Focus on Women in 18th Century America

Together and separately, Lisa Norling's and Patricia Cleary's well-documented accounts suggest that women's trading was both more visible and accepted in eighteenth-century New England than has been traditionally thought. In Captain Ahab Had a Wife, Lisa Norling follows Nantucket whaling wives as they minded everything, including the store, while their husbands were at sea. At around the same time and less than a province away, the intriguingly entrepreneurial Elizabeth Murray successfully set up shop independently in Boston. Patricia Cleary recounts the story of this fascinating early New England businesswoman in her work Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America.

Elizabeth Murray never gave up her belief that women could, and should, make their own way in the world through commerce. Cleary shows how Murray, as a wealthy widow, mentored a number of young businesswomen by staking them to plenty of merchandise and advice. By contrast, Norling takes her account of whaling wives into the nineteenth century. Prolonged absences of the men and a new cultural dominance of romantic ideals resulted in more women going to sea with their husbands, exchanging virtual independence for a simulation of domestic life in a small cabin aboard ship.

Both of these books track women's entrepreneurial behavior across cultural change, revealing an eighteenth-century New England in which instances of "Cape Horn widows" and "She Merchants" were not isolated cases.

Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870
Lisa Norling, University of North Carolina Press, 2000 - [ Buy this book ]
Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America
Patricia Cleary, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000 -