During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the realities of women’s work defied emerging discursive notions of “public” that undergirded the formation of a capitalist system. Women often embraced these discursive distinctions and tried to formulate their activities using the language of family and domesticity. But as this panel shows, categorizing women’s labor, investing, and entrepreneurialism as private bolstered claims that the “public” interest, as a synonym for public good, might best be served by wealthy white men. Distinctions between productive and reproductive labor, savers and borrowers, and everyday and mercantile entrepreneurship further enshrined the public good as the purview of men.
As we will show, it was in the public’s interest to make women’s labor, investing, and business activities appear private. While “public” interest tends to connote positive normativity, this panel will show that, public-mindedness served to reinforce racial, gendered and class distinction. Public-mindedness encouraged working women to live as prudent savers not risky borrowers. Public-mindedness legitimized women’s entrepreneurship only as an extension of their absent husbands’ reputation. And public-mindedness labeled the cooking, cleaning, and childcare required to make money a racialized and gendered form of reproductive labor rather than productive labor. These forces made new production synonymous with growth to serve the public good while rendering more circular economic work synonymous with maintenance. As women lived in the lie of the public-private discursive distinction and all the fictional distinctions that flowed from it, they struggled under the weight of a public good that promoted their disempowerment.