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Chapter 6 - Credit and Credulity

Political Economy, Gender, and the Sentiments in The Wrongs of Woman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

Catherine Packham
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Summary

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

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Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity
, pp. 185 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Credit and Credulity
  • Catherine Packham, University of Sussex
  • Book: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
  • Online publication: 15 February 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009395823.007
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  • Credit and Credulity
  • Catherine Packham, University of Sussex
  • Book: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
  • Online publication: 15 February 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009395823.007
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Credit and Credulity
  • Catherine Packham, University of Sussex
  • Book: Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
  • Online publication: 15 February 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009395823.007
Available formats
×