author
Alice Clark
1874–1934
A pioneering feminist historian, she challenged old assumptions about women’s work and helped shape the study of women’s economic history. Her best-known book explores how work, family, and social change affected women in seventeenth-century England.
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 shoemakers, a Quaker family closely connected with reform and the women’s suffrage movement. She later studied at the London School of Economics, where her historical research focused on women’s labor and everyday economic life.
Her best-known work, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), argued that women had played a much larger part in industry and agriculture than many historians had recognized. The book became an important early contribution to women’s history and economic history.
Alongside her scholarship, she was active in feminist causes and is remembered as both a historian and a campaigner for women’s rights. She died in 1934.