THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

domestic consumption and women naturalized abstention as a female concern. Yet, as
historian Karen Harvey argues, rather than a period of declining male influence in the
home, the late eighteenth century instead was a period of shifting relationships between
the home and the polity. The home, she notes, retained political significance in ways that
destabilize historians’ ideas about the “privacy” of the domestic sphere. 28 Eighteenth-
century abstention rhetoric highlights how Britons debated the relationship of men and
women to the “world of goods.” In turn, the unsettled character of domestic and political
economy and gender roles informed debates about the consumption of slave-labor goods.
In the nineteenth century, women’s purchasing power continued to capture the
attention of abstainers. The ideological association of women and domesticity had
gained ascendancy by 1824 when Elizabeth Heyrick suggested a more radical use for
abstention, the immediate abolition of slavery. 29 The ideology of “separate spheres”
described men as rational, competitive, and independent. In contrast, “true womanhood”
was based on the qualities of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Because
McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of
Eighteenth Century England (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982); John Brewer and Roy
Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); Grant McCracken,
Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988); T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How
Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ann
Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008); Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a
Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28 (1993), 141-157; Cary Carson, “The Consumer
Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in
the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1994), 483-697.
28 Karen Harvey, “Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century
Britain,” Gender and History 21 (2009), 520-540.
29 Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition.
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