The measure of the market: Women's economic lives in Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island, 1750--1820

Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island were thriving port cities in the eighteenth century—heavily dependent on the slave trade, multiracial in population, and connected by multiple family and business relationships. Sustained by commerce, these urban centers saw the genesis of new types of commercial relationships between residents, as cash wages replaced indentures, renters outnumbered freeholders, and buying and selling overtook home production and barter. Rooted in the Atlantic world of trade, urban culture was commercial in ways that touched every facet of city-dwellers' lives, from the rooms they lived in to the buttons they bought to the way they understood personal relationships. Women's lives were no exception; in fact, women were quintessential market participants, with fluid occupational identities, cross-class social and economic connections, and a firm investment in cash and commercial goods for power and meaning.; This dissertation examines women's economic lives in Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, from 1750 to 1820. Through a study of free and enslaved women's activities as borrowers, lenders, employers, workers, shoppers, and vendors, I explore women's ubiquitous presence in the urban marketplace and their roles in forming an urban commercial culture. Informal networks of women, connected horizontally across geographic distance and vertically along hierarchies of rank, created and sustained commercial culture by using, exchanging, and discussing goods and labor. Their economic choices blended financial calculation with social and emotional concerns in shifting measures.; The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of great change in the politics of commerce. Women's actions in the marketplace shaped these changes, in spite of power inequities, legal restrictions on women, and an emerging language of “domesticity” that promised middle-class and well-to-do families a feminine haven from the cruel calculations of the marketplace. Political discourse minimized the larger significance of female buying, selling, and laboring even as the economy depended on these activities, offering women an expanded public and even international context for their lives.