Uncovering the hidden histories of women in the Stationers' Company

For centuries, the Worshipful Company of Stationers has played a central role in London’s print and book trades. It was originally established as a guild representing people involved in printing and related crafts such as bookbinding, engraving and bookselling. Over time its role expanded. Today the Company represents professionals working across the wider content and communications industries, including paper and print production, publishing, packaging, newspapers, broadcasting and digital media.

Women are well represented in the UK content and communications industries today (for instance, 55% of people identify as women in PR and Communications in 2025), but there remains a gender pay gap of 17% (PRCA, 2025). Women’s contributions to print production have long been devalued, though interesting histories emerge from the archives when we look closely. Can today’s membership see themselves represented in the 600-year old records of the Company? And when they do, what do they find?

Women in the records

The Stationers’ Company was established as a means of controlling the London printing trades. Control was exerted over copyright, press licences, and the right to trade, protecting its membership from plagiarism, unorthodoxy, and rival enterprises. It also excluded women, who were not formally admitted to the Livery until 1933, though women entered the Company through apprenticeships from the seventeenth century onwards.

Nevertheless, women contributed in diverse ways to the work of the Company and to the London book trades over the centuries. In terms of their participation in guild-recognised trade, they could be admitted to the Company as a widow or daughter taking over a deceased husband’s or father’s role. Members by widowhood or patrimony had the right to trade and bind apprentices at Stationers’ Hall and were eligible for Freedom but not Livery. These women feature in the archives, where we see them buying and selling copy, owning businesses, managing apprentices, and masterminding the production of the nation’s books.

Reading between the lines

Because of the centralisation of much of the British book trades in London until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the records of the Stationers’ Company are a primary source for the history of women’s work in the book trades. They reveal much about the labour of the significant minority of women formally recognised by the Company, whose lives and works those records preserve, at the same time as they speak volumes about women’s exclusion from the public life of bookselling in the early modern period. Many more women than feature in the archives contributed to the London press from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The research project

The British-Academy funded Innovation Fellowship project, ‘Communicating Women’s Work in the Historical Archive’, co-led by Drs Ruth Frendo and Helen Williams, recovers some of the narratives of women’s contributions to the Company whilst building a network of archivists and academics considering modern archival practice for gender inclusion today. The project has five main outputs: a finding aid, an online exhibition, an animation, trans-inclusion and feminist leadership training for archives professionals, and a forthcoming report on gender-inclusion in UK archives and libraries.

The animation above outlines some of the contributions of women to the Stationers’ Company from their earliest involvement to the present, and directs viewers to the finding aid introduced in a follow-up blog post as well as our online exhibition on the history of women in the Company. The animation, exhibition, and finding aid are just three entry points to consider how to approach the rich and extensive history of women in the Company as evident in (and hidden between the lines of) the archives of the Company and digitised in Literary Print Culture, on this International Women’s Day.

For a transcript of the above animation, click here.

For more information on AM’s Literary Print Culture, including pricing, please request a demo.

For updates on the project, visit the website Women Making Books.

Further Reading:

• Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Woman and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
• Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
• Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., The Stationers’ Company and the Book Trade 1550-1990 (London: Oak Knoll, 1997).