Notes Place of publication London unless otherwise stated. PROLOGUE: MAKING SHIff 1. Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO) DIP 202118113 n.d. postmarked 1801. 2. W. Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1822; 17th edn 1850), p.115. 3. O. Hurton, 'Women without men: widows and spinsters in Britain and France in the eighteenth century' Journal of Family History, 9:4 (1984), p. 363. See also O. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-century France 1750- 1789 (Oxford, 1974). 4. ERO DIP 94/18/42 291511825. 1 INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ADAPTING TO CAPITALISM 1. T. Fuller, The Worthies (1662; abridged, ed. J. Freeman, 1952), p. 318. 2. For more background on Essex's economic history in this period see A.FJ. Brown, Essex at Work 1700-1815 (Chelmsford, 1969); K.H. Burley, 'The economic development of Essex in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries' (PhD thesis, University of London 1957). 3. MJ. Dobson, 'Population, disease and mortality in south-east England 1600-1800' (D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1982); "'Marsh fever" - the geography of malaria in England', Journal of Historical Geography, 6:4 (1980), pp. 357-89; 'When malaria was an English disease', Geo­ graphical Magazine (Feb. 1982), pp. 94-9. 4. See, for example, K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525-1700 (New York, 1979). 5. J. Lown, Women and Industrialisation: Gender at Work in Nineteenth­ century England (Oxford, 1990). 6. Thomas Wright, The History and Topography of the County of Essex Vols 1 & 2 (1842). 7. For looking at visual imagery of the poor more generally, see J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge 1980). 8. See work in progress on north Essex towns by Neil Raven, research stu­ dent at University of Leicester, e.g. N.D. Raven, 'City and countryside: London and the market town economies of southern England c.1770- 1851', unpublished paper New Researchers session of the Economic His­ tory Society conference, Nottingham University, April 1994. 9. J. Boys, 'Agricultural notes, taken in a ride from Betshanger to Bradfield, and back by the hundreds of Essex', Annals of Agriculture, XXI (1793), pp.69-83. 154 Notes 155 10. M. Berg and P. Hudson, 'Rehabilitating the industrial revolution' Econ­ omic History Review, XLV (1992), pp. 24-50. 11. See the comments of J.D. Marshall, 'Some items for our historical agen­ da: considerations old and new', The Local Historian, 22 (1992), pp.14- 17. He argues there has been no methodological progress in local history since the agricultural history of the 1950s and that it has failed to absorb the demographic, urban or oral history developed since then. As a result the parish or country seat generally remains the focus of studies. 12. F.J. Fisher, 'The development of London as a centre of conspicuous con­ sumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (1948), pp. 37-50; 'Of all forms of histori­ cal writing, that which deals with particular places is perhaps the most pregnant with the possibilities of boredom, for the general reader can seldom hope to share the parochial enthusiasms by which the study of local history is so often inspired' (p. 37). 13. C. Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship /550-1850: Cul­ tural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester, 1993). 14. C. Phythian-Adams, 'Local history and societal history', Local Popula­ tion Studies, 51 (1993), pp. 30-45 (p. 44). 15. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth 1963); EJ. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of La­ bour (1964) and S. Alexander, A. Davin and E. Hostettler, 'Labouring women: a reply to Eric Hobsbawm', History Workshop Journal, 8 (1979), pp. 174-82. For women in riots see J. Bohstedt, 'Gender, household and community politics: women in English riots 1790-1810', Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 88-122. 16. The local history sources - mainly court or poor law records-are 'texts', mediated before I see them and by me when I go on to construct my own stories with them. Post-structuralist ideas can inform us as econ­ omic historians because they force us to look at the history of the con­ cepts and constructions that we work with, see J. