Playing the Feminine Card: Women of the Early Modern Map Trade

Images of allegorical women have often appeared on maps or in atlas frontispieces as objects in need of security provided by male protectors or as the counterpoint, objects to be dominated by male possessors. Exploring the role of women in the early modern map trade initially reveals not only a similar male dominance but also similar calls for protection. Nearly 10 years ago, Alice Hudson and Mary McMichael Ritzlin produced a checklist of about 300 pre-twentieth-century women in cartography. The present work contributes to the further investigation of some of these women in the early modern map trade and studies in the allied field of book printing, and more general works on women in commercial trade provide the framework for this piece. Women in the map trade were quite cognizant of the challenges of their gender and used a feminine discourse – that is, they played the feminine card – when it served their interests. All of these women, however, participated in the male discourse of the corporate communit...