Korda 2011

Korda, Natasha. Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

"Situating the commercial playhouses within the broader economic landscape of early modern London, this book argues that the rise of the professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, properties, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities." (1)

"Women, whose labor was often proscribed or restricted within the formal economy regulated by guilds and civic authorities, predominated in the informal networks of trade that flourished in the suburbs and liberties wher ehte commerical theaters were located." (1)

Labors Lost

Weavers' Company ordinance of 1596 -- no women may weave unless they're widows of guild members (20)

"Although crafts- and tradesmen's wives ad daughters often worked actively alongside their male kin, either in manual labor or taking charge of the financial end of the family business (receiving payments, acting as buyers, and so forth ), their labor was unremunerated and therefore largely unrecorded. As such, it belonged to a hidden, yet nonetheless crucial "shadow" economy." (20)

"A dichotomous view of female absence versus presence is insufficient to account for women's work in the informal sector, whichw as present yet often hidden, unacknolwedged, undervalued, stigmatized, or otherwise placed under cultural erasure." (21)

"informal economy" of women's work -- done in suburbs, off the books, outside of guilds (21)

rise of commercial theaters coincided with the loosening of the guild system and expansion of informal sector; theaters located in subrbs where informal economy had liberties (24)

women apprenticed to the wives of guildsmen to learn needlework (27, see n84)

"women's participation in the theatrical affairs of male kin"

account books of Office of Revels -- evidence of women's work in the manufacture of luxury attire

stigma of idleness -- gendered; "playing" (acting) considered "the antithetises of work" (50)

"The claims that playing was a dishonest calling and that the commercial theater was a 'nuserie of idelnesse' were frequently cast in gendered terms that linked idleness to effeminacy." (51)

"Situated on the cusp of the formal and informal sectors, the commercial theaters thus worked to women's advantage and disadvantage, opening new employment opportunities for women while at the same time excluding them from the most visible or open workspace of the theater, the stage itself, in an effort to define the play that took place there as legitimate work." (53)

Dame Usury

"Usury in early modern England was construed as the antithesis of 'honest' work, or in Aristotelian/Thomistic terms, as an unnatural reproduction of wealth that circumvented productive labor. Instead of working, usurers put money itself to work -- and their money never stopped working, even on the Sabbath." (54)

usury -- gendered as a form of idle female reproduction; monstrous birth (55)

"While some women turned to moneylending before marriage to increase the size of their inherited portions, others remained unmarried and were able to live off the interest from loans. Unmarried women and widows, who had fewer claims on their money and who were unconstrained by the law of coverture restricting married women's legal and financial rights, were among the most important providers of credit, often putting large portions of their estates out at interest to friends, neighbors, and kin, as well as tradesmen, merchants, and even local town governments." (58)

"Depending on the circumstances, women moneylenders were regarded as indispensable facilitators of, or irritating impediments to, male commercial enterprise and (ad)venture. Among the circumstances that influenced how female creditors were perceived were marital status, 'credit' or sexual reputation, and the degree of agency and self-interest (or 'will') and expertise (or 'skill') they exhibited in their financial and legal dealings." (60-1)

"By characterizing widows and maids as lacking in will and skill, and as socially vulnerable and victimized, their defenders could construe women's moneylending as an expression of God's mercy rather than as a self-interested, profit-making venture. Ironically, as mentioned above, this rhetorical strategy was adopted by financially savvy single women and widows themselves when they defended their own commercial interests in equity courts." (68)