ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how women writers made that stake evident and, in the process, helped mainstream political economy in the nineteenth century. It contributes to a growing body of research that shows women not only understood political economy, but that their writing helped secure its place in the Victorian cultural imagination. Women's contributions were often collaborative—dependent on formal and informal networks of writers and thinkers—and took many forms including fictional exploration, textbook and essay writing, university work, and committee participation. Jane Marcet's Conversations was Martineau's own introduction to political economy and she came to Adam Smith only after reading Marcet, an example that, in itself, illustrates the powerful reach of women's writing about political economy. The language of separate spheres saturates the passage, and yet so does the language of women's economic liberation; this duality was characteristic of women's economic writing in the period.
