Writing Women at Work

Abstract

This chapter re-examines the unique kinds of socio-economic agency that Hannah More grants to her female characters, both working and middle class. Even in didactic literature that teaches the ostensible social and moral values of inequality, the Cheap Repository Tracts and the revisionist Sacred Dramas also offer models of women who have become active participants in the capitalist marketplace, securing economic independence through labour. More additionally casts women's work as embodying intertwined economic, social and moral values central to modernity and laissez-faire capitalism. This chapter discusses what scholars have, in other contexts, called the “economic Bildungsroman” – a form, in More's case, that crucially includes women alongside men as capable of developing economic agency. More's writings thereby trace a counter-trajectory to the kinds of marriage plots we find in the writings of Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, in which More explicitly presents women's economic agency as an antecedent to marriage or, at other times, an escape from marital discord. Thus, the chapter's argument focuses on More's evaluation of women's independence, and might also be considered as part of the history of women's rights, in that More understands that recognising the financial, not just moral value of women's work is necessary for their achievement of full economic and eventual political autonomy.