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In their recognition of the necessity of economic independence for women, Fern, Alcott, and Gilman, along with African American writers like Harper and Jacobs, took a stand on an issue that was counter to the dominant discourse throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, many of the women in the court cases in this study lived independently, coping with the legal and economic restraints of their culture while making money for themselves and, in most cases, for their families as well.At the same time, many women writers, even when they did not publicly advocate economic independence for women, supported themselves and their families and in their fiction portrayed the importance of money in women’s lives. Women who could not write their names and women who lived in comfort, white women and women of color, urban women and farm wives, independent businesswomen and abused wives—women from all backgrounds were very much a part of the money economy. The nature of their involvement was as varied as their backgrounds and ranged from the flounderings of women who were defeated by ignorance or placidity to the successes of astute businesswomen, some of whom were as ruthless and callous as the most hardened businessmen. Yet twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have had di≈culty recognizing the complexity of women’s economic roles in the nineteenth century. Earlier critics romanticized women as removed from the marketplace , victims of an unjust legal and economic system, while more recent scholars, seeking to give women agency, identified middle- and upper-class women as self-oriented consumers, complicitous in the maintenance of capitalism. What my findings show is that women were both and neither; the victim could also be agent, while the woman who Into the Twenty-first Century epilogue seemed to have agency was herself powerless within the system. But most of all, what my research has shown is that, in spite of cultural prescriptions that constructed women as outside the economy except as exploited workers, many women were actively involved in money matters of their own. Moreover, evidence of this tendency was apparent in every class. Generalizations about women’s involvement with money lose sight of these complexities because they do not allow room for the many and varied ways in which individual women resolved their economic situations . It is for this reason that I chose to examine a multiplicity of individual court cases and a multiplicity of writers and fictional works. It is their particularity that is significant, yet it is this very particularity that can be lost in too-easy generalizations. By combining a study of the court cases with a look at the lives and works of a broad selection of fiction writers, what I have attempted to do (to borrow a phrase from Harriet Jacobs) is to give the twenty-first-century reader “a realizing sense” of what nineteenth-century women’s lives were like with respect to economics .1 What emerges from this study, is, I think, a closer approximation of the lived situation than we have previously been able to obtain. But this study is important not only as a corrective to prevailing views of nineteenth-century women but also as a backdrop to women’s economic situation in the twentieth century and today. Although women writers were wrestling with the question of woman’s economic independence throughout the nineteenth century—and the court cases reveal that many ordinary nineteenth-century women were living their lives independently in spite of law and custom—the concept of woman’s financial independence remained flagged by a question mark in the greater culture throughout most of the twentieth century. Just how problematic this issue has been is suggested by the following passage from a letter written by a liberal former congressman from Wisconsin in the mid-twentieth century. On August 15, 1954, a hundred years after the publication of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Tom Amlie wrote to his son Tom regarding Tom’s wife, Polly, who apparently wanted to finish college and get a job. Amlie wrote: “This determination on Polly’s part to be in control took the form of an attitude of self indulgence. Polly told me that she considered her own career to be as important as your career. There is no use in going into the absurdity of that statement” [my italics].2 into the twenty-first century • 3 0 3 The author of this letter was no timid conservative. He was a radical lawyer...

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