The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (72 page)

To combat this, Fox explained that woman’s lack of authority was part of the bad order of things, and had not existed in a state of innocence. Eve, by her transgression, her evil ‘teaching’ of her husband, had brought that about, but in the restoration, brought about by Jesus Christ, ‘all the family of God, women as well as men, might know, possess, perform and discharge their offices and services in the house of God’. He also made the point, which arose in different forms throughout the seventeenth century, that if husbands such as Nathaniel Coleman could rule over their wives, which he did not seek to deny, ‘neither he [Coleman] nor they must rule over widows and young women, and other men’s wives’.
⁴²

In general, however, Fox attempted conciliation rather than provocation. So the arguments about the Women’s Meetings and their precise purpose, and women’s right to speak, continued within the Quaker movement itself: the very existence of such a controversy at that period being of course a tribute to the movement’s early ideals concerning the spiritual equality of women.

Margaret Fell did not only enrich the Quaker movement with her own stalwart example of a woman whose conscience was unshackled by wealth, uncowed by adversity; she also bequeathed to it those further crusaders, her brilliant daughters. The possible influence of the mother for good at a period when
few women were subject to influence outside the home is demonstrated at its fullest by the lives of the Fell girls. Sarah Fell, later married to William Meade, was said in her preaching to ravish ‘all her beholders and hearers with admiration and wonder’. Margaret Fell herself had long shown an interest in Hebrew literature and teaching, leading towards the possible reconversion of the Jews. Sarah taught herself Hebrew to confound her critics, who claimed that she could not understand the biblical texts.
⁴³
Isabel Yeamans accompanied her step-father on his travels to Europe.

George Fox died in January 1691 but Margaret lived on another eleven years, to benefit from the expanding atmosphere of toleration following the accession of William III. She was not bereft of the traditional joy of old age. Her eight children gave her twenty-four grandchildren, fourteen of whom survived childhood. As little John Abraham, son of Rachel, wrote in 1687: ‘Dear Grandmot thou art oftener in my mind than I can menshon.’
⁴⁴

As for Margaret Fell’s spiritual convictions, as late as 1695 she was reminding the Women’s Yearly Meeting in London that the ‘seed is one in male and female’.
⁴⁵

1
Although one would hardly today go as far as Mabel R. Brailsford who, writing in 1915 in
Quaker Women 1650–1690
, was influenced – but unfavourably – by the actions of the suffragette movement; she compared the plight of the ‘priest’ faced by a Quaker woman to that of a Cabinet Minister faced by a suffragette, her sympathies being with the politician.
⁹

2
Between 1753 and 1837 the marriages of the Quakers and the Jews were the only ones performed outside the Church of England which were legal.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Delight of Business

‘Business is her sole delight in this world … It is charity to keep her in full time employment.’

MRS CONSTANCE PLEY TO SAMUEL PEPYS
,
Calendar of State Papers
,
Domestic
, 1666

‘I
t is the Lord that creates true industry in his people …’; thus Joan Dant, a pedlar, or rather a pedlar-extraordinary, and one of the few women
entrepreneurs
of the seventeenth century about whom some personal details are known. A woman pedlar in the seventeenth century was of course not necessarily indigent or despised, as the name might seem to indicate today. At one end of the market there did exist those women, close to beggars, who if sufficiently unsuccessful, old and quarrelsome, might be in danger of being accused of witchcraft. But at the other end were those enterprising women who travelled the country supplying haberdashery or provisions to the good wives unable or unwilling to make the journey to market. There was the Widow Elizabeth Doddington of Hillbishops, licensed by the Somerset justices in 1630 to use up to three horses in her work as a ‘badger’ of butter and cheese in Somerset, Wilts, Hants and Devon; or Hester Pinney, the unmarried daughter of a Puritan minister in Dorset who was ejected from his living at the Restoration: she sold lace in London, first as part of the family business (keeping in touch with her relations by letter) and then on her own account.
¹

When Joan Dant, who died in 1715 at the age of eighty-four,
came to make her will she was worth rather more than £9,000. ‘I got it by the rich and I mean to leave it to the poor,’ she observed. In a letter to her executors she described herself as having ‘through the blessing of God, with honesty and industrious care, improved my little in the world to a pretty good degree’. She therefore wished to help ‘the fatherless and the widows in the Church of Christ’.

Joan Dant was a Quaker. Her husband had been a weaver who worked in Spitalfields. It was after his death that she took up work as a pedlar; carrying haberdashery, hosiery and the like from house to house in London and thereabouts. As a Quaker, and incidentally a woman of resolutely upright life, she was able to make good business use of her connections among the Friends. Soon the frugality of her own lifestyle (which she never altered) combined with the expanding nature of her business enabled her to save enough to start trading abroad. At her death, her executors found debts incurred due to business pending, as far away as Paris and Brussels; while the amount of her fortune surprised even those who knew her well.

