My current project explores the relationship between the rhetoric about a masculine economy and women's threat to it and the lived experience of women workers in eighteenth-century England. I am engaged with the ways in which public spaces (both literary and material) were appropriated by competing interests in constructing a gendered identity for England's economy. In particular, I am concerned with the millinery trade and the tug-of-war about its respectability--and consequently the respectability of its (mostly female) practitioners. Despite sometimes frantic calls to forestall what was labeled as "improper" (i.e. feminine) economic activity, women continued not only to work, but to advertise publicly their involvement in the economic sphere.
Fields of Interest
Early Modern & Modern Britain & Europe
World History
Theory, Methods & Critical Thinking
Sharlene Sayegh
Department of History
Education
BA, MA University of Nevada, Las
Vegas
PhD. University of California, Irvine