4 - What Girls Learned

Summary

Chapter 4 recovers what girls in apprenticeships learned, the range of trades they practiced and how they were taught. Treating apprenticeship as a training system, operating in parallel to that of boys, this chapter uses the mass of information in legal disputes to reconstruct tasks like starching, binding petticoats, using patterns and making lace; keeping shop; and the wider world of training in housewifery, literacy and working in schools. Gentry apprentices were particularly concerned with learning the right level of skills and avoiding ‘drudgery’, aiming at running their own shops and pressing for independence, while apprentices through the rest of the social spectrum followed a highly differentiated set of occupations making textiles and clothes, very few of which were entirely sex-specific. Training involved watching and copying, but also included a keen regulation of appearance and the risk of physical correction.