Joan Dant’s industry – that ‘true industry’ whose creation she ascribed to the Lord – is an example of the fact that religions which encouraged women as well as men to work ‘in God’s vineyard’ often encouraged them by implication to toil in other more commercial fields. The medieval abbesses of the great convents, confident in their religious office, had also been great businesswomen; in the same way Quaker women were sustained rather than depressed in the world of business by their beliefs; the knowledge that God intended them, in the words of George Fox, to be ‘serviceable in their generation’.
²

Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, had been able to help her husband in his business as well as write plays and poetry, in which capacity, wrote Ballard in the eighteenth century, ‘few wives are supposed capable of serving their husbands’. But a Quaker dynasty, such as that of the Gurneys of East Anglia, would produce without comment women like Elizabeth Gurney, who in the 1680s kept the books of her husband’s and brother’s mercantile affairs, and acted as chief
clerk. This energy can hardly be ascribed to lack of employment on her part; Elizabeth Gurney also bore eight sons, four of whom lived to adulthood.
³

In part this ability was due to the Quaker emphasis on schools and education for both sexes, which meant that arithmetic was not a closed book to the female Friends. But since this emphasis on education was in itself due to the Quaker conviction that the Lord might move in any spirit, regardless of sex, one is back with the confidence granted at source, that is with the esteem given to women within the Quaker religion. Sarah Fell, Margaret’s brilliant eldest daughter, had a good head for business, as well as being a ‘ravishing’ preacher, as the account books for Swarthmoor Hall show, during the years when she ran it.
⁴

Where the women of the other dissenting sects were concerned, the connection, traced by the Puritans, between worldly success and divine approval, meant that there was nothing inherently abhorrent about the amassing of profits, particularly when they were used to forward God’s purposes. (We detect a note of this in Joan Dant’s letter to her executors, even if she was herself a Quaker.) But it is also noticeable in general that those women – often but not always widows – whose circumstances led them to indulge in business, could, whatever their rank or religion, expect approval if their efforts were successful. There was no trace here of that execration which attended the public endeavours of the ‘petticoat-authors’. After all business practice in a woman could be seen as an extension of her role as the mainstay of her household, whereas learning and authorship were dangerously unfeminine pursuits. Just as the arithmetic necessary to do accounts (household accounts) was an esteemed part of female education, whereas the study of the classics drew forth angry male expostulations.

In the conduct of their affairs therefore, women paid far less lip service to the gospel of female modesty than they did, perforce, in the pursuit of a literary career. The melancholy withdrawal of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, fearing contempt for poems from a woman’s pen, may be contrasted, with the zest displayed by Anne Russell, Countess of Bristol, in the exploitation
of her wine licence. Sister of William, fifth Earl and first Duke of Bedford, wife of George Digby, Earl of Bristol, the Countess was one of those rewarded with a licence to import goods at the Restoration, her husband having formed part of the Royalist administration-in-exile. She set to and sold her wine with a will, the Earl of Bedford being among her early customers. In 1691, when she was nearly eighty, the Countess of Bristol still managed to sell her brother six dozen bottles of red port for the sum of £5 8s.
⁵

It was true, as the editors of Alice Clark’s seminal
Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
(recently reissued with a new introduction) point out, that women’s ‘productivity and talents’ depended on ‘the domestic conditions which fostered them or precluded them’.
⁶
Pepys’s diary provides an excellent insight into a world in which a variety of women were to be found working as shop-keepers, booksellers, ale-house keepers and the like. Nearly always family circumstances played some part in their situation.

The connection of women with the Stationers’ Company and printing referred to earlier (see p.119) found its natural extension in the existence of women booksellers, either independently or in working partnership with their husbands. One of Pepys’s earliest entries concerns ‘my bookseller’ Mrs Ann Mitchell, who with her husband Miles sold not only books but pamphlets and newspapers in Westminster Hall. After Miles Mitchell died of the plague in 1665, Mrs Mitchell carried on the business. Also in Westminster Hall, plying their trade as linendrapers (not linendrapers’ assistants) were the sisters Betty and Doll Lane, to whose activities as Pepys’s unofficial mistresses we shall return.
⁷

There had always been women among the brewers and the ale-wives, with special rights to brewers’ widows; ale-houses themselves being then enjoyed as meeting places by women as much as men, at a time when ale was the drink of the poor and tea and coffee the luxuries of the rich.
⁸
Just as women might enjoy a pipe, there were numerous women among the tobacco-sellers (frequently unlicensed) keeping murky establishments where it was said of the inhabitants: ‘there communication is smoke’. The mistress of the ale-house was a stock character in the popular chapbooks. Then of course at a less commanding
level there was a ‘lily at the bar’ as the playwright and Wit Sir George Etherege described the barmaid at the Rose Tavern in Russell Street. Sometimes the lily was the ale-wife herself; Richard Gough, in his
The History of Myddle
, a portrait of a Shropshire parish begun in 1670, describes the lovely girl – ‘very fair’ – who helped her husband Samuel Downton keep an ale-house.
⁹
She was known as White Legs because she wore no stockings, and drew the customers irresistibly from miles around to the great benefit of her husband’s business.

White Legs was actually the second Mrs Downton, Samuel Downton’s first wife having left him a fair amount of money. She had been a maid. Unfortunately White Legs’s character was not as fair as her complexion. First she decamped with her husband to Staffordshire, leaving behind three children to be maintained by the parish. Then the Downtons descended to becoming beggars; he ‘an old decrepit person’ and she with a box of pins and laces to sell. How unlike the worthy Joan Dant did White Legs show herself in her attitude to her trade! There was little of the ‘true industry’ given by the Lord to be seen here. Soon White Legs left her elderly husband for ‘a new Sparke’ who travelled the country. Old Samuel went back to Shropshire to be maintained by the kindly son of his first marriage.