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CW Journal
: Spring 04 : With All the Grace of the Sex
Paul Revere's mother
likely was a silversmith before her son. Gayle Clark has wielded a hammer at
Colonial Williamsburg's Golden Ball silversmith's shop for twenty-five years.
Click image to enlarge |
Author Donna
Woodward worked for many years in Colonial Williamsburg's Shoemaker's Shop,
one of many trades in which women participated during the eighteenth century.
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At Colonial
Williamsburg's Brickmaker's Yard, Christine Trowbridge uses a double form to
shape bricks to be fired for Historic Area use, broken bricks and a kiln behind
her.
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Suzanne Dye
works amid the flames and the fumes in Colonial Williamsburg's Geddy Foundry.
Some colonial women were metalworkers.
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In Colonial
Williamsburg's Cooper's Shop, Ramona Vogel shapes staves for a cask. Few trades
were without women at some point.
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Text by Donna Dene Woodward
Photos by Dave Doody
Traveling
through the English countryside in 1741, William Hutton happened upon a
blacksmith's shop, where he saw "one or more females, stripped of their upper
garments, and not overcharged with the lower, wielding the hammer with all the
grace of the sex." If Hutton was taken aback, it might not have been so much by
the costuming as by finding women working a trade usually practiced by men.
Journeyman
Gayle Clarke is working in the James Craig silversmith shop on a typical July
day in Colonial Williamsburg. Her sleeves are rolled, she's sweating, and she's
swinging a forging hammer over a thick piece of silver. In spite of the
Tidewater humidity, there's a fire blazing in the fireplace so Clarke can
anneal the ingot when it's hardened. Guests mill about the shop. A woman looks
around, walks into the back, peers down the hall, turns to her companions and
says, "Oh, I guess none of the silversmiths are working today."
Clarke
laughs as she recounts the story, variations of which have happened many times
over her nearly twenty-five- year career. "I don't get much of an opportunity
to talk to those folks," she says. "They've got their minds made up about
women's roles. But the guests that ask where my husband is, or why am I
working, those are the guests that are fascinated to find out about the
historical accuracy of my presence."
An
apprentice female at the Anderson Blacksmith Forge in the late 1980s drew
attention from guests. Journeyman supervisor Ken Schwarz and his colleagues
were often asked whether women were allowed to be blacksmiths. "It's as if
there were some law forbidding women from work, or the ever-present worry that
this work was too physically demanding for women to carry out," Schwarz says.
Guests
expect to see women cooking, cleaning, sewing, and raising and educating
children in the home, and are understandably perplexed by a female swinging a
hammer at a forge or planing a board at the cooper's. This curiosity often
leads to questions of political correctness versus historical accuracy.
Answering such questions is not easy. It requires a detective's nose for
documentation and sometimes lucky happenstance.
The
Historic Area's modern apprenticeship system is modeled on eighteenth-century
practices. Men and women admitted to the program are expected to learn their
trade and become journeymen, a representation of the day-to-day reality of
eighteenth-century life. The master of her shop has carefully documented
Clarke's progress, and a twenty-fifth-century historian will be able to
understand her role in the business. But what of those partially clad
Englishwomen working as blacksmiths? How did they get there?
Other than
Hutton's remark, there's nothing suggesting their names or family situations.
For most girls, becoming a blacksmith was probably not a dream. Husband,
family, home: those were the pursuits of a young woman of the eighteenth
century. Finding a woman or women working at all outside the home, much less in
a male-dominated trade, most likely meant the dream wasn't shaping up the way
they'd hoped. Some women worked because they had no choice.
Though
there was no system of standards governing the trades in the colonies, the
method of learning a trade generally followed the apprenticeship guidelines
established by the guilds in medieval England and Europe. Women were not
excluded from membership in any of the earlier guilds. The Worshipful Company of
Blacksmiths in London lists sixty-five "brethren" and two "sistren" in its 1434
charter.
"No
one contested the right of wives and daughters to work in a shop or at a stall
leased in the name of the husband and father," writes Olwen Hufton in The
Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800. "The tendency of a master in an
occupation where there was scope for the employment of his
daughter—particularly if he had no sons—may have been to familiarize her with
the techniques of the trade. At the humblest levels, where the master in
question did not employ journeymen and where any apprentices kept quiet, then
the master's daughter unofficially may have done much work without incurring
opposition from the guild."
Blacksmith
Schwarz says it is important to consider the woman's role in a family business:
"It is just that—a family working to produce an income. In periods of sharp
increase in demand, any able-bodied member of the family may be involved in
making the business successful. Including women."
Male
or female, a prospective guild member had to apply for entrance by
apprenticeship, patrimony, redemption, or marriage. Most women applied by right
of marriage, or widowhood. More than 200 youngsters are documented to have been
apprenticed to women in Oxford between 1520 and 1800, evidence that women
claimed the rights of masters.
Conspicuous
differences existed in the strength and types of guilds to enforce their
control and keep work from slipping under women, so a female's success or participation
in a business could vary from place to place, from year to year. "Complaints
were more common in periods of economic strain," Hufton wrote, "particularly
when the labour supply was overabundant and rising prices outstripped wages. In
easy times, journeymen were less anxious and might permit without complaint
some infiltration by women into what they saw as their sphere of activity."
Girls
were apprenticed, too, usually in cases of orphaning. Parish or pauper
apprenticeships, as they were called, featured contracts that left blank spaces
so the court or church official could write in "him" or "her," "she" or "he."
K. D. M. Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor lists nearly 300 orphan girls
apprenticed to trades in the eighteenth century in the southern counties of
England.
