Late medieval Coventry attracted so many in-migrating singlewomen that it might have seemed a city of women — for every ten women, only seven men. Some of these peasants-turned-townswomen supported themselves as labourers, domestic servants or prostitutes, but it was the demand for their industrial labour as spinners of cloth-yarn and cap-yarn that drew most women to the city. Coventry’s merchants and masters, who needed spinners’ work but deplored women’s autonomy, tried with considerable success to push these spinners into supervised living within the city’s established households. The experiences of Coventry’s singlewoman-spinners show that ‘maidservants’ were sometimes industrial workers; that singlewomen were corralled into ‘little commonwealths’ well before Protestantism; and that ‘girl power’ was more about economic growth than the empowerment of women.

中文翻译：

---

需要但遗憾：考文垂工业中的纺纱厂和单身女性，约 1490-1525 年


中世纪晚期的考文垂吸引了如此多的移民单身女性，以至于它似乎是一座女性之城——每 10 名女性中，只有 7 名男性。这些农民出身的城镇妇女中，有的以劳工、家庭佣人或的身份自给自足，但吸引大多数妇女来到这座城市的是她们作为纺布纱和帽纱的工业劳动的需求。考文垂的商人和师傅需要纺纱工的工作，但对妇女的自主权感到遗憾，他们试图将这些纺纱工推入该市成熟家庭的监督生活，并取得了相当大的成功。考文垂的单身女性纺纱工的经历表明，“女仆”有时是产业工人;单身女性在新教之前就被关进了“小联邦”;而“女孩力量”更多的是关于经济增长，而不是赋予女性权力。