To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities by Sara T. Damiano (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities by Sara T. Damiano Jacqueline Beatty To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities. By Sara T. Damiano. Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. 309 pages. Cloth, ebook. On the reverse of a hand-drawn nine of clubs, Benjamin Wickham signed a short promissory note guaranteeing that he would pay Abigail Stoneman, a Newport, Rhode Island, tavernkeeper, the thirteen pounds he owed her. In all likelihood, as Sara T. Damiano suggests in To Her Credit, the two used the playing card to legitimate Wickham's debt to Stoneman in the midst of a game in her establishment. This small piece of paper functioned beyond its intended purpose, at once an integral component of a tavern game, a record of a financial transaction, and a legally binding document. Damiano's analysis of this seemingly quotidian primary source encapsulates her findings on women's financial and legal activities in two eighteenth-century British North American port cities. It is precisely the card's mundanity that signals one of the most important conclusions of her work: free white women were present, involved, and active in eighteenth-century financial and legal affairs. Far from merely recovering the presence of women in those interactions, Damiano underscores the fact that few contemporaries questioned women's financial activities unless they perceived they might benefit from doing so. Importantly, too, "as long as married women's labor and decisions remained uncontroversial, financial and legal records obscured femes covert or subordinated them to their husbands" (30). Thus, the very prevalence of women's financial activities has obfuscated a full historical and historiographical accounting of their presence in the early American political economy. Damiano's work remedies this problem. In To Her Credit, Damiano deftly demonstrates that women were central, critical, and relatively commonplace figures in financial transactions, regularly engaging in negotiations over credit and debt. They appeared both within and outside of the courtroom, in formal and informal ways. Their financial activities were simultaneously "heterosocial and profoundly gendered" (5). Indeed, this study underscores the complexities of the urban economy's influence on gendered spaces in the eighteenth century. The household had significant financial dimensions—such as debt agreements negotiated in homes with family members acting as witnesses—making the public sphere far less masculine in its contours than researchers have conceded even recently. Along with scholars such as Laura F. Edwards and Kirsten Sword, Damiano complicates our understanding of coverture's [End Page 772] impact on women's daily lives.1 William Blackstone's 1765 Commentaries, for example, long cited by historians discussing femes covert, diverged from his contemporaries' legal analyses by displaying a distinctly conservative view of the position of women.2 To Her Credit thus urges us to be more careful in the weight we give coverture, particularly Blackstone's portrayal of it, in shaping interpretations of women's financial agency. This work sits at the intersection of scholarship on women's place in the political economy and the courtroom in early America.3 Damiano's study demonstrates the need for historians to consider more nuanced, often contradictory, conclusions in their analyses. She neither adopts a declension model nor overemphasizes the significance of advancements for women. Rather, she finds both "persistence and change" (173) in women's financial activities during the "final two-thirds of the eighteenth century" (3). On the one hand, she argues, women's position as creditors often gave them power over men in their communities; and on the other hand, their position as debtors made them acutely vulnerable. The same, of course, could be argued of men: one's position as a creditor gave one power, and being a debtor made one vulnerable to abuses of that power. Damiano investigates women's financial activities in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, two bustling port cities whose residents were "especially conversant in the workings of the law" and whose "legal activities inside and outside of court were closely intertwined" (11). The author examines more than 800 petitions...