Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London

T. Reinke-Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137372093
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137372109
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Motherhood

This chapter examines how becoming and being mothers, in terms of offering emotional and material support to their offspring from pregnancy to adulthood, affected the reputations and shaped the behaviour of women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London. Many early modern women spent much of their adult lives bearing and raising children, and being a good mother enabled a woman to gain respect within and beyond her household, as well as giving her a sense of pride in her achievements. Motherhood was a constructed role that a woman carried out in the family, but which also connected her with friends and relatives outside the domestic environment.¹ Each woman who gave birth ‘participated in a series of commonly shared experiences, performances and ceremonies’ each stage of which was ‘nuanced by social scripting and social construction’ as well as being ‘invested with emotional, cultural, and religious significance’.² Becoming and being a mother was an individual and exclusively female biological experience, but also a role and a relationship that affected the development of both mother and child.³ Moreover, although not all women in early modern England gave birth to children, the duties of mothering and childcare were not confined to biological mothers, practices which have been underexplored in existing historiography. Numerous childless women were involved in delivering, feeding, nurturing and educating children, and like the women who bore children they were both idealised and subject to constant scrutiny and criticism.⁴ Motherhood thus needs to be studied for what it illuminates about the emotional attachments of women to children, be that their own or those of others, and as a form of gendered and corporeal work which was poorly remunerated or unpaid.⁵

The study of motherhood is also important because of what it reveals about the different parental roles of women and men. Prior to the 1990s much scholarship on childrearing was gender-blind, and the notion that motherhood or fatherhood be studied in isolation was criticised.⁶ Subsequent scholarship, much of it inspired by the development of the history of masculinity, has noted how fatherhood complemented and overlapped with motherhood in various ways, but simultaneously has drawn attention to how perceptions and duties of parents, as well as the levels of authority they enjoyed, differed significantly according to gender, especially among the nobility, gentry and upper middling sorts.⁷The subject of early modern fathers and fatherhood warrants a book of its own, but as part of a study of female reputation this chapter touches on fatherhood in a minimal fashion, focusing instead on what constituted acceptable and praiseworthy motherly behaviour by examining changing meanings of motherhood from before conception to when children reached adulthood and took greater responsibility for their own lives.

Fertility issues

In early modern England children conceived or at least born within wedlock were for the most part welcomed and valued as divine blessings, as well as for the emotional satisfaction they gave to their parents. Biological urges compelled many women and men to want children, and offspring were perceived both as physical manifestations of spousal love and as potential sources of help and support for elderly parents, especially amongst the labouring poor. Bearing a moderate number of children brought honour for parents, who it was believed lived on through their children, but many women worried about failing to conceive, particularly amongst the upper ranks of society where the importance of continuing the family line was paramount, whilst others feared having too many children, especially if financial and material resources were lacking.⁸ Lawrence Stone suggested that women were in a constant state of anxiety about pregnancy: if they did conceive, he argued, they worried about whether the child would come to term, whether they would survive labour and how they would feed their child, whilst those unable to conceive, according to Stone, experienced feelings of guilt and inadequacy that created tensions in their marriages.⁹Pessimism was the characteristic tone of much of the work of Stone, but as shall be demonstrated, he was correct to note that concerns about being able to conceive and bear children created feelings of anxiety in many women.

That the teachings of the post-Reformation Church associated fertility and childbearing with female piety and respectability did little to help matters. Preachers and authors of conduct books drew on biblical references to argue that the souls of women were saved by childbearing and that their labour in childbirth was ‘part of a covenant of sanctification, mercy and eternal comfort’. Moving away from the medieval Catholic worldview which privileged celibacy as the Christian ideal for both sexes, such writers argued that sexual activity, conception and childbearing were part of God’s divine plan, Christian duties and lawful activities to be enjoyed by married couples, and such attitudes were shared by pious women and men.¹⁰ Whilst serving as minister of Blackfriars in the early seventeenth century, William Gouge preached that it was not necessary ‘that a husband and wife should have a family to governe, for two may be married and have neither children nor servants (as many are) and yet be true husband and wife’, but his comments were designed to comfort couples unable to conceive rather than being offered as a recommended lifestyle choice.¹¹ The message promoted by the Prayer Book and clergy, that a primary purpose of marriage was for procreation, harmonised with commonly held notions that female fertility was a highly valued blessing. As Patricia Crawford noted, ‘giving birth to a child was prima facie evidence of womanliness’.¹²

Early modern England witnessed significant demographic growth, with London in particular swelling in size during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As such, large families were not universally approved of, with social commentators expressing concern that the poor were giving birth to more children than the rich, and that having too many children would cause poverty.¹³ Yet at a local level the quantity of children a woman bore in a single birth or during her reproductive years might have a positive effect on her reputation, with some women being happy to brag about the number of children they had given birth to. In 1611 an exchange between Elizabeth Jacob and Elizabeth Chare involved one woman telling the other that she was as good a woman as her rival because she had ten children ‘and thou hast never a one’ whilst in August 1638 Frances Powell called Mrs Ireland a ‘base whore, base queane and base jade’ and a bitch, to which Ireland responded, ‘no, no bitch, I have been the mother of sixteene children’.¹⁴

