London's material representations: Women's millinery and economic activity in literary imagination and lived experience, 1720--1785 (England)

This dissertation examines the relationship between literature about female milliners and the "feminine" and milliners' own lived experience and argues that the relationship reflects a malleable rather than fixed concept of women's proper work. By interrogating the way in which discourse operated once it moved beyond the boundaries of the print culture, this dissertation complicates the eighteenth-century genealogy of "separate spheres." Specifically, extant records of milliners' material lives---notably accounts of their consumption patterns in auction catalogues, political and other advertisements by them, and their own personal letters and claims available from the English Courts---suggest that while there were constraints imposed on businesswomen in literature, that this literature was hardly hegemonic in controlling businesswomen's activities.; While an emphatically constrictive discourse about the nature of "polite" economic society attempted to counteract the material existence of businesswomen, the English Court and male creditors accepted matter-of-factly a woman's right to participate in the public economy. This discourse, in political pamphlet literature of the 1720s, in plays of the 1730s, and in the legal rhetoric of various litigants at court in the 1770s, argued that women's involvement and decision-making in economic affairs was dangerous to the re-ordered and modernizing capitol city. In other words, London after the Great Fire and before the French Revolution claimed to be a masculine realm. Despite this discourse of polite masculinity in economic affairs, Georgian England was a transitory world-to borrow a phrase from EP Thompson---and cannot be understood as a seamless link to the nineteenth century. Constructions of "norms" of feminine behavior were constantly contested in the print culture, and women served as active and public historical agents in that contestation. By juxtaposing various moments of discourse against women to the historical milliner, this dissertation complicates the received narrative that argues that the pre-industrial eighteenth century was punctuated by a discourse that both reflected and influenced women's actual lives. Female milliners' own claims and the records they left behind suggest that the rhetoric constructing the bonds of separate spheres was therefore more contentious than previously considered.