Within Her Power by Linda Sturtz

Author:Linda Sturtz [Sturtz, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781135302030
Google: 6eD9AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T16:00:10+00:00

FIGURE 6.2 Frances Norton’s Dress. Silk Gown and Matching Petticoat. “By tradition made in England in 1778 and brought to Virginia by Mrs. Frances Norton, daughter of Courtenay Norton.”125 Reproduced by permission of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Accession G1946–133, 1953–171, 2.

The correspondence between customers and merchants demonstrates the commercial activities of married women who have eluded historians who dwelt excessively on legal status at the expense of understanding actual pursuits. Robert Cary and Company served Daniel Parke Custis and later his widow Martha (Dandridge) Custis (Washington),120 but a receipt of goods sent to Custis indicates that Mrs. Cary purchased some of the items.121 Elizabeth Perry made selections and offered advice to a Mrs. Jones on clothing. Perry explained that she bought a more fashionable “Parkey Burdet” instead of the originally requested fabric because she “[th] ought a chery dery had too mean a look,” or too down-market an image for her Virginia customer. The substitution was more expensive than the original order. Perry was also unable to find the requested “sprigg’d muslin... there is no such thing.”122 Perry’s letter is interesting in that it is directly between the female purchaser and female buyer at a time when much of the correspondence regarding purchases was made through male family members.

Virginia-born English resident Courtenay Norton served as a purchaser of goods for her family’s firm, John Norton and Sons. One Virginia woman, when ordering china through the Nortons in 1771, requested specifically that Mrs. Norton choose the dishes.123 This is significant because during the Revolutionary War era ceramic increasingly replaced pewter for drinking vessels. Ceramic teacups became an increasingly common consumer item even for “middling” level colonists, and fashions and technologies were subject to rapid changes. A range of merchandise, from cheap to expensive (some cups and saucers cost the equivalent of a week’s wages of a laborer), was offered to Virginia customers. Even less prosperous Virginians sought to “live in the vogue of the cosmopolitan center of the British empire” by acquiring and using newly available creamware and patterned ceramics.124 In this context of specialized consumer demand for the latest fashions of goods that displayed a family’s social ranking and economic position, a customer could turn to Mrs. Norton’s taste in goods available in England. (For some indication of the Norton women’s choice in fashion items, see fig. 6.2). The family business benefited from her specialized function within the firm.

Mrs. Norton also acquired supplies at the wholesale level when Charlotte Dickson set up a Williamsburg store with her son Beverley. Then, the Dicksons ordered their goods from the firm of John Norton and Sons and, in thanking the Nortons for supplying them with merchandise that sold quickly, Beverley wrote that they were “oblig’d” to Mrs Norton “for choosing her things so well.”126

Mrs. Norton occasionally ran into communications difficulties because of the distance between the London and Yorktown bases of operation. After the Dicksons set up their Williamsburg shop they asked Mrs. Norton to get a pair of stays made to the same measurements as those on file with an English supplier.

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