Women in the Provincial Print Trade, 1700-1830

The role of women as producers and distributors in the provincial print market is an underexplored
subject. Doing justice to the range of women's activity in the long eighteenth century, my project will
take an interdisciplinary approach, making significant contributions to book history, trade history and
gender history, using original archive research to establish how women operated in the English
regional print trade.
My project will survey women working in the print trade across the broad Midlands area,
encompassing the wide and often interchanging roles undertaken by print trade workers including
papermaking, printing, bookbinding, publishing and as booksellers, hawkers, stationers, and library
owners. The numbers of women working in the trade have been underestimated, making the project
timely and urgent. According to existing scholarship, approximately 50 women operated outside of
London between 1550 and 1700 (Bell, 1996), and 437 in the entire English trade in the following
century (Barker, 1996). However, preliminary interrogation of the British Book Trade Index (BBTI)
gives over 1,000 records for women working outside of London between 1700 and 1830, 350 of which
were based in the wider Midlands region alone.
My project will establish valuable new case studies of working women, restoring the names of women
producers in the region. It will explore the route into trade for female booksellers, particularly as
widows taking over an existing family business; establish what women sold and produced; and
present women as trusted partners and active agents in their trade, particularly in examples where
women have taken over businesses previously run by other women. Where evidence allows, the
thesis will also establish the extent to which women operated within new and established networks,
who their customers were, and assess their standing in their communities. As a centre of industrial
development with a landscape encompassing large trade centres, key coaching...