Clothing as Currency: Women and Property after the Revolution

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Join historians Laura F. Edwards (Princeton University) and Ashley Rose Young (Library of Congress) for a discussion of Laura’s book “Only the Clothes on her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth Century United States” and the Library collections associated with the importance of clothing and textiles in the founding of America.

In the decades following the Revolution, textiles were not just necessities or desirable consumer goods; they also circulated as currency. That was particularly true for people who had difficulty acquiring property or credit. The federal system’s decentralized structure enabled that situation: lax financial regulation allowed textiles to circulate just like mediums of exchange that bore the imprimatur of states and the federal government. If anything, the people who used textiles as currency improved on the systems of exchange overseen by their government. Textiles stored value reliably. There was considerable consensus as to their value. They were extremely liquid. And they were attached to people through longstanding practices acknowledged in law. Through use, people turned textiles into banknotes—which is where textiles eventually ended up anyway, since banknotes were made of rags. Spinners, weavers, seamstresses, dressmakers, tailors, and even washerwomen were all, essentially, printing money.

Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty in the History Department at…

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Library of Congress

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English

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United States

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