ABSTRACT
LuckyWoodkeptanalehouseintheCannongateineighteenth-centuryEdinburgh, whereshewasmuchrespectedforherhospitality,honestyandtheneatnessbothof
her person and her Inn. In this extract from the poem, Elegy on Lucky Wood in the Cannongate, May 1717, by Allan Ramsay, we get a fme picture of an honest aleseller. Natalie Davis has argued that independent female traders could gain and maintain a sense of craft and status through the esteem in which they were held by husbands, kin, neighbours, clients, and other women in the trade. Credit for their work and ability remained largely within 'their street, their commerage, their tavern, their kin-unpublished and unsung' .2 I have been exploring ideas of status and standing in the European working community, and the ways in which status itself is a gendered concept. I am interested in how women created an identity within a culture and community, how they fit in the economy and society, how much agency and independence they had. Numerous women ran their own businesses, both single and married, working independently or in female partnerships. This chapter will examine the issue of the independent woman and her creation of identity in the corporate society of eighteenth-century urban Europe.
