If marriage cannot be achieved by a woman, Allestree promises there are pleasures in spinsterhood – only he describes them so briefly, it is clear there are none. Even if marriage is a prison for a woman, Allestree says it is ‘better to be a Prisoner to one’s home, than a Stranger’.39

  Political Protest

  The restored monarchy was openly antagonistic to protests from the lower classes, especially those of women. New laws against petitioning, mass demonstration and press freedom were passed in 1661 and 1662.40 Some women refused to be silenced; they argued for women’s education, preached in women-only sects and worked in the underground press, like the heroine Elizabeth Calvert who was a printer and bookseller alongside her husband Giles at the Black Spread Eagle, in St Paul’s Churchyard, and the Black Spread Eagle, Barbican. After the Restoration, Elizabeth led in publishing radical pamphlets, even when her husband was imprisoned. She worked with other female publishers, Hannah Allen, Joan Dover (later Darby) and Ann(a) Brewster, on anti-monarchy texts, and was arrested twice. Widowed in 1663, Elizabeth continued to print seditious material and was arrested with her maid Elizabeth Evans, her apprentice Mathias Stephenson and her son Nathaniel. She was imprisoned in 1664, and her son died before she could win her release to nurse him. Although her print shop was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, Elizabeth Calvert continued to print radical texts and send them all over England.

  Her secret press outside the City limits was found and broken in 1668 but she returned to St Paul’s Churchyard a year later to open another press and was arrested and tried for publishing another banned book. She absconded from her trial in 1671 and charges against her were dropped, but she was arrested again three years later for another offence. Undeterred, she signed on another apprentice, before making her will in favour of her only surviving son Giles, a rebel to her death in 1675.41

  Other women wrote books against the restored king, published pamphlets and spoke out against him: 11 per cent of the cases of seditious speech against Charles II prosecuted in court were spoken by anti-monarchy women.42 Women defied the new laws banning petitions. Working women, silk weavers and glass-makers intimidated their MPs and forced the Houses of Parliament to hear their concerns about their trades.43

  Women flocked to join the rebellions against the restored monarchy. London sugar-baker Ann Smith hid Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll, during his first uprising against James II, the brother and heir to Charles II. Smith and her husband fled abroad with Argyll, and financed his second uprising against James in Scotland in 1685. Despite this extraordinary act of treason, she was given a pardon in 1686. Deborah Hawkins promised that she would ‘put on breeches myself to fight for the Duke of Monmouth’ rather than see the Roman Catholic James inherit the throne.44 The bastard son of Charles II, Monmouth also attracted the ‘Maids of Taunton’, 20 schoolgirls who embroidered a banner for him and hailed him as king under the leadership of their schoolmistress, Mrs Musgrave. They were all arrested for treason and sentenced to transportation as indentured servants to the Sugar Islands. Mrs Musgrave died in prison but the girls’ families were allowed to buy pardons from James II’s second wife, Queen Mary of Modena, their ‘owner’.45

  Elizabeth Gaunt, a London shopkeeper, hid one of the conspirators of the Monmouth uprising but was betrayed by him. As a woman, with no direct connection to the conspiracy, she expected to face a minor charge, but instead she was accused of treason and sentenced to death by burning, without the mercy of being strangled first. However, the public execution ordered by James II backfired. Elizabeth Gaunt’s courage won support for her cause. Hers was an entirely unapologetic scaffold speech, written in her own hand for publication, and she proclaimed it in her own voice, before her terrible death by burning:

  I leave it to him, who is the avenger of all such wrong who will tread upon Princes as upon mortar, & be terrible to the Kings of the earth; & know this also, that tho’ you are seemingly fixed, & because of the power in your hands, are weighing out your violence, & dealing with a despiteful mind, because of the old & new hatred, by impoverishing & every way destressing those you have got under you, yet unless you can secure Jesus Christ & all his holy Angells, you shall never do your business, nor your hand accomplish your enterprizes; for he will be upon you ere you are aware; and therefore that you would be wise, instructed, & learn, is the desire of her that finds no mercy from you.46

