Enterprising Women

In recent years there has been an explosion of new historical and literary studies devoted to women and economics. In particular, scholars of Western Europe and the United States have argued that women played a vital role in the rise of capitalism through their activities as property owners, domestic managers, consumers, laborers, retailers, and investors.¹ Much of this new research undermines longstanding assumptions that capitalism and industrialism pushed women out of the marketplace, contributed to their economic immiseration, and imposed an inflexible regime of separate spheres. The three books reviewed here all make important and original contributions to the scholarship on women and economics, while also confirming a more nuanced and optimistic appraisal of women as economic players.

Clare Haru Crowston’s Credit, Fashion, Sex examines the rhetoric and material reality of credit in French women’s lives during the late eighteenth century. A central theme of the book is that “credit” was a crucial concept in the Ancien Régime for understanding the dynamics of influence and power in all spheres of life. It referred not merely to access to financial resources, but to all sorts of influence and patronage. This alternate usage of “credit,” which Crowston notes preceded the financial definition, was closely associated with reputation and could itself confer wealth, power, and authority.

Crowston focuses on how the dual meaning of credit was associated with women since financial credit was often linked to fashionability and sexual reputation. If women exerted too much influence, they were accused of leveraging sex into power, and moralists feared that public credit might be based on private vice. When royal mistresses like Madame Pompadour were accused of both depleting the treasury and sapping the king’s sexual vitality, the “overlapping circuits of libidinal and financial economy” were revealed (89). Women engaged in public commerce were also open to charges of sexual impropriety, as fashion boutiques brought together working women and elite male customers.

While Crowston brings new insights into eighteenth-century discourses regarding women’s credit and fashion, the heart of her book is a detailed study of French women fashion merchants and their female clientele. Drawing upon a rich array of sources—account books, bankruptcy records, invoices, and memoirs—Crowston demonstrates how fashion merchants were caught in the middle of a complex credit system in which they bought the materials of their trade (fabric, ribbons, feathers, etc.) on credit from wholesalers and then sold their finished products on credit to their aristocratic customers. She underscores the unequal relationships between bourgeois women merchants and both their male suppliers and aristocratic clients. Fashion merchants were often driven into bankruptcy when wholesalers demanded payment of their bills before the merchants’ own customers could be coaxed into settling their accounts. Fashion merchants were also dependent on the patronage and goodwill of their aristocratic clients, who certainly recognized their power in this relationship. Wealthy customers made merchants wait months, or even years, before settling their accounts and, even then, seldom paid in full. To pursue legal action against elite debtors was rarely worth the risk of losing their future business and alienating their friends and relations.

Although their account books seldom balanced, fashion merchants were sustained by cultural credit founded upon reputation, prestige, and talent. The ability to create fashionable merchandise or maintain a boutique that was a center of elite sociability kept customers coming and persuaded wholesalers to extend financial credit. Crowston notes that such intangible forms of credit “could be more important than profit as conceived by modern accounting methods” (200). Credit, Fashion, Sex...