ABSTRACT
Another response to the original slander, An Answer to the Character of an ExchangeWench, or a Vindication of an Exchange-Woman, seems to take the opposite tack by delibidinizing the consumer market and taking the saleswoman seriously. It praises the Exchange as an "Academy" of good manners, and stresses the value of female economic independence: "An Exchange-Woman does as far exceed a meer Gentlewoman, as a Civil Tradesman does a common Shark, having a commendable Calling to vouch for her honesty." But this too turns out to be a facetious work, overstating its case to provoke amusement and reinforcing the idea that relations with Exchange-women must
customers and by working bawds. Pepys recorded that a saleswoman in Cheapside ("the pretty woman that 1 always loved" and thus defined as a sexual object), had been snatched up by the procuress "Lady" Bennett, to whom Wycherley would later dedicate his Plain-Dealer (September 22, 1660).\0 But Pepys's past tense and lamenting tone ("poor soul") suggest that the victim had disappeared from her position, that Mrs. Bennett's success had obliterated her from her visible place. The two careers could not run concurrently. Again, Randolph Trumbach has found some evidence of seduced and abandoned women having been apprenticed to luxury trades like mantua-making and millinery (both allowed in the New Exchange), to show how aptly Cleland lodges Fanny Hill with Mrs. Cole the "milliner." Trumbach proves that Cleland portrays the circumstances of prostitution correctly, but leaves out the horror, destitution, and disease. It is unwise, however, to cite as evidence for non-phantasmic reality a text like The London Tradesman, which solemnly advised parents not to apprentice their daughters to millinery because "nine out of ten of the young creatures who are obliged to serve in these shops are ruined and undone" (Trumbach 1988: 79). Here the serious conduct book merges and colludes with the scandalous pamphlet, both forms of male discourse enforcing the sexual interpretation of luxury production and its "new exchange." Rather than assuming that a female-run fashion industry naturally shaded off into prostitution, we should try to assemble the contrary evidence. Bridget Hill reminds us that female apprenticeship - particularly in expanding luxury trades like dressmaking - still represented an important career opportunity, and sometimes meant working for independent mistresses. Moreover, millinery was the most lucrative and had the highest prestige, to judge by the large premiums paid for daughters' apprenticeships (1989: 95). It is surely no coincidence that libertine fictions and libertine practices - each following and confirming the other - should be directed against this particular bastion.
