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three Female “Economists” Expanding Women’s Financial Agency So far I have been discussing responses to and analyses of panic that are remarkable more for their placement of economic discourse within domestic settings than for any major differences in content from the responses of male writers. Both men and women condemned greed, expressed fears about the excessive extension of credit, and blamed panics on overtrading. Many male writers of the 1830s also expressed similar anxieties about class instability, often evidenced by disapproval of those they felt were attempting to become wealthy without the gradual process of hard work. But for women authors, unlike most of their male counterparts, the gender definitions that were integral to class identity emerge as a central concern in their narratives of panic. The movement toward industrialization in the Northeast during the 1820s and 1830s had repercussions on conceptions of gender just as it did on relations between emerging socioeconomic classes. This was in part because class formation utilized distinct class-bound definitions of women but also in part because industrialization changed traditional work practices, moving production out of the home and thereby altering women’s roles in family and national economies. The 1830s were thus a critical decade in the creation of women’s domestic identity, and a time in which gender definitions—and their relation to economics—were in a process of change. As a result, the anxieties about gain and loss so apparent in women’s panic fiction of this time are not only attributable to changes in social hierarchies but also to a mounting sense of middle-class women’s economic powerlessness in both an industrial and a speculative economy. Diminishing access to the means of making money or even of being economically self-sufficient increased women’s economic vulnerability in times of panic. A distinct, though interwoven, strand of this fiction’s rhetorical purpose, then, was to combat emerging definitions of middle-class women as occupying a wholly noneconomic sphere by making visible the ways that women exercised economic agency within their domestic roles Female “Economists” 107 and proposing expansions to that agency. These novels repeatedly place the key to social and economic stability in the hands of middle-class women, not through their own passivity or withdrawal from economic activity but through strengthening the economic power of the domestic realm. This is where women’s panic fiction differs most sharply from male-authored responses to panic. Because its authors recognized the potential dangers of women’s economic dependence, they highlighted both the necessity for middle-class women to retain some measure of economic control and their ability to act in economically beneficial ways for the family and for the nation. We can see this difference clearly in the contrast between Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee’s novels and a male-authored imitation that appeared shortly after her Three Experiments of Living, titled Living on Other People’s Means, or the History of Simon Silver.1 The title character of the novel, Simon Silver, rejects his family’s agricultural life as too arduous and goes to the city to make his fortune through speculation. Picking up the pieces of his uncle’s failed mercantile house, Simon soon constructs an empire of his own based entirely on credit or “other people’s means.” Despite the fact that he does not actually engage in trade, he is able to stay in business by skillfully shifting his debts from one creditor to another and by attracting funds from others wishing him to invest for them. Each time financial pressures threaten to topple his house of cards, Simon devises a new scheme for staying afloat. As executor of a friend’s will, he steals money left in trust for a widow and her children. He creates a dummy corporation—the Drumstick Manufacturing Company—on credit, then sells out his shares for cash. Somewhat later, he applies for and receives a bank charter capitalized at five hundred thousand dollars. In the end, Simon is killed by a runaway horse, and his actual state of insolvency is discovered, bringing ruin upon his many investors. While the novel’s obvious condemnation of greed and fraud echoes some of the moral and economic messages of women’s panic fiction, its setting, tone, and outcome reveal a very different agenda. To begin with, Simon Silver’s world is almost wholly male. His economic irresponsibility takes place in the masculine sphere of banks and corporations and even his victims, except for the...

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