  Another woman, 68-year-old Alice Lisle (1617–85), was accused of treason for harbouring two rebels on the run. She argued that she had not known they were rebels and she thought that one of them was merely a radical preacher. As the widow of a regicide who had agreed the execution of Charles I, she faced a trial that was prejudiced against her from the start. Her husband John Lisle had fled the country at the restoration of the monarchy and been assassinated by a Royalist spy in exile at Lausanne in 1664. Twenty years after his death, 36 years after his regicide, his act counted against his widow. Judge Jeffreys ruled that Alice Lisle could not speak in her own defence, because Charles I had not been allowed to speak in his defence; and the jury reluctantly found her guilty of treason. James II delayed for a week after her sentence, finally commuting the penalty as she was an aristocratic woman from burning alive to the more merciful beheading. She was decapitated in Winchester market – the last woman to be legally executed in this way in England.47

  One young woman killed a Royalist officer with his own sword while he was raping her mother after Monmouth’s defeat at Westonzoyland in Somerset. Mary Bridge, aged only 12, seized the rapist’s sword and stabbed him through the heart. She was the only Monmouth supporter ever released by the notorious Judge Jeffreys, who gave her the sword as a souvenir. It was passed down through her family and can be seen today, at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton.

  Protest flared up against Judge Jeffreys who hanged hundreds of Protestant and Puritan rebels fighting for the Duke of Monmouth in 1685. The widows and daughters of the hanged and transported men wrote a specifically female petition denouncing Jeffreys and invited him to return to visit them in the West Country: ‘Where we, the good women in the west, will be glad to see him, and give him another manner of welcome than he had three years since.’48

  Fears of Roman Catholic James II and his wife Mary of Modena peaked with the surprising birth of a son – almost immediately denounced as a changeling by Protestant rabble-rousers. The fear of a Roman Catholic Prince of Wales inspired a second uprising against James II, this time encouraged by his two Protestant daughters, princesses Mary and Anne, and led by a group of lords, who offered James’s throne to his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. The couple took up a joint monarchy by invitation, and their royal powers were limited yet further by a Bill of Rights in 1688.

  The new monarchs were not universally welcomed. Some women still supporting the exiled Stuart king James II, after he had run away, threatened to scratch out the eyes of the mayor who backed William and Mary at Kingston upon Thames in 1716.49

  Once again, England had a regnant queen in Mary, daughter of James II, and the Parliament and the queen herself tried to establish her common-born husband’s supremacy over his royal wife. Queen Mary’s biographers suggest that she was bullied into complete submission by her emotionally cold husband. Even before they were offered the throne, she had promised to make him king for life and obey him, putting her marriage vows of obedience before her royal status as a queen. Although Mary was heir to the throne, William insisted that he also be crowned, to rule jointly. The lords who invited the couple needed Mary’s line to the throne to give the appearance of legitimacy to an invasion by her husband’s army. Of course, they had no interest in the rights of women monarchs and readily agreed that the couple, one a royal Stuart, the other an elected ruler, be crowned as equal king and queen.

  The Bill of Rights, presented to the ruling queen and king, often hailed as one of the heroic steps towards democracy, does not even mention women. It was designed only to protect the rights of men in Parliament, Protestant men and male juries. It was inspired by the work of thinkers around John Locke, including women – Mary Astell and Damaris Cudworth – who argued that there was no ‘natural state’ of monarchy – the power of kings was only established by agreement with the people. But although there was no natural monarchy, there was such a state as natural patriarchy: a tyranny of men over women – given by God and maintained by man’s superior physical strength: ‘But the husband and wife, though they have but one common concern, yet having different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too; it therefore being necessary that the last determination – i.e., the rule – should be placed somewhere, it naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and stronger.’50

  It was a brilliant side-step to preserve patriarchy after the decapitation of the monarchy, to hold up the authority of men while diminishing kings. Not even Locke’s opponents, pro-Royalist women philosophers, could speak up for women. As Royalists, they were bound to argue for male authority in throne room and home. As Royalists they named the king as the father of the nation and the head of the household. They could not develop rebellious ideas against male authority, while supporting the ultimate male authority: the king.51

  Two successive queens made no improvement in the status of women – neither Mary, nor her sister Anne who eventually succeeded her, encouraged women into positions of authority, nor paved the way for the rise of powerful royal princesses, and both died without female heirs – or any direct heirs at all. Mary’s submissiveness to her husband meant that even when she acted as regent during William’s frequent absences, nobody had the sense of a woman taking over.

