The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900.

Allen, Judith A.

The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900, by Kathleen Waters Sander. Urbana, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1998. 165 pp. $39.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

This book tells the story of the American institutions designed to save genteel white women suddenly thrust into poverty from the dishonour of paid work or prostitution, from the 1830s until the early twentieth century. The Women's Exchanges took needlework produced by consignees fallen on hard times, selling it in retail stores leased in the fashionable downtowns of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and gradually across the whole country by 1900, amounting to more than 80 separate establishments. At prices competitive with, and often actually exceeding those of nineteenth-century retail stores like Bloomingdales, hard-working consignees could, perhaps, supplement meager resources enough to stay home with their children in the event of widowhood, husbandly unemployment, desertion, and other economic disasters. Uncertainty remains about the finances of this income option, because as the author of this study readily admits, she has little reliable indication of the experiences and perspectives of the women who supplied the products sold in the exchanges stores. Their voices are silent.

We do know, however, that by the mid-twentieth century, women in these circumstances had a more certain existence from state-provided welfare. Meanwhile, increased competition and market internationalization eroded the possibility that such production and retail sales could supply even a part livelihood. Probably this would have been clear earlier without the highly successful late nineteenth-century diversification of exchanges into providing tea-rooms, lunch counters, and edibles departments essentially providing take-out meals, a boon to the busy wife.

In her review of over a century of the operation of these institutions, conducted by urban Protestant women, Sander provides an institutional history of urban expansion and change. Grounded firmly in the movements' regional annual reports, publicity, promotion, and commentary by participants, the perspective is almost entirely institutional, top-down, and formal. The predictable result is a certain bloodless or lifeless quality, a sense that the flesh and bone of the story is missing. Moreover, even with the lack of sources on the lives affected by the exchanges as income options, the wider context of Protestant female philanthropy seems an important component of the story. Temperance and rescue work receive passing mention in Sander's hands, but, fuller context framing might have compensated somewhat for the lack of consignee perspectives on the Exchange movement.

Beyond these matters of context and wider perspective, however, the story of the Exchange movement arguably signals important historical tensions in urban configurations of class, race, and gender that deserved more ample and adventurous analysis than offered in this study. Staying close to the primary sources of the movement did not permit Sander to write the bigger story that this study could have sustained. Even at its most literal, the evidence mandates a story of sex, whiteness, and sewing, evolving into the urban catering business, the gradual erosion or destabilization of sex divisions of labour, and the rise of the limited American welfare state. The implicit and never-discussed whiteness of all relevant protagonists warrants analytic space of some kind, in a study spanning the century or so from the 1830s. Furthermore, prostitution was the little-spoken specter framing the outer limit of the Exchange movement, the presumably more likely resort of the African-American, working-class, and poor women of all ethnicities, than of the embroidering consignees.

For these enriching dimensions to be incorporated into the framework of this study, a broader, more catholic, and more diverse historiographical canvass is needed. A vast literature on women's philanthropy, paid work, class, marriage, religion, and labour and business history, not only in America, but in comparable new and old western cultures, could have raised more challenging questions right at the heart of this rather lethargic and brief study.

In the meantime, by being the study to cover this topic, Sander's is the authoritative text on the Women's Exchange Movement. She has done a creditable job with solid and traditional methods of research and argument. The book is written in a spare and pleasing style, making it accessible and readily grasped. Its argument and significance could go so much further. Sander and others can take it from here and deepen the purchase of the evidence and findings, relative to comparable projects, to the benefit of all.

Judith A. Allen

Indiana University