Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.

Winner, 2023 Social History Society Book Prize, Social History Society

‘Gowing puts female apprenticeship convincingly front and centre in the history of early modern women, showing how girls learned the gendered mix of agency and contingency that would shape their lives as producers, traders and consumers. This book is a pleasure for its readers and a triumph for its author.’

Cynthia Herrup - University of Southern California

‘This wonderful book shifts women’s artisanal training from the historiographical margins to the centre of city life. Focusing on people rather than things, Gowing’s meticulous research brings to life the female makers and sellers of the consumer revolution and shows how women’s skilled work crafted gendered identity alongside producing goods.’

Alexandra Shepard - University of Glasgow

'… she writes in a style that makes her book readily accessible to students and those generally interested in early modern daily life.'

Joseph P. Ward Source: Seventeenth-Century News

‘… Gowing has provided us with a book that changes historical narratives around early modern guilds and women’s work.’

Katherine L. French Source: Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal

‘… an outstanding contribution to our understanding of women’s work, apprenticeship, the guilds, as well as the connections between provincial gentry families and the city traders.’

Melinda S. Zook Source: Journal of Modern History

‘… convincingly argues that apprenticeship shaped women’s lives in new ways and that training, working and being paid for labour was a normal, although circumscribed, experience for seventeenth-century women. I recommend this book for anyone interested in histories of women's work in early modern Europe, guild and labour histories, and dress historians interested in the clothing trades.’

Sarah A. Bendall Source: Textile History