Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900. By Kathleen Waters Sander. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xii, 165 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-252-02401-X. Paper, $16.95, isbn 0-252-06703-7.)

An example of the lively, ongoing reassessment of women's historical relationship to money and capitalist enterprise, Kathleen Waters Sander's useful study of the producers' cooperatives called woman's exchanges documents a movement that at its height spread to seventy cities and helped thousands of women to distribute and sell home-produced work. We learn that the Cincinnati woman's exchange paid out almost half a million dollars to its consignors between its founding in 1884 and 1900, and that the ten largest exchanges in the nation disbursed $210,551 to producers in 1891 alone. Sander's study makes connections to the history of consumerism and retailing as well as to women's work and voluntary associations. Despite this, the significance of the movement remains elusive and its meaning for women's historians problematic. . . .

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