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revised 26 June 2008
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a 1678 textbook for “the women and maidens
of London,” written by “one of that sex”
Intended to teach women
the right understanding and practice of the method of keeping books of account: whereby, either single, or married, they may know their estates, carry on their trades, and avoid the danger of a helpless and forlorn condition, incident to widows ...
this accounting manual for women — a quarto of about 40 pages, including several sample ledgers — is an early masterpiece of information design.
It opens by renouncing English women’s limited “education in needle-work, lace, and point-making,” arguing that elsewhere in the world, bookkeeping is traditionally part of the women’s sphere, and a necessary skill for those women hoping to move beyond “the female slavery” to a more independent lifestyle. In foreign countries, the reader learns,
Merchants and other trades men have no other Book-keepers then their Wives: who by this means (the Husband dying) are well acquainted with the nature and manner of the trade.
By the time this textbook appeared, there was already an established market for pre-printed business forms and assorted financial tools. Playing cards and books teaching both sexes the rudiments of mathematics had been published in London for almost a century by then, and calculators had also become fashionable (e.g., Samuel Morland’s “arithmetic engine,” designed about 1660, was specifically aimed at the “Ladies”). An earlier calculator, William Pratt’s Arithmeticall Jewell, which fitted into a pocket in the cover of its instruction manual and was useful for “all Arithmetic works in whole Numbers as all fractional operations without fractions or reductions,” first appeared in 1617. And the always-popular almanacs included more and more computational tables (e.g., for calculating compound interest) as the century progressed.
All of this raises questions for Mary Poovey’s theory about the move to a gendered system of double-entry bookkeeping in England ca. 1620. According to Poovey, the new bookkeeping replaced the more heterogeneous narrative accounts of daily business transactions recorded by women and servants in the conventional memorial — “after the capacitie of their minds” — with the rule-governed writing and numbers of the masculine journal. As a result, the socioeconomic abstraction we know as “the market” came into being. Poovey argues that bookkeeping’s new discourse of economic rationality created a statistical basis for measuring the economy, while at the same time presenting it as something lawlike and knowable, mostly by equating risk with women’s style of work.
RELATES TO: various ISSUES webessays and IN BRIEF topics on the gendering of science and women’s aptitude for mathematics; an ISSUES webessay on feminist economics; a companion GALLERY exhibit on early-modern financial information design