This is for one of my best friends. An article I found on the history of alewives.
By the 1500s, the church had had it with alewives. They were usurping the structures the church had been using to strip women of their agency and autonomy for over a thousand years. Land ownership? Nah, alewives just needed a cauldron. Husbands? Nah, alewvives didn’t need any land. Alewives were perfectly capable of making money without men. They were, quite literally, destroying the patriarchy with their beer.
So go forth and destroy the patriarchy! Drown it in your beery goodness!
Also, going to toot my own horn here, but my historical spy thriller features a London alewife who knows much more than she lets on…
Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England
Despite these obstacles, some women did secure licenses, especially licenses for alehouse-keeping. … Yet the women licensed to keep alehouses in the sixteenth century and later constituted not only a small minority of licensees but also a small minority of a particular sort: they were almost invariably widows.
Judith Bennett