Mary Anne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett. “Crafts, Guilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale.”

Kowaleski, Mary Anne and Judith Bennett. “Crafts, Guilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale.” Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 11-38.

This will likely be a succinct post, but the essay in question is to the point and clear in its discussion of women and guild involvement in late medieval England. Building off of the work done in Marian K. Dale's 1933 article, Kowaleski and Bennett plot out the role of guilds in women's labor, protections, and freedoms. Acknowledging some of the advantages that guild participation provided for women, Kowaleski and Bennett spend the larger portion of this essay  discussing how that participation could in itself be restrictive. Women who had gained membership in late medieval guilds were often treated as second class members, paying lower dues but also afforded far fewer protections and privileges than their male counterparts. Unlike male guild members, women were seldom granted journeyman status, instead serving as apprentices in their masters' shops until they married, entering into their husbands' trade instead. The wives of guild members, including high ranking ones, were afforded some further privileges, yet these tended to be only through their current husbands; a widow who remarried could face expulsion from the guild entirely, let alone denial of those benefits. Generally speaking, Kowaleski and Bennett argue that with a few exceptions the medieval guild structure offered more social and economic limitations than freedoms for women. 

Interestingly, Kowaleski and Bennett's article is followed by a reprint of the original Marian K. Dale article, which I will return to at a later date for my work with Emare. The focus of that article, and of a portion of Kowaleski and Bennett's essay, is of the briefly successful London women silk workers. While not able to form a full guild, for a time this group of women were able to maintain their trade independence and even petitioned (and received) several protections from parliament. Unfortunately, this was short lived as by the 16th and 17th century men pushed into their trade in London, eventually edging these women out entirely. For my Emare work, I want to particularly look into Dale's suggestion that "[s]ilkworking was a true 'myster' ... a skilled craft with secrets of production and trade passed only from mistress to apprentice" (17).