The existing body of research on the 17th-century Dutch genre paintings tends to view their women subjects as signs that embody female virtues upheld by the mainstream society. Such a symbolic reading is based on Jacob Cats’s influential Houwelick (1625) where the author divides a woman’s life-cycle into six phases, touting cardinal virtues that a lady is obliged to realize at each phase. A mother (Moeder), for instance, should devote herself to child-rearing. This study, however, notes that the Dutch women and their societal roles at the time were by no means confined to housekeeping and child-rearing. Rather, they were actively involved in a broad range of business practices: weaving, fishing, peddling, and store-running to name just a few. This essay draws attention to the female characters of the Dutch genre paintings, particularly those who are engaged in extra-household, commercial activities. It illuminates the ways in which the paintings portray the wives supporting their family businesses, the girls exercising their paid labors, and the widows independently running their stores. The painted ladies also represent the vast number of consumers who gave rise to an unprecedented economic prosperity called the Industrious Revolution in the 17th-century Netherlands. Consequently, this study suggests that the Dutch artists must have found in the female workers and consumers another image of ideal woman to be registered in their paintings.

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20 Honig, Elizabeth Alice, "Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered" Cambridge University Press 187-201, 1997

21 Schmidt, Ariadne, "Labour Ideologies and Women in the Northern Netherlands, c. 1500-1800" 56 : 45-67, 2011

22 Cats, Jacob, "Houwelick" Jan Pieterss vande Venne 1625

23 Peacock, Martha Moffitt, "Geertruydt Roghman and the Female Perspective in 17th-Century Dutch Genre Imagery" 14 : 3-10, 1994

24 Stone-Ferrier, Linda, "Gabriel Metsu" Yale University Press 72-95, 2010

25 Sachs, Hans, "Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden" Frankfurt am Main 1568

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27 Franits, Wayne, "Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution" Yale University Press 2004

28 Stone-Ferrier, Linda, "Dutch Prints of Daily Life: Mirrors of Life or Masks of Morals?" The Spencer Museum of Art 1983

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30 Honig, Elizabeth Alice, "Desire and Domestic Economy" 83 (83): 294-315, 2001

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32 Baer, Ronni, "Class Distinctions : Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer" MFA Pub 2015

33 Barnes, Donna R., "Childhood Pleasures : Dutch Children in the Seventeenth Century" Syracuse University Press 2012

34 Moryson, Fynes, "An itinerary containing his ten yeeres travell through the twelve dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Sweitzerlnad, Netherland, Denmarke, Poland, Italy, Turky, France, England, Scotland & Ireland. 4 vols" Glasgow 1907

35 Cats, Jacob, "Alle de wercken" Amsterdam 1700