Women's Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York City

Ideologies of gender and ideologies of exchange came together in complex and contradictory ways to construct the Anglo-American marketplace. Poor and wealthy women alike had access to New York City markets, yet their trading activities exposed them to markedly different dangers. Court records, both civil and criminal, demonstrate the extent to which poor and enslaved women traded in an "informal economy." The business papers of three middling and elite white women reveal a different world in which women traded both locally and internationally. In both social strata, however, women's legal and economic practices both overrode and were constrained by the common-law fiction of coverture. Examining women's trading networks within and beyond the limits of the family shows many ways that female status helped and hindered their trading activities.