Abstract
This study examines the economic agency and participation of sixty-five women in Colchester, Fairfax County, Virginia throughout the years of 1760-1761 based on ledgers from a general store where they purchased goods on credit. To expand the view of women of different social standings in the colonial south, this study builds a more complicated picture of eighteenth-century women's scope of economic participation. "Control, Consumption, and Connections" explores how women could acquire credit, how they used that credit to make informed consumer purchases, and how they used the extensive social networks they lived in to earn and consume. By studying their transactions at the store, it becomes clear that women had several avenues for earning credit and that they used those methods, their purchases, and their social networks to provide for their households which some of these women, as widows, maintained on their own. This study contributes to the field of Chesapeake, economic, and gender history. Women's economic agency as consumers, producers, influential members of social networks, and providers for their households complicates the image of the Colonial South that has dominated public and scholarly discourse. Where women were primarily seen as exercising their influence in the domestic sphere and as consumers, here we see them actively using and acquiring credit and involved in different facets of the colonial economy.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2020
Semester
Fall
Advisor
Beiler, Rosalind
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
College
College of Arts and Humanities
Department
History
Degree Program
History
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0008325; DP0023762
URL
https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0023762
Language
English
Release Date
December 2020
Length of Campus-only Access
None
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
STARS Citation
Forgue, Bryce, "Control, Consumption, and Connections: The Women of Eighteenth-Century Colchester, Virginia, and their Participation in the Atlantic World of Goods, 1760-1761" (2020). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023. 354.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2020/354