This article explores how the reputations and agency of middling and plebeian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were affected by what they wore. Compared with provincial England, markets for women's clothes in the capital were more diverse and accessible. Ambiguous moral judgments were made of women based on their dress, but many sought to acquire good, fashionable attire as the right clothes would improve their options in terms of courtship, sociability and employment, as well as facilitating their ability to negotiate the metropolitan environment and providing them with a ready store of capital. Clothes were thus contested commodities which helped define the limits of the possible for women in early modern London.

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In 1650, the author of a pamphlet defending women cited the advice of Solomon in order to urge his male readers not to be contentious and hateful, but to love their wives, hoping that the words of such a 'wise man' would:. . . quell those foolish mens follies which utter and write such invectives, and fantastic revilings, taunts, and iests against women, for these are those wicked spirits the Devills Agents, which soweth discord, and breedeth contentions, kindling the coles of strife, hatred, and disdaine in divers families betwixt man and wife never perswading to peace, love or unity, which should hide and cover all domestick iarrs or trespasses; and they make as though a woman were but as a meere cipher, and stood for nothing. 1In referring to those who wrote and uttered 'iests against women', the pamphleteer may have been thinking of the authors and readers of jest-books, cheap printed texts that reveal much about gender relations and the politics of plebeian households in early modern England, albeit through the darkened glass of sexist bigotry. The following examination of several seventeenth-century jest-books suggests that their misogynist humour pleased some sorts of men, while others found it offensive, building on and reinforcing recent scholarship on patriarchy and meanings of manhood in early modern England. 2 Patriarchy as an analytical concept has come to define the writing of histories of women, gender and masculinity. Judith Bennett has been a forthright and pioneering advocate of such an approach, arguing that feminist scholars should examine the enduring nature of patriarchy in its many forms in order to explain how women as victims and agents colluded in, undermined and survived this dominant gender ideology. 3 In her most recent work, Bennett continues to emphasise the need to explain how the 'patriarchal equilibrium' was maintained, and to consider both continuities and transformations in women's experiences and gender relations. 4 Following Bennett's lead, Anthony Fletcher argued that changing theories about the body in early modern England led to new readings of gender and the refashioning of patriarchy through the reconstruction and reinterpretation of theology, philosophy, law and custom. Fletcher emphasised the role of culture in this process, arguing that proverbs, drama and cheap print reflected male anxieties about the instability of patriarchy and the disorderliness of female behaviour. 5 The jocular nature of much C

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