Managing Property and Credit: Female Landlords in Eighteenth-Century British North American Port Cities

This paper analyzes the enterprises of female landlords in three British North American port cities—Boston, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—during the second half of the eighteenth century. Overall, more than ten percent of eighteenth-century landlords were women, but historians have yet to study such women systematically. Taking in boarders and renting out one’s property were important survival strategies for widows and single women who otherwise had limited sources of income. Such rentals by women, which often took place on credit, also helped sustain maritime economies characterized by deferred payments to sailors and high levels of male transience.

            This paper uses newspaper advertisements, legal cases, tax records, and correspondence in order to reconstruct the business activities of female landlords. It interrogates the conditions that made renting a particularly accessible economic pursuit for women, and it assesses the extent to which the female landlords’ economic strategies and challenges differed from those of male landlords. Overall, systematic study of female landlords, a group whose activities involved extensive management of both real estate and credit, revises understandings of the gendering of economic life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.