Dowd investigates literature's engagement with the gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists created to describe the lives of working women.

Labours of Love: Female Servants and the Marriage Plot The Spatial Syntax of Midwifery and Wetnursing Divine Drudgery: The Spiritual Logic of Housework Household Pedagogies: Female Educators and the Language of Legacy

"Dowd has written a rewarding, well-researched study of the ways social conditions, social mobility, gender, and literary culture interacted in early modern England." - Studies in English Literature"Throughout Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Dowd elucidates how the stories of women as workers helped to make women culturally legible in a book at once readable and compelling." - Renaissance Quarterly"Dowd makes an extremely valuable and strongly feminist addition to the field of early modern studies of gender, economics, and culture, since she shows with great specificity how stories about work served surprisingly often to extend women's sense of themselves and their own potential." - Shakespeare Quarterly "In this richly drawn and fascinating study, Dowd makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the variegated forms of early modern women s working lives during a period of enormous social, religious, and economic change . . .By juxtaposing texts written by and about female servants, midwives, and educators, she affords her readers multiple perspectives on working women as both subjects and objects of discourse." - Natasha Korda, Associate Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University "Dowd offers an innovative reading of women s work . . .with its careful attention to the various ways in which the efforts of female workers appeared in early modern texts, Women s Work advancesour understanding of the relation between literary form and social content during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." - Douglas Bruster, The University of Texas at Austin and author of Shakespeare and the Question of Culture "Both careful and provocative, Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture advances our understanding of the complexly intertwined histories of women, work, social change, and literary form." - Frances E. Dolan, author of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy