The ties that buy : women and commerce in revolutionary America / Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hartigan-O'Connor, Ellen.

Series:

Early American studies.

Early American studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Households--Economic aspects--United States--History--18th century.

Households.

Women--Economic conditions.

Women.

United States--Commerce--History--18th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (260 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2009.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In 1770, tavernkeeper Abigail Stoneman called in her debts by flourishing a handful of playing cards before the Rhode Island Court of Common Pleas. Scrawled on the cards were the IOUs of drinkers whose links to Stoneman testified to women's paradoxical place in the urban economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stoneman did traditional women's work-boarding, feeding, cleaning, and selling alcohol-but her customers, like her creditors, underscore her connections to an expansive commercial society. These connections are central to The Ties That Buy.Historian Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor traces the lives of urban women in early America to reveal how they used the ties of residence, work, credit, and money to shape consumer culture at a time when the politics of the marketplace was gaining national significance. Covering the period 1750-1820, the book analyzes how women such as Stoneman used and were used by shifting forms of credit and cash in an economy transitioning between neighborly exchanges and investment-oriented transactions. In this world, commerce reached into every part of life. At the hearths of multifamily homes, renters, lodgers, and recent acquaintances lived together and struck financial deals for survival. Landladies, enslaved washerwomen, shopkeepers, and hucksters sustained themselves by serving the mobile population. A new economic practice in America-shopping-mobilized hierarchical and friendly relationships into wide-ranging consumer networks that depended on these same market connections.Rhetoric emerging after the Revolution downplayed the significance of expanding female economic life in the interest of stabilizing the political order. But women were quintessential market participants, with fluid occupational identities, cross-class social and economic connections, and a firm investment in cash and commercial goods for power and meaning.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Urban Housefuls

Chapter 2. Work in the Atlantic Service Economy

Chapter 3. Family Credit and Shared Debts

Chapter 4. Translating Money

Chapter 5. Shopping Networks and Consumption as Collaboration

Chapter 6 The Republic of Goods

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-242) and index.

ISBN:

9781283897846

1283897849

9780812203943

0812203941

OCLC:

802047770