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988). I have used sources here that would be useless for any sort of quantitative analysis. Stories, told by poor people, written down as evidence in court, or in approaches to the over­ seers to get more poor relief, provide mere snippets of information, but are nevertheless telling reflections of 'making shift', even if they often record a thread of a greater story, rather than a complete narrative. Since they are also life stories, because some features of women's work are a continuum, and because Essex has such a good collection of them, I have included oral history recordings and essays written by elderly people about their recollections. See C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986); C. Steedman, The Radical Soldier's Tale: John Pearman 1819-1908 (1988) for the use of stories in creating histo­ ries. See also M. Chamberlain, Fenwomen (1975) for an early project in the oral history of women. I have used interviews in the University of Essex Sociology department Family Life Archive (hereafter 'Family Life Archive'); the Colchester Recalled Archive and the BBC Essex Sound Archive as well as elderly people's essays for various Age Concern com­ petitions run in Essex. For some problems with 'experience', see J.W. 156 Notes Scott, 'The evidence of experience', Critical Inquiry, 17, (1991), pp. 773-97. 17. Useful overviews are P. Hudson and W.R. Lee (eds), Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester, 1990), esp. introduction; J. Humphries, "'Lurking in the wings ...": women in the historiography of the industrial revolution', Business and economic history, 20 (1991), pp. 32-44; E. Richards, 'Women in the British economy since about 1700: an interpretation' , History, LIX (1974), pp. 337-57; J. Thomas, 'Women and capitalism: oppression or emancipation?: a review article' Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1988), pp. 534-49. 18. M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820 (1985); M. Berg, 'Wom­ en's work, mechanisation and the early phases of industrialisation in Eng­ land' in R.E. Pahl (ed.), On Work (Oxford, 1988), pp. 61-94; reprinted from P. Joyce, (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987). 19. A. Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; 3rd ed. 1992); I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1930; 3rd ed. 1981). 20. B. Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in the Eighteenth Century England (Oxford, 1989). 21. R.C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992); 'The growth of labor productivity in early modern English agriculture', Explorations in Economic History, 25:2 (1988), pp. 117-46. 22. Snell, Annals, pp. 15-66. 23. J. Humphries, 'Enclosures, common rights and women: the proletarianisation of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries', Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), pp. 17-42. 24. E.A. Wrigley, 'Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent in the early modern period', Journal of Interdisciplinary His­ tory, 15 (1985), pp. 683-728. 25. K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 270- 319. 26. P. Earle, 'The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries', Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 328-53; L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cam­ bridge 1992), pp. 14-22. 27. S. Alexander, 'Women's work in nineteenth century London', in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (1976), pp. 59-Ill. 28. For recent research see 1. Styles, 'Clothing the north: the supply of non­ elite clothing in the eighteenth century north of England', Textile Histo­ ry, 25 (1994), pp. 139-66. 29. P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eight­ eenth Century (1991), p.148. 30. M. Berg, 'What difference did women's work make to the industrial rev­ olution?' History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), pp. 22-44. As recently put by S.L. Engerman, 'Expanding proto-industrialisation', Journal of Family History, 17:2 (1992), pp. 241-51, (250): [within proto-industry] 'the existence and persistence of gender differences in occupational struc­ tures and in relative incomes remains an important puzzle, both in their own right and also as a guide to past (and present) gender politics'. 31. Pinchbeck, Women Workers, pp. 1-4. Notes 157 32. R.S. Neale, Writing Marxist History: British Society, Economy and Cul- ture since 1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 120-21. 33. T. Sokoll, Household and Family among the Poor (Bochum, 1993). 34. Berg, 'Women's work', (1988), p. 88. 35. O. Hufton, 'Women and the family economy in eighteenth-century France', French Historical Studies, 9 (1975), pp. 1-22, p. 3. 36. N. McKendrick, 'Home demand and economic growth: a new view of the role of women and children in the Industrial Revolution', in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society (1974), pp. 152-210. McKendrick's analysis was flawed, however, by seeing women's paid employment as a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century. A more sophisticated argument for the import­ ance of women in consumer demand stimulating the supply side of the industrial revolution is J. de Vries 'Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe', in J.