5 - Making Havoc: Discipline, Demeanour and Resistance

Summary

Two young women in apprenticeship, Katherine Venner and Christiana Hutchins, offer case studies of the difficulties that adolescence in apprenticeship might produce. It was a period in which girls learned, and resisted, gender identities. Mistresses might find themselves managing girls who refused to learn, spoke rudely, purloined shop goods and failed to perform the civil manners expected of seamstresses and milliners. Alongside court testimonies, the advice of Hannah Woolley, the one writer who dealt with female apprentices, presents a guide to the ways female apprentices were told to manage their minds and bodies, and how they responded. Work, this chapter argues, was formative of femininity.