Out of the shadows: uncovering women's productive and consuming labor in the Mid-Atlantic, 1750-1815

Matson, CathyThis study argues that the early American economy and the early American household rested upon women’s unpaid and unrecognized economic and social labor, and that there was often no strong delineation between the economy and the household. It moves away from studies of household authority to instead consider household responsibility: Whose labor ensured the household’s economic and social stability, allowed for engagement with the market, and pressed consumer goods into the service of household needs? If this labor failed to gain recognition when it was done well, who garnered blame when it was done badly? Most women lacked meaningful control over household finances, purchasing decisions, and labor arrangements. However, they were given major responsibilities, such as managing household accounts and dependent labor, creating resources, building family credit, and exercising skill in purchasing to bring needed goods into the home. Single white women were freed from some of these constraints, but their activities were still submerged under the heading of the family in away that single white men’s endeavors were not. ☐ By focusing on responsibility rather than authority, we leave room to recognize women’s economic competencies without insisting these abilities garnered them power. In contrast to earlier studies, I have found widespread economic competence among women of various backgrounds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Mid-Atlantic. Their lack of control over household finances did not mean these women lacked responsibility for maintaining them. Women acquired economic competence both inside and outside marriage. While widows may have had incomplete knowledge of their husbands’ businesses, they were rarely completely ignorant of household finances. Wives, servants, and other female dependents were expected to use credit instruments, control small sums of money, settle debts, and seek out and purchase consumer goods, all of which required economic knowledge. ☐ A large portion of women’s economic efforts in this period revolved around consumption, which I describe as a type of shadow labor. Although it involved cultivated knowledge, legwork, management of scarce resources, and decision-making skills, consumption was often abridged into the exchange of male-owned resources for finished consumer goods that required no additional labor. This study challenges that elision, drawing out, from often recalcitrant sources, women’s economic activity in the household, the store, and beyond. ☐ I have found the neoclassical model of economics to be a poor fit for this study, especially its emphasis on atomistic economic actors and belief in free choice as the normal state of being. I argue instead that dependent ties continued to dominate American life and placed strong limitations on economic choice. Class, gender, race, pressure from family and peers, and even the enmeshed nature of credit constrained the individual’ sexercise of choice.4 This study adopts the Marxist-feminist belief that patriarchy and emerging capitalism evolved together. Just as the rise of capitalism relied on a web of unpaid and unvalorized labor, white male economic independence rested upon unseen dependent ties. Both systems benefited from the invisible aspects of shadow labor. However, I argue that both of these processes were incomplete. In particular, white male dominance and surveillance of household labor was extensive, but not all-encompassing. Male household heads were forced to delegate decision-making power and small sums of money to wives, daughters, servants, and other dependents in order to manage the household. The daily decisions of dependents added up over time, and while they did not constitute household authority, they did represent the accrual of diffuse power. Consumption in particular offered women small spaces to create financial connections, socialize, gain access to goods, and ascribe meaning to their daily activities. This study explores those spaces to pull women’s economic labor out of the shadows and how we might reimagine the categories that have defined that labor in our historiography. ☐ This study relies on a close reading of a wide variety of sources, including household account books, retail daybooks and ledgers, correspondence, prescriptive literature, legal treatises, wills, and the loose bits of economic paper that shaped everyday life in Pennsylvania and Delaware between 1750 and 1815. Retail daybooks have been especially helpful in identifying the types of economic work women performed during visits to their local stores. These sources provide a more detailed picture of how shoppers made selections, accrued credit, gained trust, paid debts, exchanged work, and repaid neighbors through the store. ☐ As shown by evidence from accounts, diaries, advice manuals, and correspondence, early American women of Mid-Atlantic households performed an enormous amount of labor within the household, whether their tasks and items of production and exchange were given explicit values or not. In addition to the production of food, clothing, and other essentials, these women managed servants and other dependents, maintained household goods, paid family creditors, and stretched resources to get their full value. Women’s participation in accounting for household goods and services also required a depth of knowledge about money, valuing goods, and entering entangled financial arrangements that are masked by the conventions of coverture and prescriptions. Yet their numerous skills and responsibilities did not translate easily into women’s greater household authority. Married women and women living under their fathers’ roofs were stymied by laws and customary perspectives that invested men with substantial control over their property, labor, and bodies, as well as widespread notions of femininity that obscured and devalued their labor. Despite these obstacles, some women managed to use their competency in keeping accounts and managing economic resources very effectively, and many women were able to carve out small spaces of authority in their households and record a measure of personal satisfaction from their work.University of Delaware, Department of HistoryPh.D