With such an emphasis on procreation it is unsurprising that infertility often caused disquiet between spouses. Approximately a quarter of all marriages in early modern England were childless and although childlessness might be considered the fault of the man and a slur on his sexual prowess, more frequently it was blamed on his wife. For married women from all ranks of society conception signified honesty and respectability as well as conveying status and authority, and wives seeking to prove their fulfilment of the marital role emphasised how many children they had borne. By contrast barren wives risked losing respect, especially if the family line or issues of inheritance were at stake, as well as being mocked or having their sexual honesty questioned since infertility was associated with whoredom.¹⁵ Accusations of barrenness were deemed to be so damaging to the reputations of women that those who were insulted in such terms were willing to take action against their accusers in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. In 1622 Marie Downinge defamed Alice Meredith as a ‘barren bitch’; in 1658 Mary Yeao was slandered as a ‘barren bitch’ and ‘barren jade’; and in 1662 Anne Newton was bound over for calling Katherine Rich ‘barren bitch’ and whore, an accusation that created bad feeling between Katherine and her husband.¹⁶ The importance of fertility to female reputation is further demonstrated by the extreme measures which some women went to in order to pretend they were capable of conceiving and bearing a child. In 1596 rumours circulated in St Botolph Aldgate that one Mrs Steede from Kent had bought the baby of Mary Monsloe, the maidservant of Sara Welch, because the elderly Mr Steede wanted an heir; in 1610 Agnes Goddard was prosecuted at the church courts for offering the child of a single woman to another woman whose husband had started to ‘take dislike to her because she was barren’, whilst in 1677 a midwife from St Giles Cripplegate pretended to be pregnant ‘by wearing a small pillow’, persuaded her neighbours that ‘she was great’ with child and

a week before her pretended labour enquired very earnestly of a poor woman if she could not help her to a young child as soon almost as born, either alive or dead, for says she there is a lady whose husband will not live with her because she never had a child, and he is now in the country and if I could get a child, I should do a good office in rendering love between them, and get something my self.

Having obtained the corpse of an infant from two female searchers in Whitechapel the midwife pretended to go into labour on 18 April and produced the dead child, claiming she had given birth to it, only for ‘several sober matrons’ to contradict her statement. The author of the report described the incident as ‘a strange extravagant humour’ and claimed that the midwife had pursued this course of action either ‘to satisfie her husband . . . who was very impatient to have a child, or . . . to preserve her credit in her imploy which she thought somwhat prejudiced by the imputation of barrenness’.¹⁷ Such cases illustrate that throughout the early modern period the reputations of married women were bound up with their ability to conceive and bear children, either to please their husbands or, in the case of midwives, to preserve their credit as professionals.

Given the importance placed on fertility and childbearing, women were taught to search for indications of conception, and female friends, neighbours and kin observed and performed tests on each other’s bodies, searching for signs that a child was forming in the womb. Many wives and widows, especially those working as midwives and cunning women, claimed to have particular expertise in such matters, but bodies were difficult to read, and as such women might be deceived into thinking they were pregnant or fail to realise they were expecting a child.¹⁸ If conception proved difficult, middling-sort couples might turn to almanacs and medical treatises for remedies, or seek advice from friends and relatives. Frequent copulation was warned against as it was believed to weaken the seed and result in stunted children, whilst what a woman ate and the maternal imagination were believed to be capable of affecting both the likelihood of conception and the health of the resulting offspring.¹⁹

Once pregnant it was the duty of a responsible woman to protect herself and her unborn child through to delivery. Prior to the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century the Church had allowed the invocation of the saints and the use of relics, girdles and amulets as forms of protection, and some pregnant mothers would vow to go on pilgrimage if they were delivered safely. Herbals, potions, eagle stones, charms and the sacraments were believed to offer protection too, and although their validity became contested during the early modern period they continued to be used by Catholics and moderate Protestants, whilst prayer as both an aid to conception and as a form of protection for women in childbirth was valued by Puritans and nonconformists in particular. Other advice offered to pregnant women included avoiding anything that might ignite their passions and all strenuous physical activities, moderation in diet and temperature, and abstention from sex.²⁰ For those with the financial resources, finding a reliable and well-trained midwife was important too. Most London midwives were wives and widows of English gentlemen, professionals, craftsmen and tradesmen, but others were Protestant refugees from France and the Low Countries. Midwifery licences cost between £1 and £2, with a woman needing to prove via testimonials and sworn evidence from six women, as well as a statement from a minister, that she was a competent practitioner of good character who attended Church of England services. Licensed midwives received informal practical training over several years by serving as deputy midwives or by assisting in the childbirths of family, friends and neighbours. Close relationships might develop between midwives and the women they delivered, with satisfied clients using the same midwife repeatedly, sometimes recommending them to other expectant mothers.²¹

