Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Ordinary People

Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia. By LINDA L. STURTZ. New World in the Atlantic World. (New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xvi, 278. $85.00, $22.95.)

In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina. By CARA ANZILOTTI . Contributions in American History, Number 196 . (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002 . Pp. x, 216 . $ 64.95 .)

Reviewed by Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton

Early Americanists often qualify their descriptions of economic and social categories, differentiating masters from mistresses, planters from female planters, and merchants from she merchants. This terminology is not, on the face of it, surprising: it often arises from the sources on which historians rely. These studies by Patricia Cleary, Linda L. Sturtz, and Cara Anzilotti suggest that propertied white women in colonial British North America embraced the same identities that, linguistically and commonly, were most often associated with men. Regardless of their sex, women and men acted as masters, planters, and merchants who headed households, oversaw farms, and pursued business in the transatlantic world. These books also explore more potent subjects, analyzing how the contours of those roles, much like the language used to qualify them, changed when they were assumed by women. Collectively, the books raise important questions. How were white women's experiences as merchants, planters, or masters expressly gendered? Did they face particular constraints when they took up pursuits deemed acceptable for women yet largely practiced and defined by men? How did gender affect the power that propertied women might wield relative to their male counterparts? The answers to these questions depend significantly on a combination of family, class, and regional factors.	1
Cleary's biography resurrects the life of Scottish immigrant Elizabeth Murray, who arrived in America parentless at the age of fourteen. Thanks to the support of her brother and his connections and to her own shrewd business sense and indefatigable industry, Murray earned a favorable reputation as a Boston merchant. She maintained her occupation throughout three marriages, the first of which was made at the relatively late age of twenty-nine.	2
Cleary's nuanced biography is firmly grounded in the context of the eighteenth-century mercantile Atlantic world and encompasses the rise of consumerism and the events of the American Revolution. One remarkable feature of Murray's life was her support for the careers of other female merchants. In particular, she mentored younger female relatives. Realizing that merchants often lacked dowries to provide for their daughters and that being able to spend on the latest fashions was increasingly important to a young woman's stock in the marriage market, she took pains to insure that younger women would have a trade that might sustain them and, one day, help them marry.	. . .