ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a few illustrations of the interaction between pauper women and local authorities of the Hanoverian state. Here the worlds of rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled, met yet they interacted according to a set of orderly and stylized procedures, and within a face-to-face society and community rather than an impersonal and bureaucratic system. Women did raise their voices and participate in the public sphere, and they did so with the same ingenuity they needed to survive the strain of the harsh economic and demographic regimes which the vast majority of eighteenth-century women faced every day of their brief lives. Pauper women approached the courts and challenged local authorities with the expectation of redress of grievances and in some cases with positive results. The experiences of individuals such as Elizabeth Elless and Sarah Davies reveal an economic vulnerability that should lacerate complacency from those of us who inhabit the non-catastrophic world.