  Queen Anne, though she emphasised her lack of education and struggled with ill health caused by 17 pregnancies and no surviving child, attended more council meetings than any previous monarch and took a keen interest in the politics of her time. But as politicians grouped into the two opposing rivalrous parties – Whigs and Tories – and as she was powerfully influenced by women favourites, Anne won the reputation of being overemotional, changeable and easily influenced. And her hard work was forgotten.

  Work

  Most women were still supporting themselves, in a countryside that was less and less open, in an economy deliberately closed against them. Women living at home tried to fit cash-earning work around their production for the household. Jane Milward, the wife of a miner in the late 1700s, fed her husband Richard and their six children, as a report described:

  The management of the ground is in good measure left to his wife Jane, although her husband always assists in digging after his hours of ordinary labour (in the pit). In 13 years their scrap of ground yielded good crops of potatoes peas and cabbages, which she sold in Shrewsbury. She kept a pig and used its droppings for manure along with what she and the children could scrape off the roads. Without Jane’s efforts, a family of six children would have been reduced to pauperdom.52

  When times were hard, women and men had to take any work to keep themselves and their family alive. Mrs Jones of Ruthin in Wales in the late eighteenth century forged an agreement with her husband that he should take over traditional female work to set her free to knit the wool from the family sheep. Although they owned a small farm, they could not survive on their own produce: the farmer had to take on his wife’s work to set her free to make the cash produce – butter and knitting. Her son remembered what she said:

  ‘I’ll make a bargain with thee; I’ll see to food for us and both the children all winter if thou, in addition to looking after the horse, the cattle, and pigs, wilt do the churning, wash-up, make the beds, and clean the house. I’ll make the butter myself.’

  ‘How wilt thou manage?’ asked my father.

  ‘I will knit,’ said she. ‘We have wool, if thou wilt card it, I’ll spin.’

  The bargain was struck, my father did the housework in addition to the work on the farm, and my mother knitted, and so it was she kept us alive until the next harvest.53

  Single women headed households as independent widows, deserted wives, single mothers and spinsters, earning their own livings, often on the breadline in rural communities, but sometimes very successful in towns: especially in luxury goods and retail businesses, lending small amounts of money to familiar faces – trusted creditors. Law court records show that most wives were self-sufficient: 60 per cent of them attending court said they kept themselves by their own labour.54 Of London women, 77 per cent of single women and 71 per cent of widows earned their own living in paid work,55 and about 40 per cent of London shops and businesses were owned by women.56

  Some businesswomen were hugely successful. Elinor Mosley, a single woman, gained the freedom to trade in London by joining the Clockmakers’ Guild, though she herself was a milliner, and employed four female apprentices as well as women servants in her home and workshop at Gracechurch Street. She married at the age of 47, but kept the business and her membership of the guild in her single name. The business was probably taken over by her sister.57 Single women traders ran or owned 36 shops or trades in Southampton by 1750, and one of them, Jane Martin, a milliner, carried so much stock that she used carts with metal wheels for deliveries – and was fined under city regulations for damaging the paved ways.58

  Records from other towns suggest that a woman had to show income or status before she could open a business on her own and earn. Women who opened shops in Oxford had to have capital or family connections. In London, they had to be heiresses from merchants or tradesmen, backed by family money, or able to buy into a guild with liberal regulations.59

  Even very small-scale women traders might make a fortune. Alice Dant was a pedlar, selling little items of clothing: ribbons and stockings, from a backpack. She left a fortune of £9,000 to the poor. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, was surprised by the competence of a woman merchant, Mrs Bland: ‘It seem she doth understand it and perform a great deal.’60

