This article investigates American household purchasing roles from the late colonial era to the mid-nineteenth century. Issues examined include marital authority versus the real balance of power, home production and the gendered division of labor, and family decision-making influences and purchasing behaviors. The article points out historical changes and continuities as well as some social class differences. The concluding section suggests implications for marketing and consumer history as well as some limitations of the research.

The Early Development of Purchasing Roles in the American Household, 1750 to 1840

..................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER I: HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WOMEN AND PRINT.....................2 CHAPTER 0: “TO BE A DUTIFUL AND OBEDIANT WIFE”: TRADITIONAL ADVICE IN ENGLAND AND THE EARLY AMERICAN SOUTH..................................................................................57 CHAPTER ffl: THE DISSEMINATION AND READING OF TRADITIONAL ADVICE IN THE SOUTH............................................ 116 CHAPTER IV: THE ROLE OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLAND AND THE EARLY AMERICAN SOUTH........................... 186 CHAPTER V: READING NOVELS IN THE SOUTH.................................229 CHAPTER VI: REFASHIONING FEMININITY.........................................282 CONCLUSION: TAKING UP THE PEN.................................................... 337 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................... 343

By the book: Advice and female behavior in the eighteenth -century South

This dissertation explores the influence of Louisiana civil law on women’s property ownership between 1782 and 1835. Louisiana civil law offered women significant advantages over the predominant common law tradition found in most early American states. Louisiana civil law, unlike common law, allowed a married woman to retain her legal identity, her personal property and her rights to monetary rewards from her labors within her family. A woman in early Louisiana owned half the property accumulated during marriage and she inherited her half of the property at the dissolution of the marriage. She also owned and could administer separate property. Data drawn from notarial and probate records from three parishes representative of early Louisiana’s population indicate that Louisiana women accumulated economic resources and they exercised economic authority within their families and communities. Regional comparisons of wealth accumulation between Pennsylvania and Louisiana demonstrate that overall women fared better under civil law than women under common law. These findings call into question traditional interpretations of legal dispossession and enforced dependence for early American women. They also illuminate ethnic and regional dimensions to the relationship between the civil law and women’s property. The study demonstrates that Anglos in Louisiana were less likely to conform to legal provisions economically beneficial to women, than was the French-speaking population in

Women and the Law of Property Under Louisiana Civil Law, 1782--1835.

This dissertation is a study of value adaptation by the southern New England Indians who attended Moor's Charity School, in Lebanon, Connecticut, between 1743 and 1770. These Indians were part of New Light Minister Eleazar Wheelock's extended household, dubbed by one student, the "tawnee family." This designation distinguished these Indian scholars as surrogate members of the Wheelock family. I analyzed how the Indian students adapted to, resisted and reformed the values taught at Moor's as they grew to adulthood. I drew my analysis from letters collected in the Eleazar Wheelock Papers housed at Dartmouth College. My arguments are drawn principally from Indian-authored texts preserved in the Wheelock Papers. Wheelock and the students' correspondence allow one to examine lifelong relationships, particularly with respect to the meaning of family. One of my arguments is that family – as an ideological construct, as the defining places of gender roles and as a defender of rights to the broader society – is essential to understanding racial relations at the time. The easily identifiable and the less recognizable families formed under the auspices of Wheelock functioned within one Anglo-American family. One result of the education Indians received at Moor's was a newly created perception of what constituted appropriate values within those Anglo-American and Indian households that interacted extensively. Some Moor's students became Wheelock's proteges and went on missions to convert the Iroquois to Christianity. They also served as leaders in their own tribes. The correspondence demonstrates that belonging, as a perceived sense of place or comfort whether within a family or faith in colonial southern New England, was a central concern of the correspondents. Importantly, Wheelock and the Indian students debated the conditional and fluid set of circumstances that created an amorphous sense of longing in the Indian students, for community, for a place to belong and for acceptance. My study concludes that following a lifetime of disillusionment the adult proteges found it necessary to create a new, intentional community in upstate New York. They felt physical removal was necessary to preserving their adapted values, and ultimately finding a place to belong.

"The tawnee family": The life course of Indian value adaptation for Eleazar Wheelock's Indian scholars

In 1930 Richard B. Morris published Studies in the History of American Law: With Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The monograph included a chapter on the legal status of colonial women that became extremely influential within a short time of its appearance. Morris's influence continues half a century later. Several books published in 1980 cite him as one of their primary authorities on women's rights: Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America; Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth-Century New England; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Other influential books and articles also rely heavily on Morris, including A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony by John Demos, ‘The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,’ by Joan Hoff Wilson, and ‘The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800–1840,’ by Gerda Lerner. In fact, almost every published sentence on women's rights in early American law is followed by a footnote citing chapter three of Studies in the History of American Law. In The Bonds of Womanhood (1977), Nancy F. Cott declared that Morris's chapter ‘has become the standard essay on colonial women under the common law.’

The Legal Status of Women in Early America: A Reappraisal

A single woman in eighteenth-century British America possessed the same legal, if not political, rights as a single man, but when she married she became a feme covert, thereby undergoing a substantial change in legal status. Historians have disagreed on the meaning of coverture in the colonial period and in their assessments of the legal relationship of wives to husbands and to the system of law in general.' English common law dictated the major terms of the judicial arrangements for the feme covert in the colonies. While some historians have accepted a literal interpretation of Blackstone's famous dictum that "the husband and wife are one and that one is the husband" to mean complete unity of spouses under the common law, others have rejected this notion.2 The foremost twentieth-century English legal scholars, Sir William Holdsworth, Frederick Pollock, and Frederic William Maitland, have shown that married women often appeared as persons before the law in England.3 Our research extends this argument to free white women in eighteenthcentury New York and Virginia. We will demonstrate that matrons in

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1923419.pdf

Gwen Victor Gampel

Papers

Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia