Women and work in eighteenth-century Edinburgh

by Elizabeth C. Sanderson

Georgian Edinburgh has become a familiar place to many of us, yet the working life of its population, especially the working lives of women, has been largely neglected. In this book, the first in-depth study of women's experience of work in Scotland before 1800, previously unexplored sources have been used to illuminate the everyday working activities of women, married and single, successful and deprived, and their role in the urban community. Prominence is given to women in retailing and the textile-related trades, the extent to which both married and single women worked outside the home, the place of women's training, education and apprenticeship to preparing them for work, and the role of women in community care, such as the graveclothes-makers whose work is discussed for the first time. While focusing on Edinburgh, the capital and premier service town of eighteenth-century Scotland, Dr Sanderson's findings are important in the British context and beyond.