The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America

Abstract

that the economic influence and legal rights embedded in the possession of textiles for most of American history did not carry over into the post-Civil War era, leaving women like Mrs. Lincoln “with only the clothes on their backs” (289). Contextualizing the power of textiles and the legal rights afforded those who owned them, Edwards creates an argument for the loss of rights experienced by women, the poor, and other marginalized people in the years following the Civil War. She contends, “The legal principles and practices associated with textiles ... featured centrally in the new republic’s economic and governing order” (297). However, “the legal principles and practices that all people on the margins used in [the] decades before the Revolution and the Civil War have been overlooked” in recent scholarship (298). This, then, is the task she sets for herself: to show that a “focus on textiles reveals a more complicated history, [one] in which all people with tenuous claims to rights involved themselves in the economy, law, and governance” (298). Indeed, that is the crux of Edwards’s argument, which she supports through the myriad stories she tells. Although numerous books have been published on the roles fashion and textiles have played in history, and I list only a few of those in my opening paragraph, none that I am aware of has taken on the herculean task of investigating the property rights tied to articles of clothing and other textiles in the antebellum United States. In her efforts to illuminate the subject, Edwards provides readers with a meticulously researched, carefully edited, and creatively presented historical analysis of exchange value and property rights as they were acquired through textile ownership. The illustrations included in the text support the arguments being made and ask readers to step into the times and places being depicted, and the archival materials listed in the voluminous notes (eightythree pages to be exact) call on readers to take the next steps in contributing to this fascinating field of research. In the end, “[t]he mix of the personal and [the] professional” (259), to use the author’s own words, makes Edwards’s book not only an educational experience but also a satisfying read. As Edwards notes, “The part of the textile market that facilitated ... exchanges was composed of real people” (173), and through her work, we come to know these real people and the significance of their legal interactions—civil and criminal—as they borrow, steal, pawn, trade, and hoard textiles.