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The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented
here describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern
London. Domestics' court depositions offer qualitative evidence
that female servants were an important support of emergent
capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the
contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the
mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this
mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has
traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital
phase of women's lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume
show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour.
While some women left service once they married, others relied on
domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long
single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they
usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in
London had considerably more agency than has earlier been
recognized. Female servants who deposed before London
ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly
non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and
distinct as they present information about their working and
personal circumstances.
The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century texts presented
here describe female servants' experiences of work in early modern
London. Domestics' court depositions offer qualitative evidence
that female servants were an important support of emergent
capitalism in the early modern metropolis. Exposed here are the
contractual underpinnings of domestic service for women; the
mobility that domestic servants enjoyed; and the concern that this
mobility generated in the authorities. Paid domestic work has
traditionally been regarded by historians simply as a pre-marital
phase of women's lives. In fact, the depositions in this volume
show that service was a prototypical form of female wage labour.
While some women left service once they married, others relied on
domestic positions as an avenue to generating income as life-long
single women, as married women, and as widows. Even though they
usually lived in poverty, labouring women who worked as servants in
London had considerably more agency than has earlier been
recognized. Female servants who deposed before London
ecclesiastical and parish courts three centuries ago were mostly
non-literate. Strikingly, their individual voices are clear and
distinct as they present information about their working and
personal circumstances.
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