Synopses & Reviews
This book examines the daily practices of men and women in the 17th through 19th centuries to budget succesfully and make ends meet. The author shows the many ways businesses worked, such as pawning, selling, and borrowing on a regular basis, as well as the strong role gender played in the division of responsibilities.
Synopsis
In times past, everyday business might mean making a trip to the pawnbroker, giving a loan to a trusted friend of selling off a coat, all to make ends meet. Both women and men engaged in this daily budgeting, but women's roles were especially important in achieving some level of comfort and avoiding penury. In some communities, the daily practices in place in the seventeenth century persisted into the twentieth, whilst other groups adopted new ways, such as using numbers to chart domestic affairs and turning to the savings banks that appeared in the nineteenth century. These strategies promised respectability and greater access to new consumer goods: better clothes and finer furnishings accompanied a newly disciplined behaviour.
Therefore, in the material world of the past and in the changing habits of earlier generations lie crucial turning points. This book explores these previously under-researched patterns and practices that gave shape to modern consumer society.
About the Author
Beverly Lemire is Professor of History and Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments * List of illustrations * Introduction: Everyday Practice and Plebeian Affairs * Gender, the Informal Economy and the Development of Capitalism in England, 1650-1850; or, Credit among the Common People * Credit for the Poor and the Failed Experiment of The Charitable Corporation, c. 1700-1750 * Shifting Currency: the Practice and Economy of the Secondhand Trade, c. 1600-1850 * Refashioning Society: Expressions of Popular Consumerism and Dress, c. 1660-1820 * Savings Culture, Provident Consumerism and the Advent of Modern Consumer Society, c. 1780-1900 * Accounting for the Household: Gender and the Culture of Household Management, c. 1600-1900 * Conclusion * Bibliography