ABSTRACT
This chapter examines their influence on urban fashion industries and on the gender debates that permeated the competition between men and women in corporate towns where artisan solidarity was under challenge. The debate over the needle trades demonstrates how status and exclusivity were important in artisanal trades, while skill was a contested terrain. The chapter draws on evidence from three medium-sized eighteenth-century towns: Aberdeen or Scotland, Colchester or England and La Rochelle or France and demonstrates how complex the pattern of demographic and commercial growth was. Several debates, constructed first around luxury and secondly around commercial competition, and ultimately situated in Enlightenment discourses on female nature, converged on the high-status needle trades. Thus women became the milliners and marchandes de modes of European towns, producing the high-class haberdashery and dresses which fashion demanded. Partnerships were important to many women in business, since sharing costs gave them an edge in the business world, as well as the potential for successful independence.
