Women Entrepreneurs in English Spa Towns

This paper examines business practices of female entrepreneurs in early modern spa towns. Natural spring spas in Britain have long been understood as sites of late seventeenth century sociability, but their representations to date have usually been dominated by men's voices and understandings. This paper will illustrate how spas throughout Britain – but mainly at the towns of Bath, Tunbridge and Epsom – were described and experienced by the women who worked in proximity to them: confectioners and hostellers, fruit-sellers and dressmakers, women who sold beer to spa patrons and those who spent each day soaked to the skin, leading bathers through the waters as ‘bathing-guides.' At British spas, women could choose to bathe, eat, entertain and do business within a largely female community. Spa towns were places where the female population was larger than the male population, socioeconomically diverse, and widely visible. While statistical data is scarce, two very brief examples from the city of Bath are suggestive of the kinds of very evident, interactive spaces inhabited by women of varying stations in spa towns. The first is represented in Bath's two almshouses, which housed three times more women than men. Almshouse records also attest to the visible presence of poor women working at the spas and in town, washing clothes, caring for those indigents allowed access to the mineral waters, cleaning public buildings, all as recompense for their upkeep. The second brief example comes from Bath's highly visible female presence in trades which guaranteed interaction with visiting bathers: between 1640 and 1740, women applied to the Bath Corporation for deeds to run shops and lodging houses; these records show that one woman oversaw a slaughterhouse and another, a coffeehouse, while a large number of women, claiming status as ‘spinsters,' applied for deeds to manage brew and public houses.