In the pages of her account books, Abigail Robinson, a single woman from a Newport, Rhode Island merchant family at the turn of the nineteenth century, represented the mundane tasks of domestic life as monetary transactions. With each stroke of her pen, she linked the ways and concerns of the market with the "women's work" performed by herself and by the women she employed, corresponded with, and cared for. This article explores each kind of transaction recorded in Abigail's account books—hiring servants, buying imported goods for family and friends, stewarding young relatives, and investing in paper securities—to illuminate the complex ways in which emotion, social obligation, and economic calculation intersected. Strikingly and explicitly, market transactions constructed social relationships and affective ties shaped economic transactions. Women such as Abigail Robinson led lives that were at once more profoundly embedded in market concerns than those of their colonial forebears and clearly different from the emerging ideal of the private, sheltered home. Forged in networks of work and exchange, a commercial consciousness served variously as complement and alternative to "domesticity" for middling and well-to-do free women.
Using court civil records and business documents, this paper argues that women in the urban ports of Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island, were central to an Atlantic service economy. The work of white and black women, who performed similar tasks for a wide range of customers, was driven by the people and goods circulating around the Atlantic Ocean in the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries. The Atlantic world's distinctive patterns created new possibilities and new vulnerabilities for women in the urban economy.
This forum includes three assessments of Emma Hart’s Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism and a response by the author. These analyses consider the book’s tracking of the formation of an American commercial system that, it argues, occurred in conjunction with the creation of the independent United States.
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