Female Hucksters and Produce Markets in the Great Lakes Region, 1830s–1890s

Abstract

Female Hucksters and Produce Markets in the Great Lakes Region, 1830s–1890s Debra A. Reid (bio) Mary Judge had seen a bit of the world by the time she became a vendor at Detroit's City Hall Market. She remained a market fixture until her death. For over thirty years, newspaper reporters linked her, more than any other individual, with one cause célèbre, the city's public market. Judge catered to journalists, no doubt, but her entire cohort of female growers and hucksters found themselves in the news often. The media did not recognize them for bringing food to market, daily, between April and November. Instead, journalists often linked market women to the problems that the city hoped to solve if it closed the market. Vendors' wagons clogged downtown streets and created a public hazard, while their boisterous tactics and perceived unladylike behavior allegedly bordered on abuse. The media went even further by stressing the private challenges that individual women faced as evidence of the familial and social risks that resulted when women operated their businesses outside the bounds of patriarchy. This perpetuated the argument that the only good woman was a dutiful wife or ward working selflessly for a family's economic solvency. Judge's market story fits patterns well-documented in women's history. She became part of a sixty-year-old formal economy when she opened her stand in 1863. Yet, she selectively complied with regulations or outright defied them as need arose. Serena Zabin has documented comparable tactics among "poor white women" in colonial cities, women that she describes as "the linchpins" of informal economies. These women conducted business at a time when few women operated businesses outside the home, and most kept house and tended families under patriarchal authority. These informal economies continued into the early national period. Zabin argues, however, that informal trade and the poor White women who conducted it became [End Page 51] increasingly marginalized as common law perpetuated White male authority over commerce, earnings, real and personal property, and over the welfare of White men's wives, families, and wards.1 In Detroit, males authorized, regulated, administered, and managed the public market from its beginning. The first authorization coincided with Detroit's incorporation as part of the Old Northwest Territory in 1802. Then, city trustees established a market at the Detroit River and authorized appointment of a clerk to manage it. Little detail about this market exists, but in 1816, trustees approved construction of a market house in the center of Woodward Avenue below Jefferson Avenue (on the Detroit River side), financed with tax revenue. The markets in St. Louis, also a French-influenced midwestern city, followed a similar pattern with a market in the center of a wide avenue. Male clerks appointed by an elected common council administered the market.3 Growers, hucksters, and customers alike reflected Detroit's multi-ethnic population, with Indigenous, French, British, and Black and White Americans often crossing the fluid border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Antiquarian Silas Farmer romanticized this as he described the "black-eyed, olive-skinned maidens … from the Canada shore" who brought "garden-sauce and greens" to the earliest markets in little carts pulled by French ponies. In contrast, a newspaper account indicated that little demand for garden produce existed. Instead, many residents raised what they needed, and elderly men hauled surplus to the city markets in wheelbarrows. Only a few stands operated regularly, and they sold "celery, beets, lettuce, and similar vegetables, poultry and the like."4 Each ethnic group brought different perceptions of female status and authority to market operations, but the legal status of the women at the market resulted from a transfer of English common-law procedures to the new midwestern context. Elizabeth Brown has concluded that justices in the Wayne County court of Michigan Territory did not improvise, nor did they deviate from precedent. Instead, they followed English common-law procedures, as had justices in the eastern seaboard states. Changing situations prompted additional analyses, however, especially in the case of women, commerce, and property law. Justices cited two books in their decisions addressing the legal status of married women (femme covert) and single women...