The WSG’s panel proposal for the Women, Money and Markets 1750-1850 conference taking place at King’s College London on 11 May 2017 has been submitted. (Full disclosure! It is co-organized by WSG member Emma Newport).
‘Material girls: trading and maneouvring in a material world’
Our panel proposal is for three papers, each dealing with different ways by which women negotiated and managed their material survival and their individual rights to financial control, to thereby claim and fashion a degree of independence. They faced the complex problems of financial and commercial markets as they developed through the eighteenth-century with courage, persistence and determination, and the new research represented in our papers uncovers more active and imaginative economic management by women than has hitherto been recognised.
‘Moveables, markets and married women’s access to credit in eighteenth-century Scotland’
Rebecca Mason
When researching early modern women in relation to their ability to access and attain credit, historians have tended to focus on women’s work in weaving, brewing, and skilled and unskilled trades, with paid labour dominating discussions of married women’s active participation in their local economy and beyond. Instead, this paper will focus on how married women in Scotland understood and utilized the property they attained through marriage, and how they employed this property when engaging in moneylending, pawnbroking, and purchasing merchandise from local market stalls. Wherever commerce took hold, it affected ideas about property, marriage and exchange; resulting in ever-shifting boundaries between what constituted married women’s separate property, which was her own to sell, pawn and bequeath; alongside her and her husband’s conjugal property, which was explicitly under his administration. This paper will focus on those married women who placed their separate and conjugal property in ‘wad’ (Scots legal term meaning ‘in pledge’) as a means of attaining access to credit either alongside or independently of their husbands, and will investigate the extent to which married women could act on behalf of their husband when contracting debts for the benefit of the household. By focusing on burgh court records and family papers pertaining to the west of Scotland, it will investigate how women established informal and formal networks of exchange amongst other members of the burgh communities they resided in and beyond, and investigate the extent to which married women attained access to credit through property ownership, social credibility, trustworthiness and reputation.
Rebecca is a second year PhD student at the University of Glasgow working under the supervision of Prof Alexandra Shepard and Dr Karin Bowie as part of a wider project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council entitled “Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice, c.1100-c.1750.” Her PhD thesis, “Married Women and the Law in Scotland, c.1600-c.1750”, investigates the transmission and procuration of property, both landed and moveable, acquired by married women in the west coast of Scotland from 1600 to 1750.
‘Enterprising painters: women in the art market 1820-1850’
Johanna Holmes
In 1832 a talented young female artist came from Norfolk to live in London for a period wondering whether she might make some extra money from her work. She discovered that she was not alone in a competitive market and, ultimately, that a literary career would suit her better. This paper considers the art world she encountered, the many female artists who were successfully making a living in it and the constraints imposed by their gender upon their income, their careers and their art.
Based on new research and analysis of secondary material, the paper examines three aspects of the art practitioner’s world critical to making a living – skills, marketing and pricing. Analysis of a group of over 300 female artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy during the period together with thumbnail sketches of individual female painters’ careers reveal women artists’ personal circumstances, the scale of their output, the length of their careers and the media in which they worked. The factors in their favour and the strategies they adopted which contributed to their success are discussed, which perhaps challenge the popular assumptions of today about women’s opportunities at this time. However, the overall outcome from their persistence and compromise was in many cases a respectable but modest living within a predictable, unadventurous market. In the last decade of this period, it was becoming evident that a burgeoning market for art, linked to economic growth and British national and imperial identity construction, would offer their male contemporaries wealth, celebrity and diverse career opportunities from which women were excluded.
Johanna is a second year PhD student at Royal Holloway University of London (History), working under the supervision of Dr. Alex Windscheffel and Dr. Jane Hamlett, in the field of nineteenth century visual and material culture. She has a previous career in public sector management consultancy and policy advice. Her PhD thesis, “Strong women: Images of womanhood and their female audience 1820-1880” proposes a continuity of female resistance to the idealisation and stereotyping evident in visual culture through the examination of six women’s motivation and experience at critical points in their careers.
‘The “fiery force” of Eleanor Coade’s business success’
Miriam Al Jamil
Eleanor Coade (1733-1821) developed a successful manufactory of artificial stone statues and decorative items from 1769 at her premises in Lambeth. Her customers eventually included major architects, civic and church officials and the royal family. Clearly, she was a shrewd businesswoman and inspired loyalty from her employees and associates, but she was not afraid to litigate and to insist on her rights. Due to a lack of information about her as an individual, she has received little scholarly attention and has necessarily been represented through her products and their locations.The uniqueness of her case is thus less apparent when she is subsumed as a footnote within discussions of taste and luxury goods, and neoclassical architecture.
My paper examines the evidence that points to Coade’s marketing strategies, to business problems and the assumptions which denied her a role as entrepreneur. She was unusually not engaged in the businesses associated with a feminised luxury trade, although she began as a draper. Her trade card and catalogue demonstate how she utilised classical iconography and prints from Grand Tour collections to promote and design her goods.They feature sculpture and emblematic images which were owned by or demonstrate the prerogatives of powerful and wealthy men who were also her customers. However they also point to the religious and charitable interests of her customers for which she provided evidence in enduring stone. Her nonconformist background and connections are likely to have contributed to her success, but hers is still a remarkable achievement in a highly competetive market.
Miriam has just begun her research at Birkbeck, University of London, supervised by Dr. Luisa Calè and Dr. Kate Retford, looking at the ways in which eighteenth-century women accessed and engaged with Classical sculpture. She has MA’s in Eighteenth-Century Studies and in Early Modern Studies, and has taught at all levels in the past, currently in EFL.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 