Marketing women: Representations of working women in early modern London

Frequently in early modern London, as Elizabeth Fowler aptly put it, "the sexual is constituted in economic terms, and the economic is construed in sexual terms." Reproduction, production, and consumption are linked in early modern ideology. This project builds on and extends the many historical studies about working women by turning to fictional representations as another site of evidence. In this project I focus on the male voices of popular literature (including John Skelton, Thomas Deloney, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Thomas Dekker), when viewing women in artisan, retail and service situations, the most common forms of women's urban work, in order to see how women's identities are based on sexual reputations, which play out in association with issues of credit, the gaze, spectacle, theatricality, and movements across the city.;This project will examine the popular culture of early modern London to see what ideology has to show us about women's work and attitudes about women in and on the market. By examining the language of consumption and sexuality that intertwines all images of women in the workplace, I will show the constraints within which real women worked in early modern London. But, beyond this historical investment, the project more broadly demonstrates the ways in which the imagination of women working, the fictional representation of women at work, served not only as a mimetic representation of actual women working in early modern England; it also, more potently, reveals the symbolic position held by women during a period of transition and anxiety. Representing working women offered a means for thinking through issues of change. Thus fictional women function both mimetically and symbolically, both mirroring their real life counterparts and signifying broader concerns. Early modern London was undergoing cultural changes related to capitalism, class, national identity, and religion. Women in the popular literature of the time became the battleground upon which ideological changes were fought; representations of working women, because of the way production, consumption, and reproduction were linked, particularly bore the brunt of these ideological battles.