Laura Gowing's Ingenious Trade serves as a corrective to the predominantly male-focused nature of existing work on trade guilds, apprenticeship, and citizenship. Gowing shows that, rather than being isolated from the world of guilds and trade, women's work occupied an important parallel to that of men. Parallel is a key term, used throughout the book to denote the real yet restricted access women had to official guild resources and titles, as well as to denote the similarities and differences between the patriarchal guild system and the networks and formal associations of working women in seventeenth-century London. The work referred to is almost exclusively in the textile trade, although some other trades are mentioned across the six chapters. Chapters 1–3 cover the world of the working woman, examining the social and commercial backdrops to women's trade in the shops of the Royal Exchange, the institution and prevalence of female apprenticeship, and the role of mistresses. Chapters 4–6 take a more thematic approach, analyzing the social and business skills learnt through apprenticeship; social relations between apprentice and master/mistress and their breakdown; and the conflict between law and custom when it came to women obtaining freedom.
The struggle to uncover women's working lives lies at the heart of this book. Gowing emphasizes the informal and flexible nature of women's work as well as attempts by guilds to obscure the involvement of women within their institutions. To combat the deliberate concealment and underreporting of women's work, Gowing uses a combination of court records, guild records, tax listings, wills, and indentures, alongside print sources and the occasional set of letters or diaries to reconstruct women's working lives. She makes particular use of records from the Mayor's Court, a common law and, to a lesser degree, equity court that was used by apprentices and their families or by masters and mistresses to dissolve apprenticeship contracts and recoup fees or damages. The reconstruction of women's working lives through these sources is impressive, although it can sometimes be difficult to follow the threads being connected between different sources. The one network graph used in the book could be used to greater effect in illustrating individual women's networks as they are mentioned.
One of the book's main triumphs is that it carries out an examination of women's working lives that is not dictated by the institution of marriage. Previous socioeconomic studies have tended to focus on a particular group of women—married, single, or widowed—and little work has focused on young women. In contrast, Gowing's approach incorporates the whole life cycle, which is represented structurally in the book's transition through apprenticeship, mistresses, and freewomen. This approach reveals how women planned for and carried out training that led to independent careers as single women or that adapted to lifecycle changes such as marriage, childrearing, and widowhood. She demonstrates that single women's working lives were more similar to those of men, while marriage could both offer opportunities for women to engage in trade as well as restrict them from it.
The book identifies strong links between occupational and gender identities, demonstrating that apprenticeship involved not only crafting a career but also the crafting of gender through the teaching of bodily and behavioral conduct. Not all apprenticeships were equal, though. Status had important implications for female apprenticeship and women's working lives, from the skills learned to the relationship between mistress and apprentice. However, cheaper apprenticeships, and particularly pauper apprenticeships, are discussed to a lesser degree throughout, as Gowing admits that premium apprenticeships leave a clearer trace in the archives, meaning the book does not always incorporate the whole social strata.
The book, quite obviously, only accounts for London and not the rest of England. The number of female apprentices was likely lower in provincial centers, and the working lives of women in rural England were even further removed from the metropolitan model outlined in the book. However, this is far from a criticism. Gowing's extensive research into the working lives of women in London, and her lifecycle approach, will hopefully prompt further, similar studies into women's working lives across England and beyond. The book will be of great interest to socioeconomic and cultural historians of early modern England, especially historians of gender, trade, and sociability.
