My vague sense of the period is that socio-cultural restraints were generally stronger on upper class women who were expected to be exemplars of their sex, so I'm certainly more interested in that slice, although I don't want to cut out any interesting angles that this question might cover within the lower segments of society.
My impression also is that the most easy way to have "independence" was to be a widow, probably with a young son who wasn't able to control his fortune himself. To be sure I'm also not cutting out them (although open to correction if I'm wrong there), but what I'm really interested is in those who aren't granted it by unfortunate (or fortunate?) circumstance. That is to say, a young woman raised in a good family, makes a fairly average marriage, and begins motherhood, or, of course, a woman from a good family who remains unmarried yet wants to do more than join a nunnery, or be an old maid in her father's house.
What avenues were available to women such as these to maintain a sense of self and control within the expectations of the society she lived in?
Of course, women in this period didn’t have a lot of agency that we would have associated with independence. However, there are examples of expected female roles that did have a certain amount of agency and independent creativity associated with them, which happened also, like widows, in circumstances where a male presence was removed from their lives. For example, in early modern England, women from all classes, even poor, illiterate women, were expected to petition to the nobility and even the monarchy in situations in which their husband/brother/son/father were facing legal jeopardy.
Women would skillfully utilize tropes of the day, such as propagandistic monarchical images and broadly understood sympathetic traits to try to secure the release of their male relatives. This particularly worked when petitioning female monarchs, such as Queen Anne. Women would compare themselves and even position themselves as “her majesties poor daughter” (petition of Martha Elton, British State Papers) in order to try to flatter themselves to a queen who portrayed herself as mother of a nation. Women also leaned into stereotypes about themselves, stressing their weakness and inability to survive and take care of their children without a man.
The fact that women, even illiterate ones*, were able to understand and manipulate these rhetorical techniques shows some level of independence and freethinking that we often consider impossible for early modern women. However, this role as petitioner only worked when a male figure was removed from their lives so obviously it’s not like independence was possible in normal settings. It is remarkable however the agency that these women of all classes had in securing the release of their release of their relatives. These everyday common women were frequently successful in these petitions and ironically expressed large amounts of agency that is still documented today in order to have the protecting male presence in their life return. Women were able to craftily make some real change in the world and even directly communicate with the most powerful person in England while exerting agency. So no, I don’t think that you can discount early modern women from having independence. While it doesn’t follow how we would see it, in their own way Early Modern English common women at least were able to act of their own accord.
*you may wonder how illiterate women were able to petition, the letters were always scribal but because many women petitioned several times with different scribes but the same unique message shows they brought their own ideas.
Sources: My own research, a published article entitled To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty: Women’s Criminal Petitions to Queen Anne of England (which I can send upon request) of which this argument can be based on the work of James Daybell. “Scripting a Female Voice: Women’s Epistolary Rhetoric in Sixteenth- Century Letters of Petitions.” Women’s Writing, vol. 13, no. 1 (2006): 3-22.
I can speak to the late medieval period, and 1500s/1600s. The answer is, unfortunately, largely no: there were no real routes for a woman to become "independent" in the modern sense of successfully running her own business and becoming self-sufficient. This is due to the expectations that women would primarily run the household, and systematic roadblocks created to keep women from advancing to the top of any trade, even in widowhood. This is true for both women in rural villages and women in towns and cities.
Women's jobs, first and foremost, were to maintain her household. This includes chores like lighting the fire, warming porridge, doing housekeeping, going to the well to retrieve water for cleaning and laundry, and visiting local shops to purchase necessities for the family. Rural women were also expected to take care of livestock and keep gardens. Women in cities might also help their husbands in their shops. Both were also expected to be the sole caretakers and educators of children. These jobs were time consuming and physically demanding, precluding women from working full time outside the home.
But before getting into what work women did outside their household duties, we must first understand the economy of early modern Europe. Populations were steadily rising and the wealth from colonies in the Americas reaching Europe was causing inflation, and governments were increasingly interfering in labor by trying to regulate who did what jobs, pushing the economy more and more toward a capitalist style that dropped wages and displaced worker. Unemployment was on the rise, and in this type of situation women were the first to have their wages cut and to be systematically pushed out of the work force.
This was accomplished by not allowing women to become apprentices, and thus barring them from achieving expertise (and the resulting higher wages that would come with it) in any one trade. Women also were, on the whole, not allowed to become members of guilds, and thus had no part in determining wages, prices, and collection of resources. Even in rural areas, women's income was limited; a statute from 1388 decrees that women laborers should earn a shilling less that plowmen. By 1495 this disparity increased, and another statue declared that women's annual income be 10 shillings while men received 16 shillings.
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