Rosemary Sweet - Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England: On the Town

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane 2003

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Women and urban life in eighteenth-century England : on the town

1. City and town life - England - History 18th century

2. City and town life - England - History 19th century

3. Women - Social conditions - England - History - 18th century 4. Women - Social conditions - England - History - 19th century 5. Women - Economic conditions - England - History - 18th century 6. Women - Economic conditions - England - History - 19th century

I. Sweet, Rosemary II. Lane, Penelope

307.76082094209033

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women and urban life in eighteenth-century England : on the town / edited by Rosemary
Sweet and Penelope Lane.
p. cm.
Papers of a conference held at the University of Leicester in May 1999.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Women--England--History--18th century--Congresses. 2. City and
town life--England--History--18th century--Congresses. I. Sweet, Rosemary. II. Lane, Penelope.

HQ1599.E5W624 2003
305.4094209033--dc212002042679

ISBN: 9780754607304 (hbk)

Rosemary Sweet

Rosemary Sweet

Elaine Chalus

Sylvia Pinches

Christine Wiskin

Hannah Barker and Karen Harvey

Helen Berry

Denise Fowler

David E. Shuttleton

Hannah Barker is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Manchester. She is author of Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (1998) and Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695-1855 (1999). She is also co-editor of Gender in Eighteenth-Century England (1997), with Elaine Chalus; Language, Print and Electoral Politics, 1790-1832 (2001), with David Vincent; and Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America c. 1760-1820 (2002), with Simon Burrows.

Helen Berry is lecturer in Early Modern British History at the University of Newcastle She has published a number of articles on social and cultural history in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England She won the Royal Historical Societys Alexander Prize (2000) for an essay on Moll Kings coffee house and the use of flash talk, a form of street slang in early Hanoverian London Her book Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England was published by Ashgate in May 2003 Her next project will be a survey of cultural change, viewed through the history of English coffee houses between circa 1650 and 1850

Elaine Chalus is a lecturer in the School of Historical and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College She is the co-editor of Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London, 1997) Her most recent publications include Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat (London, 2000); and To Serve my Friends: Women and Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century England, in Amanda Vickery (ed), Women, Privilege and Power (Stanford 2001) She is currently working on a monograph on eighteenth-century womens involvement in English political life

Denise Fowler is a speech and language therapist She completed her doctoral thesis entitled Social Distinction and the Written Word: Two Provincial Case Studies, Warwick and Draguignan, 1780-1820 at the University of Warwick in 1999 She has published in local history journals in England and France on topics in reading and writing, and is currently involved in research on the iconography of women in reading and writing

Karen Harvey is research fellow at the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, Royal College of Art, and honorary research fellow at the Bedford Centre for the History of Women, Royal Holloway She has published articles on erotic culture, masculinity, spatial metaphors and bodies She is completing The Pleasures of Merryland: Bodies and Gender in Eighteenth Century Erotic Culture for Cambridge University Press, and editing the collection The Kiss in History for Manchester University Press Her current research project explores male authority and the household in England, 1650-1850

Sylvia Pinches is a freelance historical researcher and the House Curator for the 78 Derngate Trust, Northampton She recently completed her doctoral thesis entitled Charities in Warwickshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries at the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester

David E Shuttleton is a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Aberystwyth He has published on eighteenth-century medico-literary themes, especially the influence of Dr George Cheyne He co-edited De-centering Sexualities; Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2000), and is currently co-editing a volume entitled Punk to Poetess: Womens Poetry 1660-1750 He is a contributing editor to the forthcoming Cambridge edition of Samuel Richardsons Correspondence and Works and recently held a Clark Memorial Library Fellowship to research a monograph on smallpox literature

Rosemary Sweet is a lecturer in History and deputy director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester Her publications include The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997) and The English Town Government, Society and Culture 1680-1840 (1999) She is currently writing a book on antiquarianism in the eighteenth century

Christine Wiskin teaches history part-time at the University of Warwick where she completed her doctoral thesis Women, Credit and Finance in England, c 1780-1826 in 2000 She has contributed articles on eighteenth-century English businesswomen to the New DNB and to Business Archives: Sources and History

This collection of essays arose out of a conference On the Town: Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England held at the University of Leicester in May 1999. At the time we felt that there was little published material which dealt directly with the varied experiences of women in the eighteenth-century urban milieu, particularly in a non-metropolitan context. We hoped both to open up discussion upon the contribution of women to urban economy, society and culture, and to consider the impact of these economic, social and cultural changes taking place upon women, rather than generalising from the experience of men. A few years have passed and many more publications have come out since that conference was planned, but the relative void in the literature remains to be filled. It is hoped that this volume will contribute in a small measure towards that end.