Earning and learning: girlhood in pre-industrial Europe [1]

Adolescence was a recognised and significant stage in the life cycle of eighteenth-century girls. It was utilised across Europe and across classes to ‘bring up’ girls, to provide them with the knowledge and social understanding they needed on reaching adulthood. For most, marriage would mark the end of adolescence, and the skills, knowledge, customs and indeed dowries that most had acquired were the necessary perquisites to set them up as a married adult woman. Girls followed many routes, but service was the mainstay of this period of their life, whether in their homes or the homes of others, whether as apprentices, or contracted servants, or whether as simple employees. This article explores the routes girls followed: schooling, service at home, as apprentices, and as servants either in farm or industrial work or as domestic servants. The role of ‘upbringing’ and transmission of culture are fundamental to our understanding of female adolescence. Also, it is important to recognise that girls themselves had a hand in making decisions about how they would traverse these years. So while adolescence had significance within the social constructions of eighteenth-century Europe, it also had meaning for the girls themselves.