In the 18th century, designing and decorating a home was a joint affair between men and women. Husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons worked together to select the style, look, and feel of their material world. These creative partnerships, however, have long been lost in the historical narrative which too often prioritizes men as the principal creators and decision makers within the domestic realm. This exploration of shopping and the market in Federal Philadelphia brings new attention to gender and the practices of furnishing households in the late 18th century. We will see how women and men in the circle of elite Americans in the national society growing around George and Martha Washington in the 1780s and 1790s, shared and divided the responsibilities of commissioning and acquiring goods for their homes. The words and actions of Martha Washington and her peers—Anne Allen Penn, Mary Lamar, Mary Morris, and Sarah Jay—provide the evidence of the various roles women played in this world of collaborative consumption.

Amy Hudson Henderson is an independent scholar and museum consultant based in Washington, D.C. With a focus on the early United States, her writing and lectures seek to highlight the political resonance of domestic material culture and how women in the late eighteenth century were integral partners in designing and decorating their homes. She has served as a curatorial consultant, research associate, and guest lecturer at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Madison’s Montpelier, George Mason’s Gunston Hall, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her publications include “French & Fashionable: The Search for George and Martha Washingtons’ Presidential Furniture,” American Furniture (2019), and “A Family Affair: The Design and Decoration of 321 South Fourth Street, Philadelphia,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830, edited by John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven: Published for Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2006). She is currently working on her book manuscript, Furnishing the Republic: Material Culture, Gender, and Politics in the Nation’s Capital, 1789-1800 (under contract, Oxford University Press). Henderson holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware and a B.A. from Grinnell College.