We must consider historical occasions of women’s own response to misogynist representations of their work or regulatory efforts to curtail their labor. As notions of women’s proper urban work space shifted in the early-eighteenth century, female fair workers responded to, ignored, or reconfigured themselves in the face of efforts to regulate their available occupations. Without institutionalized or uniform understandings of all women’s appropriate work, and in the absence of economic conditions which would allow working women to vacate the streets of London, women remained active participants in the city’s work force.
"The "Fair" Sex: Working Women at London's Fairs, 1698-1732,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought:
1, Article 1.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.salve.edu/jift/vol1/iss1/1