The Joyce Youings Memorial Lecture: Professor Laura Gowing (KCL)

The lecture will be online, please register via Eventbrite.

By the mid-seventeenth century, skilled apprenticeship was an established option for young women and their parents, but – like domestic service – it came with constraints, stresses, and verbal or even physical battles. Discussions of women’s adolescence often focus on sex, courtship, and marriage; but for most young women, work came first, and was an important component of identity. Using court records and petitions from London’s seventeenth-century female apprentices, this lecture will explore the ways that urban girls fought and laboured their way through conflicts with parents and mistresses into the hierarchies of adult life, and assess the potential they found for choice and resistance.

Laura Gowing is Professor of Early Modern History at King’s College London and author of several books on women’s history including Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England and Gender Relations in Early Modern England. Her book on female apprenticeship is forthcoming from Cambridge in 2022.

The Centre for Early Modern Studies organises the Joyce Youings Memorial Lecture in early modern History. The lecture commemorates Professor Joyce Youings, formerly head of History at Exeter, the first female professor at the institution, and a distinguished historian of early modern Britain, who died in 2011. The lecture is an annual event, and is kindly funded by Professor Youing’s nephew, Mr Peter Youings.