Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Desperate? Hysterical? Afraid? A Look at Extreme Behavior Among Mid-Nineteenth-Century Wheeling Businesswomen
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
“Extreme economics” can include more than community activism. While businessmen’s extreme behavior is a current topic of discussion and long a focus in Appalachian history, some of Wheeling’s mid-nineteenth-century businesswomen acted in ways we might consider extreme. The literature on the history of mid-nineteenth-century American women in business who were not involved in traditional occupations like dressmaking and food production anywhere is still scant and virtually non-existent for Appalachia. However women were in business, and their actions sometimes challenged the ideal of True Womanhood, which suggested they must be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. Using court records, newspaper accounts, and R. G. Dun & Co. credit reports, this paper will discuss several businesswomen whose extreme behavior attracted negative attention to try to identify their motives and help us better understand the pressures they faced in trying to earn a living in business. Absent their own words in most cases, or the insights of psychologists, though, we can only speculate on their motivations. Why, for instance, did the R. G. Dun & Co. investigator consider Mrs. M. J. Keating “a she rascal?" Was Mary Leech, who owned a merchant tailor business, really so terrible that Eliza Hughes could call her an “old dryed stinking carcass?” Was the landlady justified in defending “her castle and her honor with a broom and a pair of tongs” when a drunken Irishman tried to rape her? How could Ellen Robinson refrain from shooting after her boarder insulted her by “touching her character for chastity?”
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Barb Howe taught American women's history and women's studies at West Virginia University and has published numerous articles on West Virginia women's history, specifically focused on Wheeling. Her most recent article is "Cyprians and Courtesans, Murder and Mayhem: Prostitution in Wheeling during the Civil War" in Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, ed. by Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015): 195-216.
Desperate? Hysterical? Afraid? A Look at Extreme Behavior Among Mid-Nineteenth-Century Wheeling Businesswomen
“Extreme economics” can include more than community activism. While businessmen’s extreme behavior is a current topic of discussion and long a focus in Appalachian history, some of Wheeling’s mid-nineteenth-century businesswomen acted in ways we might consider extreme. The literature on the history of mid-nineteenth-century American women in business who were not involved in traditional occupations like dressmaking and food production anywhere is still scant and virtually non-existent for Appalachia. However women were in business, and their actions sometimes challenged the ideal of True Womanhood, which suggested they must be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. Using court records, newspaper accounts, and R. G. Dun & Co. credit reports, this paper will discuss several businesswomen whose extreme behavior attracted negative attention to try to identify their motives and help us better understand the pressures they faced in trying to earn a living in business. Absent their own words in most cases, or the insights of psychologists, though, we can only speculate on their motivations. Why, for instance, did the R. G. Dun & Co. investigator consider Mrs. M. J. Keating “a she rascal?" Was Mary Leech, who owned a merchant tailor business, really so terrible that Eliza Hughes could call her an “old dryed stinking carcass?” Was the landlady justified in defending “her castle and her honor with a broom and a pair of tongs” when a drunken Irishman tried to rape her? How could Ellen Robinson refrain from shooting after her boarder insulted her by “touching her character for chastity?”
