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gender was a function of their being most intelligible in terms of the differences between
the traditional concerns of men and women, especially considering the consumption of
domestic goods and the concern with narrow, circumscribed, private, interests.
In fact, these conceptual shifts and transformations might have looked quite
different if it weren’t for the fact that gender sensibilities were elevated to a high pitch
because the primacy of commerce required nothing less than a full assault on a social
ontology that had long-presupposed the subordination of the private to the public, the
superordination of political over ‘social’ or ‘economic’ goals, and most fundamentally,
the rule of men over women. In a sense, commerce stripped the social ontology of civic
identity down to the relationship of the public and private spheres, where it was the
relations of men and women – not slaves and masters, or sovereigns and subjects – that
were ontologically defining. Thus, when J. G. A. Pocock noted that “All serious thinkers
in the eighteenth century accepted commerce, and all had doubts about it” (Pocock 2000),
a significant dimension of those doubts had to do with how far the ‘feminization’ of the
moral economy of commercial society would extend. At root, the ‘quarrel of the ancients
and the moderns’ over the moral economy of modern society was carried out in
significant part on the register of gender because it was on this register that disputes
about the goals and behaviors appropriate to modern political life, modern civic identity,
and modern citizenship in a commercial society, made sense. One arena in which these
disputes were obvious was the ongoing redefinition of “polite” society and men’s and
women’s roles in it. Matters of deportment, dress
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, with whom one dined, and so forth
occupied many writers in this period. As Pocock observed, when a concern with
politeness emerged in the early eighteenth century, the focus of writers shifted from
Convention