Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping books in eighteenth-century England potx

[...]... governesses and the “contaminated principles” they impart to their young English wards Teaching girls accounting, the text strongly implies, will counteract that corrupting French in uence.) It bears remarking that the fashion illustrations included in women’s pocket books – and indeed, in magazines like Vogue and Elle today – work on this same principle of “perfectibility.” In the pocket book, such... husband’s coal mine while he was still alive, discussed in letters the prosperity of the business and the bookkeeping it generated: “I have almost put my eyes out with accounts,” she wrote in 1766 Female-owned businesses offered services ranging from hairdressing to coffin-making The skilled clothing trades – millinery (a large, diverse business in the eighteenth century), along with embroidery and. .. clarity of lines, then the issue of personal control is played out in the form of programming the hand to operate within those lines In this way, as noted earlier, the self is ruled like the hand – one internally and one externally Money as metaphor – and mind your own business The preface to the 1789 edition of The Ladies’ New Memorandum is devoted specifically and unabashedly to money It begins, “The... 45111 Introduction The words that recur in the literature of an age offer clues to contemporary fascinations and anxieties In the eighteenth century, “account” is such a word, taking various forms and conveying multiple meanings Account, accounting, accountable: the words are found everywhere from tutelary texts to novels, particularly – it turns out – in literature about and directed toward women In eighteenth-century. .. mantuamaking – were dominated by women, offering them not only social standing but capital as well Despite the growing strength of organized and male-dominated guild trades, the City Company of Goldsmiths apprenticed girls Surviving records, in fact, document women goldsmiths like Elizabeth Bence taking on female apprentices Many unskilled or untrained women, whether married, widowed, or single, became... remaining space on the right-hand page, horizontally sectioned into seven long boxes, one for each day of the week, is designated for “Memorandums and Remarks.” Within a volume of otherwise densely printed information, the very blankness of Chapter 21 is compelling, each of its pages clearly intended for the extensive recording of numbers and words Here, then, is the contained life The copy under examination... on a zero-sum basis Sharing, on the other hand, is endlessly generative – and in that sense more capitalistic: sharing begets more sharing, just as giving begets more giving This capitalist model, by utopian extension, leads to the sense that having is insufficient without showing and sharing – the corrupted version of which is consumption in the service of conspicuous display In that final tableau, the... executrix of his estate and/ or business.12 In 1775, a Mrs Baskerville gave public notice of carrying on her husband’s letter-founding business after his death, and the widow of John Hawthorne, a Newcastle watchmaker, did the same In the same year, Margaret Murray and Sarah Gorton, both of them single women, advertised their respective services as engraver and saddler And bluestocking Mrs Elizabeth Montague,... otherwise happen in settling the Account Almost imperceptibly the passage shifts in tone from an innocuous description of accounts as a source of “ease and comfort” to sudden dire warnings of “Danger and Difficulty,” and a “fatal Precipitancy,” if accounts are not kept The urgency of avoiding running “blindfold into Errors” again invokes the metaphor of account-book as pellucid mirror, reflecting the corrected,... the later Ladies’ Own Memorandum, reads in part: [B]y looking into this little Book, you will be capable of transacting Business punctually, of preventing the irksome Expectataions [sic] of your Acquaintance, of remembering all Necessaries you want to purchase, and of keeping your Credit with all Mankind These are some of the Benefits, and believe me, Ladies, no inconsiderable ones, which may be purchas’d . Levine 4 Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England Authoritative women since 1800 Edited by Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop 5 Women,. Women, Gender and Labour Migration Historical and global perspectives Edited by Pamela Sharpe 6 Women, Accounting, and Narrative Keeping books in eighteenth-century