ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century, a number of shifts took place in urban commerce. These included changes in guild practices, alterations to burgess rights and a growing commercial culture based on increasing trade and consumption. They altered the gendered characteristics of Scottish town economies, transforming the structures within which women had to operate. Yet, many consciously continued to work in the commercial world, defining and shaping their commercial enterprises within the urban context. Clearly there were social differences in the impact of these changes, with little effect for some women – they needed to work and continued to do so, often in time-honoured ways. Many were entrepreneurial in small ways, while others were able to utilize a larger array of resources to develop and sustain their commercial activities. This chapter probes some of these lives looking primarily at the ways women positioned themselves in their working world, examining experiences of trade with a particular focus on the gendered relationships within those physical and ideological spaces. The focus is unashamedly on the entrepreneurial strategies women used and how they were active agents in forging their commercial identities. We can hear women’s voices through their activities in the commercial market, through the ways they conducted business and the ways they used the materials of this world. This ‘snapshot’ is part of a larger historiography, which has been revising our view of women in towns over the last 15 years. While the chapter is explicitly about Scottish urban experience, drawing primarily from primary sources on Aberdeen, it is situated in the context of a broader study of gender in the European town, so that the chapter shows how Aberdeen and other Scottish towns reflected wider developments but also how their unique character flavoured women’s experience.
