Given that ‘anagement was a favourite eighteenth century term’, informing all levels of the state and public activities, eighteenth-century English society was to prove particularly fertile ground for oeconomy. ‘Oeconomy’ changed in meaning over this period, but the emphasis on the wise management of the household resources in the original Greek oikos was always present. In contrast, this chapter examines the continuing emphasis placed on the economic role of households, a role that again underscored their importance to the nation. Several historians have linked the divestment of the household's economic function in a period of nascent industrialization with the development of a discourse of ‘the economy’.
A second point of change concerned the economic activity of the household unit. While some historians have observed a subsequent splitting of household and polity later in the eighteenth century, this chapter insists instead that the eighteenth-century discourse of oeconomy attached the household firmly to the political arena. Classical theory drew analogies between the oikos and the polity, yet saw them as separate late-seventeenth-century English writers made the links concrete. One important point of change concerned the relationship of the household to the polity. These changes affected not only how the household was seen, but also the wider significance that was attached to men's and women's domestic activities. Derived from the classic Aristotelian model of oikos, the meaning of oeconomy changed over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Oeconomy was the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order. It is the discourse of ‘oeconomy’, 2 rather than ‘domesticity’, ‘separate spheres’, or ‘political patriarchalism’, that holds the key to understanding men's (and women's) engagements with the domestic in this period.
These texts are the standing remains of the cultural architecture of men's domestic engagements. These written texts created not prescriptive normative ideals but a flexible discourse that was appropriated in whole or in part as a meaningful way of seeing, thinking, and living, and that operated materially in practice. This chapter takes as its focus a collection of printed works about the house, rather than a disparate set of cultural soundings, and is thereby able to reconstruct a coherent ‘discourse’ rather than diffuse cultural ideas. Before considering how words connected to practices in Chapter 3, I will explore those concepts which shaped contemporaries’ understanding of men's relationship with the house and household. People can certainly say and believe one thing, and do quite another, yet language interacts with lives lived in complex and dynamic ways. 1 No contemporary models or concepts can be easily reconciled with the realities of men's and women's activities, it seems our knowledge of experiences has outstripped our understanding of representation. More recently, historians have attended to men's domestic activities in the house. Women's activities on the supposedly ‘private’ side of this dichotomy involved them in the ‘public’ and worldly arenas of economy and politics. Historians have established the limitations of using this language as a guide to men's and women's experiences.
Throughout, the house remained closely connected to the economy and polity.Ī language of ‘public’ and ‘private’, juxtaposing the house against the outside worlds of work and politics, was a profoundly important and deeply gendered one in early-modern England. Becoming a language of the smaller householder rather than the large landowner in the early 1700s, before shifting focus from the 1770s from estate management and political governance to citizenship for the middling‐sort, ‘oeconomy’ subsequently became a potent expression of political engagement that emphasized frugality and honest virtue in a national community. The content and audience of this discourse did change, however. The chapter shows that a language of strict order and deference dominated during the long eighteenth century, created from a fusion of older patriarchalism and classical republican theories of household. Focusing on printed works, it establishes the discourse of ‘oeconomy’ as the key to understanding men's (and women's) engagements with the domestic in the eighteenth century. This chapter explore the concepts which shaped contemporaries’ understanding of men's relationship with the house and household.
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