(Women's) Money Makes the World Go 'Round

Abstract

(Women's) Money Makes the World Go 'Round Cynthia A. Kierner (bio) Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor . The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 253 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. Frances Swallow was a familiar figure in colonial Charleston's thriving commercial community. By October 1766, when she placed a notice in the South Carolina Gazette informing patrons of her upcoming trip to London to purchase fashionable goods, she was widely known both as a successful milliner and her husband's business partner. When he fell on hard times and left for debtors' prison, she continued to sell millinery and other items at their Charleston store. As a wife and then later as a widow, Swallow also ran a boarding school in her house to support herself and her six children. When the imperial crisis limited her access to British imports, she opened a tavern, which she continued to operate after remarrying in 1774.1 Historians know about Frances Swallow and her sort in part because this elite group of female entrepreneurs advertised their goods and services, but the economic activities of the vast majority of women, who had neither reason nor resources to publicize their work, are far more difficult to uncover. Building on the work of scholars like Christine Stansell, who found women's work essential among the urban poor in an age of capitalist transformation (City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 [1982]), and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who discovered a subterranean female economy in post-revolutionary rural Maine (A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 [1990]), Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor mines private papers, newspapers, census data, city directories, and court records in search of women's economic activities. Her chief contributions are describing the varied ways in which women from across the social spectrum participated in economic life and showing that women were central actors in the story of early American commercial development. Hartigan-O'Connor argues persuasively that shifting bonds of commerce and credit, both formal and informal, were "central to the lives of thousands of unexceptional women in the years surrounding the American Revolution" (p. 2). Focusing on the decades between 1750 and 1820, she painstakingly [End Page 215] reconstructs women's economic activities and networks in Charleston, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, two bustling commercial centers that, in 1776, were the fourth and fifth largest cities, respectively, in British colonial America. The fact that Hartigan-O'Connor examines a thriving southern city and a declining northern one makes her case all the more compelling and suggests that urban residence—regardless of geographic location—had a profound and generally beneficial impact on women's lives. Hartigan-O'Connor finds women engaging in economic transactions in public markets, stores, taverns, and also in less obvious places, including their own houses, where many profited by unconventional living arrangements in what demographers call housefuls. Situations in which several small households shared living space were common in these early American cities, especially among female-headed households. Census records indicate, for instance, that 15 percent of the female-headed households in Charleston in 1790 shared space with people who were not family members. Stable single-family household units therefore were not the norm for many urban women, who came together under one roof to buy, sell, and share goods, services, and space. "The houseful was neither ideal nor idealized," Hartigan-O'Connor observes, but rather "a contingent choice—a product of its members' circumstances, calculated year by year, house by house" (p. 38). Commercial relationships pervaded the urban housefuls of white and black women and their wider communities. The development of a service economy, which encompassed everything from doing laundry and other domestic tasks to running taverns and selling imported millinery, gave women in both cities more opportunities to be paid for their labor. Although paid employment in some respects enhanced women's independence, involvement in the market economy also made them part of a vast interdependent commercial network. Hartigan-O'Connor shows how urban women forged business connections and, in turn, became connections or intermediaries for...