ABSTRACT
In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Moll, age fourteen, recounts the following observations on marriage, made by her mistress’s daughter to her younger brother, who is in pursuit of Moll:
“I wonder at you brother,” says the sister. “Betty wants but one thing, but she as good as want everything, for the market is against our sex just now; and if a woman have beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all these to an extreme, yet if she have not money, she’s nobody, she had as good want them all, for nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands.”
(Defoe 1978: 44)