But
the guild system began to decline during the eighteenth century, and with it
went the detailed records. A 1770 publication called The Tradesman's True
Guide or a Universal Directory for the Towns of Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsal,
Dudley and the manufacturing village in the neighborhood of Birmingham carries exhaustive lists of tradesmen
and -women alphabetically by name and by trade. There are women listed in every
trade from butcher to wire drawer. Unfortunately, these rosters only carry the
name and address of the individual's business. There is no hint of how he or
she came to learn the trade. Records of guilds and corporations frequently omit
mention of female apprentices suggests Bridget Hill in Women, Work, and
Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England, because "the completion of a man's apprenticeship had
political and social, as well as economic consequences (parliamentary
franchise) that did not apply to women."
Though
apprenticeship contracts do exist for the colonies, they tend to be fewer and
they are not as specific. And without the meticulous record keeping of the
guilds, what happened to a boy or girl once an apprenticeship began is
difficult to track. Orphan apprenticeship contracts are the best research tools,
since they often record more detail than a standard agreement, although many of
the girls' apprenticed trades are listed as "unspecified," and the only way to
surmise what they learned is if the master's or mistress's business is known.
In
1715 Northumberland County, Virginia, Ariskam Crowder was "hereby bound an
apprentice to serve Mary Knight in all lawfull Services & imploym until he
shall attain the age of One and twenty years, he being Seven year old."
The
colonies are full of widows running businesses. A cursory visit to the restored
colonial capital will introduce guests to many taverns run by women, and to
Clementina Rind, the Virginia Gazette printer who published Thomas Jefferson's Summary View of
the Rights of British America
in 1774. She took over the business when her husband died. Between the
seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, there are records of at least
twenty-one widows running their late husbands' printing businesses. Mrs. Jose
Glover set up shop at Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1638 after her husband died on
a ship from England. Sarah Goddard ran the Providence Gazette in Rhode Island, learning the business
from her brother. Elizabeth Bushell learned from her father, and ran The
Halifax Gazette in
Canada, from 1752 until 1761. Jane Aitken's father left her his Philadelphia
printing business in 1796, favoring her over her brother, who was apparently an
"idler tippler and little better than a vagrant, cut off without a sixpence."
Finding
women in the smith trades or any of the physically intensive occupations is
difficult. "Everyone has heard of Paul Revere," Clarke said, "but how many
people know his mother probably was a silversmith too?" Her mark exists on
several silver pieces. A 1730 Pennsylvania Gazette runaway ad searches for James Curry, "an
Apprentice to Mrs. Paris of Philadelphia, Brass Founder." An account book at
the Litchfield Historical Society shows Mary Stoddard signing all transactions
for her dead husband's Connecticut blacksmith business in the 1770s.
There is debate
about whether the women who acquired businesses from family did the physical
tasks, and whether the girls that were apprenticed to tradesmen ever really
learned the trade. Prints seem to suggest some did. Only recently did a
Colonial Williamsburg interpreter look closely at a nineteenth-century print
that had been hanging on the wall at the Geddy House for years: a portion of
Ben Franklin's Poor Richard Illustrated features a country blacksmith shop where four men are
working, and in the right-hand corner, a woman hammers at an anvil rather
inconspicuously. A 1505 Polish print is centered on a lovely woman at a
spindle, but a careful inspection of the background shows a woman making a shoe
on her knee.
The
written documentation is sometimes not as obvious as an apprenticeship
contract, and it takes meticulous readings to find names or hints of working
females. There are curious newspaper items, such as one from the Pennsylvania
Gazette, dated 1774, in
which Joel Willis, the jailer in Chester, Pennsylvania, announced that "John
Humphreys and Elizabeth, his wife; both Irish, and shoemakers by trade" were in
his custody. Why list man and wife as shoemakers if she didn't make shoes? The Pennsylvania
Gazette printed the
rules of contracting apprentices to "the Masters or Mistresses" in 1763, such
that the youngster "shall be bound by Indenture to serve as an Apprentice in
any Art, Mystery, Occupation or Labour, with the Assent of his or her Parent."
Modern
visitors wonder how these workingwomen were regarded by their betters and their
peers. "Williamsburg was a small town," says Mary Wiseman, who has studied and
portrayed Martha Washington, "and this was a time in the world where you were
known for your excellence of character and for your ability, and respected for
that on a level that personalized the world of the eighteenth century." Abigail
Schumann, who has portrayed Clementina Rind for Colonial Williamsburg for
almost ten years, believes "the fact that Rind was awarded the government
contact in her own right indicates that she was not only accepted, but
respected for the work she was doing."
Though creative
research has produced evidence of women working at male-dominated occupations
in the eighteenth century and before, there is undoubtedly more documentation
out there, in newspapers, diaries, legal proceedings, and prints. What is more
compelling is the lack of documentation that women were not allowed to work.
Although religious practices and social norms might have restricted certain
activities in some parts of the world, there were no laws prohibiting women
from working a trade.
Yet
sometimes scholars and guests have a hard time accepting the notion that women
did just that. Schumann says that "the greatest obstacle for the visitor is in
accepting Rind as an eighteenth-century woman, and not a 'born-before-her-time'
women's libber. She was in debt and had four young children. Fortunately, she
was well suited to the task." A modern woman might choose to be a mechanic as
an occupation, but an eighteenth-century woman might have had to pick up a
hammer or work a press to make ends meet. Perhaps the notion of "choice" is
where women's roles have changed in the workforce, but no matter what century
it is, women have always done what is necessary to provide for themselves and
their families.
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Women in Trades |
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Abigail Schumann interprets 18th-century characters for Colonial Williamsburg. She is interviewed by Barbara Brown. (6:47 minutes)
Read the transcript. |
Freelance
writer Donna Dene Woodward was once a member of Colonial Williamsburg's boot
and shoemaker's staff. This is her first contribution to the magazine.
For further reading:
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