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Astell, Mary. Some Reflections upon Marriage. NY: Source Book Press, 1970. (An unabridged republication of the 1730 London edition.)
Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. 157-210. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Harth, Erica. "Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act." Cultural Critique. 9, 1988, 123-154.
Erica Harth discusses the relationship between romance and economy. She states that "considerations of love and marriage were embedded in money and property" (133).
Jones, Vivien, ed. Women in the Eighteenth-Century: Constructions of Femininity. NY: Routledge Press, 1990.
This anthology edited by Vivien Jones helps to redefine the terms "women" and "femininity." The five issues dealt with in this text are conduct, sexuality, education, writing, and feminism. The writings that this text are based on demonstrate a "construction of a powerful dominant ideology of femininity and explore its effects on ideas of sexuality, women's education, and women's writing." Heard clearly are the oppositional voices of early feminists.
Outhwaite, R.B. "Marriage as business: opinions on the rise in aristocratic bridal portions in early modern England." Business Life and Public Policy. eds. Neil McKendrick and R.B. Outhwaite. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
In this article, R.B. Outhwaite clearly identifies marriage and the economy in many forms. And as he states, "financial considerations intruded because marriage amongst the upper classes involved more than the union of two freely consenting marriageable parties; it also involved a complex and sizeable interchange of income and property between the families of these parties" (22). A remarkable increase occurred in bridal portions or dowries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth-century and in this article Outhwait explores the variations in this trend and attempts to answer the question of why the increase occurred.
Poovey, Mary. "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge." Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. George Levine, ed.
Mary Poovey discusses the relationship between the economy and aesthetics. This relationship reinforces norms of gender and while it elevates women to the status of nature's perfect specimen, it also makes her an object. Because of this objectification, women can be commodified like any other piece of property and used for exchange in a market economy.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
"The primary purpose of this book is to look beyond [conceived] images of woman to examine the shadow the Proper Lady casts across the careers of some of the women who became professional authors despite the strictures of propriety. The struggle each of these women waged to create a professional identity was in large measure defined by the social and psychological force of this idea of proper--on innate--femininity. Because gender roles are part of familial, political, social, and economic relationships, the terms in which femininity is publicly formulated dictates, in large measure, the way femaleness is subjectively experienced" (x).
Scheuermann, Mona. Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money, and Society from Defoe to Austen. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993.
Scheuermann, Mons. "Women and Courtship in Eighteenth-Century English Novels." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century. 1992, 305, 1419-22.
In a very brief essay, Mons Scheuermann discusses the role of courtship in eighteenth-century English novels and its general relationship to money. While money and marriage (particularly property) are both identified together, the basis of courtship and marriage goes still further to a basic way of exercising social control. Scheuermann points out that "since society has not yet reached enlightened mutual interest, marriage still is needed to protect women" (1422) and is a necessary social safeguard.
Staves, Susan. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. NY: Harper and Row, 1979.
Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996.
In this text, James Thompson provides an interesting analysis of value in the eighteenth-century. He answers questions such as: What is it?, How is it determined?, How is society constructed around it? With regard to the commodification of women, Thompson states that "financial modeling and fashion modeling are rarely conceptualized together, but rather are seen as wholly incommensurate activities, one largely male and the other -largely female, has a great deal to do with the eighteenth-century partition of discourses appropriate to economic men and domestic women...finance and romance become dialectically related" (3). Thompson continues to question women's role in economic exchange throughout this text and continues with this thought: "As in economic theory, these are crucial questions of what or who authorizes an individual subject's social value and in what does this value consist...does it reside within or is it relational, evident only in exchange, in the actual trafficking in women?" (19)
Zomchick, John P. Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
John Zomchick analyzes in this work the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. His main focus is on what he terms, "the juridical subject": "a representation of the individual identified with the principles and the aims of the law (especially its respect for property) and motivated by an inherent need for affectation and human community fulfilled by the family, which offers a motive for internalizing the law" (I). As Zomchick himself notes, "I will argue that the mature juridical subject is both an object of visible and invisible forces of power as well as a subject empowered by her or his internalization of that same law" (xv). While looking at the social, historical and ideological functions of law and family in the eighteenth-century, Zomchick maintains the perspective of the background of England's developing market economy in this period. In terms specifically of women and exchange, Zomchick analyzes several different aspects of the commodification of women in the context of the marriage contract, and of women and the novel he writes: "as a woman (referring to Roxanna) she possesses value as a desirable commodity in the concupiscent marketplace...with its protagonist as both juridical subject and woman, the novel represents both the economization of sex and the sexualization of the economy" (40).