Cap

Public Access Description:

This cap was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

Labour in the wool industry was significantly affected by gender. Men and women kept sheep and worked as sheep-shearers, but men were paid around 16% more than women for the same work. Wool-spinning in early modern England was predominantly performed by women and children, and enabled women to earn a meagre living wage. Spinning was also ideologically gendered: all women were encouraged to spin in order to keep their hands and minds busy at a chaste, productive task.

The 1571 Cappers’ Act mandated the wearing of these caps for ‘Every Person above the Age of seven Years... Except Maids, Ladies, Gentlewomen, Noble Personages [and other aristocratic men and clerics]’. Hats signalled social status, and headwear was also a focus of gender conformity and nonconformity. Clergyman Thomas Stoughton referred to men with long hair, and women with short hair and hats, as having ‘changed their sexe’; while the ‘man-woman’ in the 1620 pamphlet Hic Mulier is condemned for their “cloudy Ruffianly broad-brim’d Hatte, and wanton Feather”. The coif or headdress was considered more appropriate for women than the hat: its capacity to metonymically signal female dress is demonstrated by the sentence passed against Thomas(ine) Hall in Virginia in 1623, which forced Hall to make visible their self-proclaimed status as ‘both man and woeman’ by wearing men’s clothing with a coif, cross-cloth (triangular forehead cloth) and apron. This meant that, for women or other people assigned female at birth who wanted to express masculinity, hats were a particularly powerful signifier: this type of cap, which was legally circumscribed as male, was arguably even more so.

Curatorial comment:

This cap was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam.

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

There is a discrepancy between Search the Collections and the gallery labels about which of the 12 similar caps held by the V&A are actually on display: Search the Collections says that 1562&A-1901, 1565-1901 and 742-1904 are on display, whereas the gallery labels list 741-1904, 1570-1901 and 1566-1901. The latter matches the appearance of the objects in the gallery.

Spinning wool and flax, which produced the raw materials of caps like this one, was convenient for women in that it could be carried out alongside other household tasks, but poorly paid: in England, a woman could earn about 3 or 4 pence a day through wool-spinning. A loaf of bread cost about a halfpenny, meaning that it was possible to survive but not thrive on the income from wool-spinning; this was, however, a better outlook than for flax-spinners, who did not earn a living wage. The wool and linen trades were profitable for merchants, but not for the suppliers of its raw materials. Meanwhile, their increasingly frequent downturns adversely affected women not just by reducing their income, but by forcing unemployed men to leave their families in search of work further afield. Some women wrote against the cultural discourse that encouraged women to spin, frustrated at the curtailing of their mental and physical autonomy, but their impact was limited.

Women were also involved in other aspects of the wool trade, such as burling, bleaching and fulling – though the fourteenth-century statutes of the Fullers’ Guild of Lincoln forbade men and women to work together on fulling behind closed doors, probably for reasons of propriety.

Capmaking was regulated by cappers’ guilds, which admitted women as apprentices, cappers and widows taking over their husbands’ businesses. Feltmakers’ guilds are likely to have also played a role in caps like this one, which are partly felted. Importantly, however, women were excluded from being described as cappers or feltmakers: professional identities were an exclusively male domain, even if the profession itself was mixed-gender.

The phrasing of the 1571 Cappers’ Act – ‘Every Person above the Age of seven Years... Except Maids, Ladies, Gentlewomen, Noble Personages [etc.]’ – is an example of what Hilda Smith calls early modern ‘false universal’ discourse, in which ‘human’ is conflated with ‘man’. This discourse has important implications for historiographical methodology: as Smith argues, ‘Although we are most apt to think the greatest potential for excluding women is their simple omission, in reality, thought patterns and popular expressions that encourage the visual and linguistic linkage of men to the universal human condition are more significant.’ This argument can be extended to any marginalised group: in Europe the ‘universal human condition’ is also conflated with whiteness, heterosexuality etc.

As a result of the capacity of hats to signal social status, the term ‘flat-cap’ and references to woollen caps became metonyms for a citizen of London. As noted elsewhere, hats and other headwear were also a focus of anxiety about the gender nonconformity of women and other people assigned female at birth. Gestures involving hats were also gendered: since it was polite for a man to doff his hat to a woman, women who chose to make this gesture were enacting a gendered transgression. Since gender nonconformity in women was associated with sexual transgression, depictions of women in hats also functioned to insinuate this.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: F.P. Dutton & Co., 1919)
• Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
• James R. Planché, An Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Costume (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003)
• Wichelns, K., ‘From the Scarlet Letter to Stonewall: Reading the 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall Case, 1978-2009’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12:3 (2014), 500-523.
   

Further reading

• Erica Fudge, ‘The Animal Face of Early Modern England’, Theory, Culture & Society, 30:7/8 (2013), 177-98
• Brian W. Gastle, ‘Breaking the Stained Glass Ceiling: Mercantile Authority, Margaret Paston, and Margery Kempe’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 36:1 (2003), 123-47
• Maria Hayward, ‘The Sign of Some Degree'?: The Financial, Social and Sartorial Significance of Male Headwear at the Courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI’, Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society, 36 (2002), 1-17
• Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Women apprentices in the trades and crafts of early modern Bristol’, Continuity and Change 6 (2), 227-252
• Jane Malcolm-Davies and Hilary Davidson, ‘“He is of no account … if he have not a velvet or taffeta hat”: A survey of sixteenth century knitted caps’, in Aspects of the Design, Production and Use of Textiles and Clothing from the Bronze Age to the Early Modern Era, ed. by Karina Grömer and Frances Pritchard (Budapest: Archaeolingua, 2015)
• Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
• Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies, The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing Sixteenth-century Dress (London: Batsford, 2006)
• Dave Postles, ‘‘Flatcaps’, Fashioning and Civility in Early-Modern England’, Literature & History, 17.2 (2008), 1-13
• Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002)