The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (review)

In The Ties That Buy, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor goes looking for the economic activities of eighteenth-century urban women of all ranks. That she finds them, fixing her eye on the port cities of Newport, Rhode Island and Charleston, South Carolina, is testament to the exhaustive and inventive research that, in Hartigan-O'Connor's able hands, helps recast our understanding of women's role in transition to capitalism during the period 1750 to 1820. Hers is a book animated by an expansive definition of economic participation and populated with actual women, free and enslaved, doing actual work—from taking in boarders and laboring over laundry, to selling goods and managing estates. Mining archival sources such as court documents and account books, Hartigan-O'Connor extracts wonderful vignettes, such as that of the playing card-turned-promissory note, to show that the eighteenth-century economy of these port cities was an "embedded" one, in which social relationships constructed financial relationships and vice-versa. The Ties That Buy represents social and women's history at its finest and most compelling, staying true to "bottom up" methodology in order to recover and center the experiences of often-overlooked historical actors and create a world that people of the past would recognize. Yet its author also sustains a sense for cultural, intellectual, and political context, and uses the recovered experiences to shed light on large historical questions.

The book's central themes are connection and paradox; its recurring trope is network. In re-creating the urban milieu of the revolutionary era, Hartigan-O'Connor first challenges readers to reconceive of filial, nuclear households as "housefuls," a far more fluid and potentially expansive social and spatial arrangement not captured by the census-takers' rigid categories. Although they lived under one roof, the members of a houseful were not necessarily bound by kin ties, but often by mutual economic need or benefit; such relationships of financial convenience could dissolve as quickly as they emerged. This new concept expands our understanding of working people's lives. Particularly for female-headed households (i.e. families), in which Hartigan-O'Connor is deeply interested, the houseful served as an important economic strategy. Sailors could become boarders who supplied income both through paying rent (which often covered room, board, and laundry) and as consumers of home-made goods for which they paid extra. Thus was traditional "women's work" not merely central to the early modern household economy, but to an emerging market economy that linked local venues and small-scale exchanges with the larger world of Atlantic commerce.

Yet women were also purveyors and consumers of goods, operating within systems of credit that sometimes reinforced their dependent status, as when married women charged goods to a family account. Other times, credit-based exchanges required women to operate independently, as feme sole traders. Although cash could facilitate economic exchanges for those without credit, it too was a "socially coded currency" in which the identity and position of the person who proffered it mattered greatly. An enslaved woman sent to purchase a length of ribbon for her mistress experienced neither cash nor credit as particularly liberating. But by hiring herself out as a washer woman and reserving a portion of the wages, that same woman could claim some purchasing power. As was the case for all participants, the market gave and it took away, but in gendered and racialized ways, although Hartigan-O'Connor holds that rank was the most important factor in locating person within the wealth structure of a city.

Within such a marketplace, in which exchanges were disembodied and abstract in theory, but were actually face-to-face and concrete, the identity of the consumer circumscribed consumer "choice." Although the language of goods might have been shared, and practices of consumption transcended divisions of class, race, and gender, the power relationships that structured shopping and other forms of exchange operated within larger systems of...