Abstract
In early modern England, women took up serving positions in a variety of household situations and across a spectrum of social classes. Collectively known as ‘maidservants’, and usually younger and unmarried, they performed such diverse tasks as milking, cooking, cleaning and assisting in childcare. They could work, in addition, in several capacities — as apprentices, as chambermaids, and as companions and attendants.1 It was through the exercise of a number of these professional functions that women servants made a vital contribution to the contemporary labour force.
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Notes
Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, eds, A History of their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, 2 vols (Harmondsworth, 1989–90), vol. I.
Jean E. Howard, ‘Scripts and/versus Playhouses: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Public Stage’, in Valerie Wayne, ed., The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare ( Ithaca, NY, 1991 ), p. 236.
Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London and New York, 1992), pp. 14–17, 27–62.
See Lynda Boose, ‘The Priest, the Slanderer, the Historian and the Feminist’, English Literary Renaissance, 25 (1995), pp. 320–40.
R. J. Fehrenbach, ‘A Letter sent by the Maydens of London (1567)’, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), p. 288.
See Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino, 1982), passim.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts ( New Haven, CT and London, 1990 ), p. 95.
Richard Smith, The Life of Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (15381608), ed. A. C. Southern (London, 1954 ), p. 11.
A. G. Dickens, ‘Estate and Household Management in Bedfordshire, c. 1540’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 36 (1956), p. 42.
G. B. Harrison, ed., Advice to His Son by Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1609) (London, 1930), p. 99.
See also Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 ( Ithaca, NY and London, 1994 ), pp. 66–7.
Simon Baylie, The Wizard, ed. Henry De Vocht (Louvain, 1930), V.vii.2629–30.
Edward Sharpham, The Works, ed. Christopher Gordon Petter (New York and London, 1986), IV.i.37–8.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1966–96), vol. II, IV.i.1–2.
Richard Brome, The Dramatic Works, ed. John Pearson, 3 vols (London, 1873), vol. I, I.ii.p. 117.
John Taylor, The unnatural) father (London, 1621; S.T.C. 23808a), sig. A3.
William Goddard, A neaste of zoaspes latelie found out in the Law Countreys (London, 1615; S.T.C. 11929), sig. Gii.
Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Simon Trussler and Jacqui Russell (London, 1983), I.i.157, 192, 219.
Paul Griffiths, ‘The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London’, Continuity and Change, 8 (1993), p. 49.
Henry Parrot, Laquei ridiculosi: or springes for woodcocks (London, 1613; S.T.C. 19332), sig. D7’
Miriam Slater, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House (London, 1984), p. 72.
Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London, 1991), p. 10.
William Parkes, The curtaine-drawer of the world (London, 1612; S.T.C. 19298), p. 12.
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1996), p. 106.
Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York, 1992), p. 15.
Paul Morgan, ‘Frances Wolfreston and “Hor Bouks”: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector’, The Library, 11 (1989), pp. 211–19.
James Shirley, The Dramatic Works, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, 6 vols (London, 1833), vol. II, IIl.iv.p. 59.
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© 1997 Mark Thornton Burnett
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Burnett, M.T. (1997). Women, Patriarchy and Service. In: Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_5
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