Pour les femmes de la Londres de l'époque moderne, les vêtements étaient par conséquent des produits contestés qui les aidaient à définir les limites du possible. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwiefern Ansehen und Verhalten von Frauen in den Mittel- und Unterschichten im London des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts davon beeinflusst wurden, was sie anhatten. Im Vergleich zur englischen Provinz war in der Hauptstadt der Markt für Frauenkleidung reichhaltiger und leichter zugänglich. Auch wenn die Werturteile, die über Frauen auf Grund ihrer Kleidung gemacht wurden, mehrdeutig waren, setzten viele Frauen auf den Erwerb guter und modischer Kleidung, weil die richtige Garderobe ihre Handlungsmöglichkeiten beim Werben um Männer, im Bereich der Geselligkeit bei der Suche nach Beschäftigung verbesserten und es ihnen überdies erleichterte, sich in der Umgebung der Metropole zu bewegen, und sie dadurch nicht zuletzt über einen handlichen Kapitalstock verfügten. Kleider waren somit heiß umkämpfte Waren, die Frauen im frühneuzeitlichen London dabei halfen, die Grenzen des Möglichen abzustecken.