Gendered Mobility and the Identification of Women in Seventeenth-Century London

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This study will examine the methods of identification applied to women in the increasingly mobile environment of seventeenth-century London. I aim to develop an analysis which centres the agency of the identified women themselves, and to challenge understandings of the history of identification as one of the unchecked expansion of state bureaucracy by revealing identification as a heterogeneous and frequently contested process. This study will examine the impacts of mobility on the identification of a broad array of women, including female vagrants, women tried for crimes which subverted identification, women who requested relief under the Poor Laws, transnationally mobile women, and women in maritime communities. My central research question is: why was gender central to the identification of mobile women?