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Vivian Bruce Conger, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. 253. $39.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 835–837, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.835-a
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Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's focus in this well-written, well-researched, and insightful book is deceptively simple. She examines women and commerce in Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina. But she weaves a much more complicated tale. Like other historians, she questions the early nineteenth-century divide between public and private, and the idealized image of wives as nurturing mothers firmly ensconced in a home headed by a working husband who sought refuge within; unlike other historians, she challenges the notion that women lost ground in this ideological shift. She does so by looking at working women's economic activities in the marketplace and arguing that “women were not exempt from .… urban life; they were central to [it]” (p. 12).
The author begins by analyzing “housefuls” rather than households, and the distinction is crucial to her arguments. Housefuls were uniquely urban arrangements of several small households living together in the same rented house. Housefuls, often multiracial collectives of male and female-headed families and single women, provided women with productive links to life in the city. Because housefuls were temporary and changeable, they weakened gender hierarchies and over time challenged patriarchal authority. More importantly, women, by choice and by necessity (these women were often poor and vulnerable—to her credit, the author does not replace one idealized vision with another) created pockets of local economic and cultural networks. From this literal and figurative foundation, Hartigan-O'Connor moves on to explore the economic opportunities for women within and without the houseful.