  One woman was so hugely successful as a silk designer that her signed design books were preserved. Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763) was the daughter of a provincial clergyman in Grantham. Her extraordinary talent for design and colour prompted her to train as an apprentice to a London master weaver – probably a woman master – who entered her into the Weavers’ Company. Garthwaite joined an artistic and scientific circle of apothecaries and botanists who specialised in botanical drawings.61 She may have known a successful botanical artist, Elizabeth Blackwell, whose book A Curious Herbal Containing Five Hundred Cuts of the Most Useful Plants, Which Are Now Used in the Practice of Physick, to Which Is Added a Short Description of ye Plants and Their Common Uses in Physick went through many editions in 1737.

  Garthwaite rose to the position of a master weaver and, inspired by flower and plant drawings, designed and made gorgeous silks that were used for gowns, upholstery and decoration, and exported. She took her sister and her ward to live with her in her grand master weaver’s house in Spitalfields – the centre for high-quality silk weaving. Her neighbours were successful women weavers too: Sarah Gabell, who ‘was paid thirty pounds to train Henrietta Griffith’, and in 1742, Elizabeth Forward, a spinster, who accepted £60 to train the daughter of a vicar as her apprentice.62

  A widow of a weaver, Margaret Hey, took up her husband’s position in the Weavers’ Company and trained several male apprentices. Another female weaver was Mary Willis, who worked alongside her husband and was a member in her own right in the company, remaining in business and in the Weavers’ after his death.63 Phoebe Wright (d. 1778) was another silk designer whose creations for the loom also included embroidery. Under the patronage of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, Wright established the Royal School for Embroidering Females, with her niece, Nancy Pawsey, and wove and embroidered the throne canopy in the king’s audience room. Wright used the flower paintings of Mary Moser (1744–1819) as the basis of her designs. Moser was one of the two women members of the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1700s.64

  Women dominated other textile industries too. Doncaster was famous for the women stockingmakers who knitted in home-based workshops and were notorious for bursting, uninvited, into inn bedrooms to ambush travellers and sell their wares.65

  Women continued to dominate the food business, both as producers and retailers. Street markets all around the country were dependent on women bringing fresh and produced foods.66 In 1662, Eleanor Davies, of The Maypole, Strand, was licensed ‘to kill and sell all manner of fresh meat except beef during the ensuing Lent’.67 Women street vendors had their own agreed rounds; they sold from baskets carried on their arms or sometimes balanced on their heads with seasonal fruits and vegetables such as strawberries, asparagus and cherries. Women preparing food and selling retail goods became even more important in the growing towns as many urban households bought in meals from the bakehouse, such as pies and cooked meats, as well as breads and puddings. Londoners, whose houses were too small to have a bread oven, bought their bread from the bakers, and brewing at home stopped, as the cycle of using yeast from brewing in home-baking was broken.68

  The new ‘exchanges’ were purpose-built buildings with retail shops inside, rather like a modern mall. Shop women were hired to serve in the new units.69 The ‘exchanges’ became centres of shopping as a leisure and social activity, dominated by women shopkeepers in the 1600s. By 1690, nearly half of the shops inside the exchanges were owned by women (47 per cent), and 46 per cent of them were kept by women shopkeepers. Daniel Defoe described: ‘The two great centres for women merchants; I mean the Exchange shops, particularly at the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange in the Strand.’70

  Women in the Royal Exchange owned businesses in light, decorative and textile trades: haberdashers, girdlers, drapers, mercers, embroiderers, milliners, grocers and clothworkers. But there were also women’s businesses offering paint-staining (portrait painters), leather sellers and merchant tailors. Women were vintners, goldsmiths, barbers, barber-surgeons, and doctors of physic, scriveners, notaries, upholders, smiths, booksellers, iron mongers, pewterers, armourers, saddlers, joiners and salters.71 Some women retailers were so well established that they issued their own coins – trade tokens to use as small change during the constant shortage of official coinage. Six trade tokens struck by women dating from 1660–70 have survived.