author
Alice Clark
1874–1934
A pioneering British feminist historian, she is best remembered for opening up the study of women’s work in early modern England. Her writing joined careful research with a strong interest in social change and women’s rights.
1 Audiobook
Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
by Alice Clark
About the author
Born in Somerset in 1874, she came from the Clark family of Street, the Quaker shoe-making family behind C. & J. Clark. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and later studied at the London School of Economics, where she worked in economic history.
Her best-known book, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), argued that women had once played a much larger role in productive work and that economic change narrowed those opportunities. The book is often remembered as an early landmark in women’s history because it treated women’s labor as central, not marginal.
She died in 1934. Though she published relatively little, her work has had a long afterlife, especially among historians interested in gender, labor, and the hidden parts of everyday economic life.