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The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
The Ties That Buy represents another valuable addition to Penn's Early American Studies series, a collection of scholarly books devoted to "neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture." In this volume, Hartigan-O'Connor explores the relationship of "unexceptional" colonial American women- slave, free, married, widowed, etc.to commerce, culture, and money. She traces the "everyday economic networks in revolutionary America with women at their center" to the end of the eighteenth century, a time after which "a new understanding of 'domesticity' began to posit a world divided into 'public' masculine and 'private' feminine spheres" (2-3). In six well-documented and lucid chapters, Hartigan-OConnor argues convincingly that during the late eighteenth century urban American women may have had limited resources and fewer legal rights than their male counterparts, but they participated in, and contributed to the business/consumer culture of the fledging United States in innovative and significant ways: "the home and the market were not mutually exclusive for most women, who crossed boundaries regularly" (4).
Hartigan-O'Connor re-visions the role of colonial women in the eighteenth-century by relying on much more than "static forms of wealth, such as landed property...