This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books as well as those belonging to family members, and then offers an in-depth exploration of how women’s clothing was described in these sources. 1 These books, like many surviving account books, can be found in collections of family papers belonging overwhelmingly to men and women of the middling and gentry classes, and so speak principally to their experiences. 2 While detailed description in accounts has sometimes been interpreted as unnecessary for the accurate keeping of accounts, largely as a result of an emphasis on rationality in histories of accounting, this chapter demonstrates that the very frequency with which it was used demands reconsideration of this. By drawing on a comparison with the language used to describe clothing and textiles in bills issued by retailers, it also demonstrates how descriptions might be moved across and between texts during the accounting process, which has important implications for our understanding of description, authorship, and meaning. Indeed, it shows how the issue, payment, and recording of bills contributed significantly to the broader circulation of descriptive terms and material literacy surrounding clothing and textiles.
Accounting became increasingly widespread after 1650, and there is ample evidence to suggest that many eighteenth-century women were competent accountants. 3 Indeed, Kenneth Charlton and Margaret Spufford have suggested that early modern women’s training in ‘ciphering’ may have been given little space in sources like journals precisely because ‘it was so necessary and obvious that it was assumed’. 4 Amy Froide has conducted a more thorough investigation into levels of female numeracy, showing that it was a discipline cultivated across the social hierarchy. 5 How and when women acquired these skills, however, is more difficult to determine, though it has been suggested that it was a skill acquired primarily in the home. 6 As Beverly Lemire has suggested, surviving accounts show that women’s shift to ‘numeric record-keeping’ was a gradual process which took place at a slower pace than men’s, but the very fact that eighteenth-century women’s manuscript accounts exist in as-yet uncounted numbers in archives across England demonstrates that many were able to acquire competency in accounting from somewhere. 7 Keeping an account book provided a space in which literate and numerate women might record expenditure on their own clothing as well as that of other people. While it is clear that women might keep accounts of investment opportunities or in their capacity as the manager of a business or estate, the personal consumption of clothing inevitably leads to a focus on the individual, household, and family. 8 Accounts have therefore formed staple sources in studies of consumption in the eighteenth century and beyond, where they have been well-used to extract information on goods, prices, and services, as well as patterns of consumption.
A number of studies have also considered accounting as a site of negotiation and power, and particularly of gendered power. 9 While the discipline of accounting history has been slow to recognise the potential of gender and the household as categories of analysis, they have been well worn in the context of consumption. 10 Writing on the seventeenth-century household accounts of Alice Le Strange, for instance, Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths have argued that accounting provides insight into the ‘power relations’ of the household, but was not necessarily a source of agency for women as a husband might oversee purchasing activities. 11 Amanda Vickery has made a similar point for the eighteenth century. 12 It has long been accepted that the rules of coverture existed ‘in a state of suspended animation’ as married women acted as independent economic agents. 13 Nevertheless, married women’s management of the household and the keeping of household accounts has formed the primary focus in discussions of women and accounting. In 1989, Linda Pollock noted a ‘key paradox of early modern society’: that women were ostensibly expected to be ‘demure, compliant and submissive’ but were in reality ‘successful managers of estates’. This, she argued, was not simply a case of prescription failing in practice, but instead reflected the fact that women were expected to perform a ‘dual role of subordination and competence’. 14 The daily management of the household has subsequently been interpreted as an important sphere of influence for married women. 15
Karen Harvey has written men back into this narrative of domesticity, which has positioned the household primarily as a source of authority for women, albeit an uncertain one. 16 Both men and women, Harvey argues, were expected to have a close involvement with the home; for women this was imagined as ‘day-to-day domestic tasks’, while male housekeeping was ‘understood as overall management of the household’. 17 Vickery has argued that these gendered roles even prescribed the types of expenditure recorded by husbands and wives. Looking at the accounts of married men and women in tandem, she suggests that while a wife’s consumption was ‘predominantly repetitive and mundane’ and for the household, her husband’s was ‘characteristically occasional and impulsive, or expensive and dynastic’. 18 On the one hand, household management has therefore been understood as a source of authority for women, who held control of day-to-day decision-making. On the other, it has been shown that they were often restricted to certain types of expenditure. Walsh even writes of the ‘constant burden’ of managing household resources, while Vickery and John Styles describe the ‘ongoing and relentless responsibility’ reflected in women’s account books. 19 Alexandra Shepard has addressed this, arguing that the management of household resources was an essential component of women’s work which ‘entailed interdependence between men and women’. 20 This responsibility for household ‘stuff’, she continues, did not restrict women to a domestic sphere, but actually placed them ‘at the heart of the early modern economy’. 21