Economic Criticism as Feminist Intervention

Economic criticism has emerged as one of the most important critical tools in our field of study, and much recent scholarship (Baker, Baker and Wertheimer, Burnham, Fichtelberg, Gould, Shields, Wertheimer, Weyler) has made the case that reading the period's literature requires understanding the cultural significance of market growth, transatlantic trade, slavery, property laws, paper money, debt, and insurance. The emergence of economic criticism has also enhanced the study of women's writing and the use of feminist critical approaches.

Many of the key concerns of economic criticism are gender based. To name just a few examples, studies of labor and production must account for women's domestic work and biological reproduction, and studies of marriage must consider how unions entailed property exchange. Scholars must also attend to the way in which spending and borrowing figure as feminine impulses in economic discourse: women (as well as men deemed effeminate) are associated with fantasies of wealth, consumer impulsiveness, and insolvency.

Economic criticism reveals not only how economic practice and theory were informed by notions of gender but also how women brought particular sensibilities and experiences to their understanding of economics. When the Philadelphia pamphleteer Letitia Cunningham deplored the nation's inability to pay off its public debts, she did not, like so many of her male peers, draw an analogy between a man's credibility and the nation's credibility. Rather, she invoked female virtue, as defined by a sexual double standard, to call for financial responsibility, likening a bankrupt republic among reputable nations to a "common prostitute" among "chaste and reputable matrons." We might consider how Cunningham, in her depiction of the nation as a woman "seduced" by the lure of easy credit to commit an "unpardonable sin," draws from the seduction novel, a genre that enjoyed popular readership among women and made women its primary concern (Cunningham 26).

Bringing economic criticism to bear on early American literature requires that we confront the question of whether women occupied a so-called separate sphere in the home removed from the male worlds of politics and the marketplace—or at least whether women imagined themselves as occupying it as such. As a historical and imagined reality, the separate sphere has been hotly contested in conversations first initiated by Linda K. Kerber, Jeanne Boydston, Nancy F. Cott, Cathy N. Davidson, and others. But there is no doubt that early American writing concerns itself with the relation between the home and surrounding world. One thing for us to consider, then, is how a rhetoric of domesticity might vary among different groups of writers or change meaningfully over time. How, for example, might early national women writers position the domestic sphere in relation to the economy and marketplace differently than do colonial or antebellum writers?

Judith Sargent Murray's writing offers one opportunity to explore this question. Murray certainly draws a distinction between the private family and the public market. Murray's family is not merely a commercial network, and her depiction of family life contrasts with the common characterization of the colonial family as "largely indistinguishable from the surrounding community" and "not yet a modern private institution bound together only by ties of affection" (Wood 47–48). But, while Murray's family certainly represents a version of the modern family bound together by ties of affection, she establishes a boundary between family and economy that is always permeable. We should be careful not to conflate her sentimental rhetoric with that of antebellum novelists, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who posit the home as a safe haven from the marketplace. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, Murray argues for women's participation in the marketplace and also sentimentalizes market transactions as an opportunity to act sympathetically.

Murray, in other words, distinguishes between the spheres but also sees those spheres as mutually reinforcing. In her play The Medium, for example, familial relatives are simultaneously financial creditors and debtors: the play's heroine, who is both a savvy businesswoman and sympathetic negotiator, invests in public stocks but also lends money to her nephew when he finds himself in dire financial straits. In one sense...