Poor Law, charity, the support of friends and relatives, begging, and prostitution
were others when starvation threatened. But many of those responses would
have made women more visibly a problem in the City.
A large proportion of the women in London had come to the capital—typic-
ally in their early twenties—in search of work.^200 Indeed, so many women had
migrated to London (as well as to other towns) over the late seventeenth century
that a significant gender imbalance seems to have developed in urban areas.^201
The problems that such women faced arose from their position of fundamental
inequality: they were very largely confined to a limited range of occupations and
their wages were significantly lower than men’s. Most of the work they could
seek was unskilled or semi-skilled, badly paid, and sensitive to seasonal fluctu-
ations. That was especially true of work in the textile and clothing trades, but it
was also true of large numbers of other jobs in a variety of trades in London and
in street-selling and work in the market gardens, in taverns and shops, and so
on.^202 Domestic service, which attracted large numbers of young women,
carried no guarantee of continuous work.^203
Women received low wages because they were expected merely to supple-
ment the earnings of a male. The reality was that such wages (and the irregu-
larity of work) left many women destitute, or at least close to the edge and easily
tipped into serious circumstances. The wives of the large number of poor un-
skilled men had to work to supply simple necessities to their families or to sup-
port themselves, like the wife of the condemned man who confessed to the
ordinary of Newgate before he was hanged that he had no excuse for stealing:
for some time, he said, ‘he got his Livelihood by mending old shoes... [ he]
needed not have gone a thieving to get a Maintenance for himself’. As for his
wife, she got ‘her own by begging about the streets’.^204 Wives commonly had to
work hardest during their child-raising years because extra mouths could not
be fed without their labour.^205 But single women, or widows with children (andIntroduction: The Crime Problem 69(^200) Peter Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eight-
eenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 2 nd ser., 17 ( 1989 ), 331.
(^201) Peter Clark and David Souden, ‘Introduction’, in Clark and Souden (eds.), Migration and Society in
Early Modern Britain( 1987 ), 23 , 35 ; Souden, ‘Migrants and the Population Structure of Later Seventeenth-
Century Provincial Cities and Market Towns’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial
Towns, 1600 – 1800 ( 1984 ), 152 – 61.
(^202) For the range of women’s work in this period, see Earle, ‘Female Labour Market’, 338 – 42 ;
Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, 14 – 22 ; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in
England, 1500 – 1800 ( 1995 ), ch. 12.
(^203) The median stay of domestic servants in one post in Earle’s sample was one year; many stayed less
than six months (’Female Labour Market’, 339 ). See also Timothy Meldrum, ‘Domestic Service in Lon-
don, 1660 – 1750 : Gender, Life Cycle, Work and Household Relations’, Ph.D. thesis (London, 1996 );
Paula Humfrey, ‘Female Servants and Women’s Criminality in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in
Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May, and Simon Devereaux (eds.), Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New
(Toronto, 1998 ), 58 – 84 ; and for servants later in the century, see D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but Invisible:
Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London’, History Workshop, 20 (Autumn 1989 ),
111 – 28.
(^204) Ordinary’s Account, 15 December 1710. (^205) Earle, ‘Female Labour Market’, 338.
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