The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice

Abstract

Despite a common view that the appeal of early modern street literature was to a predominantly male audience,¹ there is ample evidence that the broadside ballad had a particular appeal for women. Any account of its reception history would notice the many references in the period to the popularity of ballad singing with young women. It is claimed that, in the eighteenth century, most professional ballad singers were women,² but in the seventeenth century, though a woman pedlar sometimes helped a male partner to sell ballads, there were only a few women actually known to have sung publicly before the Restoration.³ The traditional, or folk ballad, was commonly transmitted through women’s singing;⁴ there are many references in the seventeenth century to women in domestic situations singing ballads of all kinds, and there is a strong tradition of female transmission from early times up to the nineteenth century.⁵ The histories of the traditional and the broadside ballad are closely interconnected,⁶ and it would be misleading to regard them as completely separate genres, even if their origins might appear to be antithetical. Singing, like story telling, was very much a woman’s act in the early modern period, and the ballad, though produced as a printed object available to be read, was sold to an audience by a singer and circulated as much by singing as by reading.