First City. Gary B. Nash
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workbench and street was very small in towns such as Philadelphia, and the relationship between the craftsman and his clientele had political and social dimensions. As Philadelphia developed, craftsmen became more and more involved in life beyond their shop doors. Peter Stretch was not only a clockmaker but also a city councilman for thirty-eight unbroken years and unceasingly involved in the affairs of his Quaker monthly meeting—seeing that the youth were orderly, mentoring orphaned children, presenting incoming Quakers with their certificates of removal from their previous meeting. William Savery was not only a chair and cabinet maker but a member of the Fellowship Fire Company and by 1757 keeper of the keys for its engine; ward tax assessor at age thirty-four; a supporter of the Friendly Association, which tried to forge an enlightened Indian policy in the difficult mid-century era; and an active member of the Society of Friends.
Although history books teach us to think of the urban economy as male-driven and the artisan’s world as masculine, Philadelphia’s economy depended in no small way on women’s paid and unpaid labor, and women by the hundreds were retailers, proprietoresses, and artisans. Most artisans lived and worked in the same structure; and in a world where home and shop were contiguous, the artisan’s wife would often tend the shop when he was away and help in the ordering and processing of materials. Other women took over their husbands’ or fathers’ trades when they died. For example, in the early national era, three of Philadelphia’s printers were women: Jane Aitken, who took over the business of her father, Robert Aitken, when he died in 1802; Lydia Bailey, who took over the business after the death of her husband, Robert Bailey; and Margaret Bache, widow of Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora from November 1798 to March 1800.
Female trades also flourished in the preindustrial city. Anyone walking through the commercial district of the late colonial era would encounter tavernkeeper Rachel Draper, upholsterer Elizabeth Lawrence, tallow chandler Ann Wishart, optician shopkeeper Hannah Breintnall, dry goods shopkeeper Elizabeth Rawle, and dozens more. At least one third of all retailers were women, and perhaps one fifth of all inns, taverns, and boardinghouses were female managed. Though males dominated the craft shops, they included female bakers and braziers, distillers and winemakers; mantua makers, glovers and tailors; tinkers and sieve makers; soap boilers and spinners. Women served as well as healers, nurses, and midwives; teachers and preachers; keepers of inns, taverns, and boardinghouses. Much of women’s work has been hidden from view because of the scarcity of records relating to both paid and unpaid labor. Yet account books of a few of these women found their way into the collections of the Historical Society and even into the holdings of Philadelphia’s College of Physicians. Skillfully exploiting these scarce accounts and supplementing them with tax records, wills, and early census reports, women’s historians in recent years have restored women to the urban economy.17
FIGURE 24. Woman’s pocket, c. 1745-55, PMA. Women’s dresses were not made with pockets during this period. Instead, separate pockets, like this one, were tied around the waist or neck to hold small necessities. Like most other clothes signifying status, pockets came in many fabrics and styles. Female domestics probably wore plain cotton or muslin pockets, while the mistress of a well-to-do household expected to have one highly decorated and made of silk and linen as pictured here.
More familiar than women whose labor made them a conspicuous part of Philadelphia’s street life was the labor of women in domestic settings. The chatelaine or “pocket” (Figure 24) was the badge of the mistress of the house and sometimes the shop—the manager who was responsible for conserving and distributing household stores. One historian has suggested that the pocket is a better symbol of eighteenth-century women than the spinning wheel because “this homely object symbolizes the obscurity, the versatility, and the personal nature of the housekeeping role. A woman sat at a wheel, but she carried her pocket with her from room to room, from house to yard, yard to street…. Whether it contained cellar keys or a paper of pins, a packet of seeds or a baby’s bib, a hand of yarn or a Testament, it characterized the social complexity as well as the demanding diversity of women’s work.”18
Symbols of Affluence, Signs of Distress
The absence of great wealth or dire poverty in Philadelphia’s early decades, what some called “a pleasing mediocrity,” was yielding to a new social order by the eve of the American Revolution. The range of social conditions had widened, and the distance between top and bottom had grown. Mixing together on the streets and wharves were merchant moguls, middling shopkeepers and artisans, and struggling—sometimes impecunious—mariners, laborers, and less successful artisans.
The collections of the city’s cultural institutions have been repeatedly replenished with objects reflecting the comfort of the merchant-rentier class in the colonial city, so much so that it sometimes seems that everybody in the city prospered. But beneath the surface of genteel Philadelphia resided other layers of society that historians have disclosed only recently. Most of the physical evidence that would document the lives of ordinary Philadelphians has been used up, torn down, or thrown away. But historians are beginning to discover the lives of the laboring classes in tax lists, poor relief rolls, pay records, newspaper notices of runaway servants and slaves, vagrancy dockets, almshouse admission ledgers, and other records. Especially important are the inventories of household goods taken when a person died. But a full picture of life in the growing colonial city remains half-visible.
As today’s builders of outsized mansions can appreciate, the house was the greatest symbol of wealth and social status in eighteenth-century America. Many of Philadelphia’s successful merchants and gentlemen living on investments and inherited wealth built houses befitting their affluence during the building boom of the 1760s and 1770s, and the wealthiest of them retreated from the heat, dirt, and yellow fever epidemics of Philadelphia summers by building country houses along the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Inside the urbane house, whether in or outside the city, fireplaces were an essential element for heating and a venue for the decorator’s touch. House carpenters assembled mantels and then added ornaments according to their client’s taste or their own.
If house size was a signifier of social status, so were the building materials of which the houses were made: brick and stone for the wealthier, wood for the humble. In the same way, inside the house the wood used in furniture signified a family’s wealth and values. Softwood pine served ordinary people, more expensive cherry and maple for middling families. But for the affluent, hardwoods such as oak, walnut, and mahogany—the latter far more expensive because it had to be imported from British Honduras and other distant places—were the materials of choice (though some conservative Quakers shied away from the more ostentatious mahogany). Fine upholstered side chairs, a drop-leaf dinner table, crystal wine glasses, and Chinese porcelain plates (Figure 25) were far beyond the means of common Philadelphians but comfortably within the budget of perhaps one hundred Philadelphia families.19
FIGURE 25. Dining room setting, mid-eighteenth century, PMA. Wealthy Philadelphians enamored of Georgian-era furnishings created a local version of English upper-class life. The table shown here is set with a silver salver (the small footed tray at the center holding a serving dish), Chinese porcelain plates, silverware, and crystal glasses. These fine material possessions have been collected so passionately and displayed so frequently in museums and historical societies that the public’s mental picture of colonial life in Philadelphia is based primarily on the household goods of the uppermost layer of urban society.
Samplers were a favorite form of female expression among the city’s well-to-do families. Needlework efficiently combined lessons in writing and cultivated discipline, patience, and quietude—or so mothers and fathers hoped. Rebecca Jones was twelve in 1751 when she worked her sampler (Figure 26), probably under the watchful eye of her mother, a schoolmistress, or Ann Marsh, a Quaker woman skilled in needlepoint. Originally treasured for