Princeton University

Eleanor Hubbard specializes in the social and cultural history of early modern Britain. Her current project, City Women: Sex, Money, and the Social Order in London 1570-1640, addresses the lives of ordinary women in the English capital during a period of extraordinary change.   Using court testimony and popular literature, she explores how women’s lives were shaped by prevailing social anxieties and concerns, in particular powerful – and often contradictory – worries about sexual and economic order. She finds that when the two conflicted, economic concerns generally took priority, creating opportunities that women were quick to exploit.

Based on new quantitative evidence as well as case studies of women’s migration to the city, courtship, extramarital pregnancy, marriage, household economies, neighborhood politics, work, widowhood and remarriage, and old age, City Women provides a detailed and vivid portrait of the aspirations and struggles of early modern Englishwomen.