Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century

								


               STUDIES IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE



                               Edited by
The Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science



        No. 56 in the series of Monographs by writers connected

       With the London School of Economics and Political Science



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                       THE WORKING LIFE OF WOMEN



                                 IN THE



                          SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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                         WORKING LIFE OF WOMEN



                                 IN THE



                          SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

                                   BY



                              ALICE CLARK


Shaw Research Student of the London School of Economics and Political

                                Science

                                LONDON:

                     GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD.

                     NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO.



                                  1919

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                               DEDICATED

                                 TO MY

                           FATHER AND MOTHER

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                                PREFACE

THE investigation, whose conclusions are partly described in the
following treatise, was undertaken with a view to discovering the actual
circumstances of women’s lives in the Seventeenth Century.
It is perhaps impossible to divest historical enquiry from all personal
bias, but in this case the bias has simply consisted in a conviction
that the conditions under which the obscure mass of women live and
fulfil their duties as human beings, have a vital influence upon the
destinies of the human race, and that a little knowledge of what these
conditions have actually been in the past will be of more value to the
sociologist than many volumes of carefully elaborated theory based on
abstract ideas.
The theories with which I began this work of investigation as to the
position occupied by women in a former social organisation have been
abandoned, and have been replaced by others, which though still only
held tentatively have at least the merit of resting solely on
ascertained fact. If these theories should in turn have to be discarded
when a deeper understanding of history becomes possible, yet the picture
of human life presented in the following pages will not entirely lose
its value.
The picture cannot pretend to be complete. The Seventeenth Century
provides such a wealth of historical material that only a small fraction
could be examined, and though the selection has been as representative
as possible, much that is of the greatest importance from the point of