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Beyond the Home: Space and Agency in the Experiences of Female Service in Early Modern England
Author(s) -
Mansell Charmian
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.12494
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , space (punctuation) , power (physics) , sociology , service (business) , social work , work (physics) , qualitative research , gender studies , political science , law , social science , business , engineering , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , marketing
This article reconfigures our understanding of female service in early modern England by examining the roles and spaces female servants occupied not only within their employers homes but outside and within the wider community. Using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to categorise and analyse the spaces in which female servants were recorded in church court depositions from the dioceses of Exeter, Gloucester and Winchester between 1550 and 1650, it argues that female servants were not confined to the domestic sphere either in their work or their social interactions. And further, it shows that female servants' links to the wider community gave them power and agency – limited perhaps, but significant nonetheless ‐ in their dealings with their employers.