Lace and Place: Women's business in occupational communities in England

While the occupational community was a common feature of work in the European past, it has been little analysed apart from the salient exception of Mary Prior's Fisher Row. Analysis of lace-making communities shows the interdependent elements of work; the geographical concentration of the lace trade, and the ways in which the trade was perpetuated through sibling groups, through skills passed from mothers to daughters or where work took place in religious communities or in apprenticeship systems that closely approximated to families.