Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. xii + 236 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

Elizabeth C. Sanderson has unearthed a wealth of evidence which reveals how urban Scottish women earned their livings. They engaged in shopkeeping, running stalls at markets, roomsetting (renting lodgings), rouping (small-scale valuation and auctioneering), gravesclothes-making, midwifery, mantua making and millinery, and teaching school, as well as assisting in their husbands' trades or running businesses as widows. Sanderson points out interesting differences between Scottish and English women's status in the world of work. In England, married women, or feme covert, could not enter into contracts on their own unless they gained the special status of feme sole. In Edinburgh, women could gain the freedom of the burgh, that is, the freedom to trade, from their fathers or from their husbands. The Merchants Company and town council which regulated trade also allowed women to enroll, occasionally at reduced rates, because they believed it was important for women to provide their own subsistence. Even the wives of professionals and merchants often ran their own businesses, which would have been unusual in England. The fact that Scottish women retained their own surnames when they married may also have given them a separate identity.