The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

inside the family business.' 17 Women were rarely found running a shoemaking
business on their own; Leonard Schwarz's study of insurance registers in
London for 1775-87 shows that of a total of 529 shoemakers only nine (1.7 per
cent) were women. 118 Only 12 women entered the company during the period
1690-1860, six of whom were daughters of cordwainers." 9 The lack of female
master cordwainers was matched by the absence of female apprentices in the
trade. At the beginning of the eighteenth century only 2 or 3 per cent of
apprentices were women. 120 This percentage fell to 1 per cent after 1710, and
women completely disappeared from the registers after 1760. The Register of
Apprentice Bindings entries show that women (in the case they were not
cordwainers' daughters) normally came from outside London and had humble
origins. The two sisters, Mary and Wilhelmina Vernal!, daughters of a yeoman
in Hertfordshire, for example, were bound apprentices to Mary Newark in
1710.121 More common was the case of young girls apprenticed by a male
master as was Mary Richardson, the daughter of a Nottingham stocking weaver,
bound apprentice in 1739.122
The overall impression such figures give is of a decline of the importance of
women in the occupation. This was not a new phenomenon, having probably
started in the medieval period.' 23 However, do such statistics reveal a decrease
of women's participation in boot and shoe production? Recent research on
women's roles has suggested that women made an important contribution to the
workforce in eighteenth-century Britain.' 24 There seems to be a dichotomy
between the dynamic role of women in the proto-industrial, household
economy, as highlighted in de Vries concept of the 'industrious revolution', and
" In 1690, out of 1590 new freemen of the City of London only twelve were women. D.V.
Glass, "Socio-economic status and occupation in the City of London", in A.E. Holleander and
W. Kellaway (ed.), Studies in London History, cit., pp. 385-6.
' 18 LD Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation, cit., p. 21.
" 9 GL, MS 24139: Worshipful Company of Cordwainers, cit.
120
P. Earle, 'The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries', Economic History Review, XLII - 3 (1989), pp. 328-53; I.K. Ben-Amos, 'Women
apprentices in trades and crafts of early modern Bristol', Continuity and Change, VI - 2 (1991),
p. 228.
121 GL, MS 24,140: Worshipful Company of Cordwainers, cit. (1710)
122 J,jj (1739)
' 23 MC Howell, Women, production and patriarchy, cit., pp. 27-32.
P. Sharpe, ed., Women's work: the English experience, 1650-1914 (London, 1998).
86