The economic position held by women depended upon whether the business was carried on at home or elsewhere, and upon the possession of a small amount of capital. The wives of men who worked as journeymen on their masters’ premises could not share their husbands’ trade, and their choice of independent occupations was very limited. The skilled women’s trades, such as millinery and mantua-making, were open, and in these, though apprenticeship was usual, there is no reason to suppose that women who worked in them without having served an apprenticeship, were prosecuted; but as has been shown the apprenticeship laws were strictly enforced in other directions, and in some cases prevented women from using their domestic skill to earn their living.
While women could share their husbands’ trades they suffered little from these restrictions, but with the development of capitalistic organisation the numbers of women who could find no outlet for their productive activity in partnership with their husbands were increasing and their opportunities for establishing an independent industry did not keep pace; on the contrary, such industry became ever more difficult. The immediate result is obscure, but it seems probable that the wife of the prosperous capitalist tended to become idle, the wife of the skilled journeyman lost her economic independence and became his unpaid domestic servant, while the wives of other wage-earners were driven into the sweated industries of that period. What were the respective numbers in each class cannot be determined, but it is probable that throughout the seventeenth century they were still outnumbered by the women who could find scope for productive activity in their husbands’ business.
Chapter VI
PROFESSIONS
Introductory—Tendencies similar to those in Industry.—Army—Church—Law closed to women. Teaching—Nursing—Medicine chiefly practised by women as domestic arts. Midwifery.
(A). Nursing. The sick poor nursed in lay institutions—London Hospitals—Dublin—Supplied by low class women—Women searchers for the plague—Nurses for small-pox or plague—Hired nurses in private families.
(B) Medicine. Women’s skill in Middle ages—Medicine practised extensively by women in seventeenth century in their families, among their friends and for the poor—Also by the village wise woman for pay—Exclusiveness of associations of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries.
(C) Midwifery. A woman’s profession—Earlier history unknown—Raynold’s translation of “the byrthe of mankynd.”—Relative dangers of childbirth in seventeenth and twentieth centuries—Importance of midwives—Character of their training—Jane Sharp—Nicholas Culpepper—Peter Chamberlain—Mrs. Cellier’s scheme for training—Superiority of French training—Licences of Midwives—Attitude of the Church to them—Fees—Growing tendency to displace midwives by Doctors.
Conclusion. Women’s position in the arts of teaching and healing lost as these arts became professional.