Even if a woman sought out what she deemed to be appropriate medical advice and support, there were other dilemmas she faced when it came to protecting the foetus in her womb. Even in advanced stages of pregnancy many poor women had to balance work and motherhood, whilst expectant mothers from all ranks of society continued to visit and socialise with their neighbours. Such tasks earned pregnant women credit and respectability, but risked placing them in situations that might cause them to miscarry. Henry Machyn recorded that in May 1557 ‘a woman grett with child’ was killed when an arrow struck her in the neck as she was walking in Finsbury Field with her husband, presumably a freak accident rather than a deliberate attempt at murder.²²In February 1572 whilst walking ‘in a public place’ in Hounslow Joan Cheese went into labour and fell to the ground, injuring the head of her baby girl, Marie, who died of the injury six days later. In January 1614 John Wanley appeared before the Middlesex sessions for having fought Mary Harforde in the street, despite her ‘being great with child’; in June 1627 John Williams, a shoemaker, struck Emanuell Peck because she had hit his pregnant wife; and at Christmas in 1631 Susan Kendal, who was pregnant herself, snatched 4s 1d from a poor woman who ‘fell in labor’ in the street.²³ Duties of work and the obligations of good neighbourliness were not the only reasons why pregnant women wandered around and beyond the metropolis. In 1619 Stephen Denison told of how the pious Elizabeth Juxon would ‘rise by five a clocke in the morning, and that in the cold winter, and when she was with child, and go to the lecture in the citie at six a clocke’.²⁴ That pregnant women walked the city streets on a regular basis is revealed by the records of the Westminster quarter sessions, which show that 87 women who brought cases of assault between 1685 and 1720 referred to being pregnant, and some referred to the presence of infants in their care when assaults took place. Women used their pregnant status to strengthen their chances of a prosecution by drawing on ideals of motherhood and appealing to notions of legal paternalism, and by doing so empowered themselves whilst remaining within the boundaries of female respectability.²⁵

Pregnant women thus deemed it acceptable to work and socialise outside the home, but no matter how cautious they were during pregnancy, some retained concerns about giving birth, especially if they had experienced difficulties in childbirth previously.²⁶ Although most pregnant women survived childbirth, expectant mothers knew there was a significant risk of death for themselves, the baby, or both.²⁷ The poor were especially vulnerable since they inhabited cramped dwellings which facilitated the spread of disease, and were thus more likely to succumb to the frequent outbreaks of plague in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century. The London Bills of Mortality record 21 deaths in childbed for every 1000 baptisms between 1657 and 1699; between 1583 and 1599 in St Botolph without Aldgate there were 23.5 deaths per 1000 baptisms; and by the later seventeenth century maternal mortality rates in London were between 30 and 50 per cent higher than the national average.²⁸ Early modern women lacked access to such statistics, but anecdotal evidence would have done little to quell any anxieties they might have had. Henry Machyn recorded the funerals of several women who died in childbirth, including the wife of Master Altham of St Martin’s in October 1558; the wife of Master Malore, alderman and sheriff of London, who died in St Thomas Acurs in April 1560 having given birth to 17 children; and the wife of William Allen, alderman and leather seller, who died the following month.²⁹ Machyn had a professional interest in mortality, but other Londoners recorded similar tragedies. In November 1625, two weeks before his wife Grace was due to give birth, Nehemiah Wallington heard of ‘threescore women with childe and in childebead that died in one weeke in Shoredich parishe and scarse two of a hondred that was sicke with childe that escaped death’, leading him to thank God for ‘restoreing of my wife to health, and giving her safe deliverance in childebeed’, whilst over 40 years later in February 1666 Samuel Pepys dined with Sheriff Hooker and noted the melancholy resulting from ‘the sickness of a daughter of the house on childbed’.³⁰

Many expectant mothers were as concerned about the likelihood of their child dying during the delivery or shortly after birth. Between 1580 and 1650 around 6800 babies were born in London each year, with shorter intervals between births in the wealthier parishes resulting in higher fertility rates than in poorer areas of the capital. Yet even in the more prosperous parts of London mortality rates were higher and life expectancy at birth was lower than in provincial England.³¹Between 1550 and 1700 infant mortality in intramural Cheapside rose from 10 to 27.1 per cent, and in extramural Clerkenwell from 21.2 to 32.2 per cent, whilst figures obtained from parish registers suggest that the average mortality rate for infants under the age of one more than doubled from 16.9 to 38.1 per cent in the same period.³² Infant mortality was to rise yet further in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the most recent estimates for London as a whole suggest an increase from 15.5 to 40.9 per cent between 1539 and 1749.³³ Contemporaries made their own calculations and estimates. In 1662 John Graunt estimated that around 5 per cent of infants in London were stillborn, whilst in 1671 Jane Sharp reported that in London ‘one can hardly find as many living as are born in half a years time’ and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Motherhood
• 2. Housewifery
• 3. Domestic Management
• 4. Retailing
• 5. Sociability
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index