"Showing how women did not just take part in dealing with but were intimately connected to all aspects of the credit economy, this book examines the gendered boundaries and wide variety of this participation. Drawing on court records, Damiano uncovers the rich and tangled connections that embedded women in daily economic dealings. An excellent and insightful book."
"A fascinating exploration of the repertoire of roles played by women in the highly choreographed world of colonial household economy. Sara Damiano's exquisite readings of the fragmentary but abundant evidence of women's financial acumen show how it underpinned the development of the eighteenth-century seaport economy and the wider Atlantic trade."
"Pressuring debtors, hiring lawyers, and dodging sheriffs was essential financial labor in the eighteenth century. Damiano's brilliant reconstruction of such activities in To Her Credit proves that this was women's work, as they secured households and local economies in a period marked by war and loss as much as by growing consumer prosperity."
"Damiano's careful reading of thousands of eighteenth-century debt cases reveals a vibrant world of women's legal and economic activities co-extensive with ordinary domestic routines and spaces. She shows that women's engagement in emerging credit and debt networks and their pursuit of legal remedies to protect their own and their families' interests helped to establish the groundwork for capitalism and the professionalization of law."
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