V
Once we move beyond enthusiasm for the agricultural enlightenment model and recognize its overemphasis on the influence of books in the dissemination of knowledge of advanced agriculture,
1 As pointed out by James Fisher, with a fresh approach to rethinking books, knowledge, and labour, in The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (2022). we may wonder what effect the literature examined in this chapter actually had on women’s conduct. Compared to books published on agriculture and new agronomic techniques, writings on economics and accountancy aimed at a female audience are more practical and have a stronger moral tone. They provide easy-to-manage techniques and behaviourist advice. Would their ostensible claim to be within the reach of all women, even from an early age, offer a gain in efficiency? Would the moral lessons embedded in the practical advice provide an effective means of communicating with their target audience?
The idea of ‘order’ provides the principle of coherence for this literature. Thus, it can be linked to other fields of social prescription: order in industrial work and within working-class families, for example in hygiene and childcare practices. Steered by the upper classes, the popular agricultural writings I have studied have a modus operandi that hardly differs from those of the manuals on hygiene for women of the working class.
2 L. Bolstanski, Prime éducation et morale de classe (1969). Their objectives of social control may seem strangely similar. It is whispered in the ears of women on small and middling farms that their orderly conduct and good book-keeping can be a guarantee of their families’ upward mobility, just as it is hammered into working-class women that they can escape poverty by managing the household economy in an orderly fashion. In the Foucauldian approach to the control of the domestic sphere, an approach that focuses on the proliferation of techniques for disciplining the body, health, food, and housing,
3 J. Donzelot, La police des familles (1977). women are allies of the state and reformers, capable of containing obscurantism, combating immorality, and imposing authority on husbands and children. This raises the question of whether rural women, by receiving an accounting education for the farm, were ‘externally acted’ agents rather than ‘self-acting’ actors of modernization. In other words, would accounting education help make them ‘governable agents’, or conversely, give them more agency?
In several respects, I have highlighted the social control project to which women were subjected in the literature studied here. This tends to support the thesis of a domestication that confines women’s role to the social project and the limits defined by the upper classes and the state. But I would like to conclude by pointing out some weaknesses of this interpretation. Indeed, accounting has also been theorized in terms of agency, from both a cognitive and a moral perspective. Drawing on Jack Goody’s seminal work
4 J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). and other theoretical reflections on accounting, writing, and power,
5 K. Hoskin and R. Macve, ‘Writing, Examining, Disciplining: The Genesis of Accounting’s Modern Power’, in A. Hopwood and P. Miller (eds), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (1994), pp. 67–97. one can surmise that keeping accounts enhanced women’s capacity for reflexivity and rationalization. It was for this very purpose that women farmers were advised in some writings to keep notebooks or diaries in addition to accounts. For Rebecca Elisabeth Connor, the recording of financial accounts in pocket books in eighteenth-century England expressed ‘a growing cultural expectation that women document what they had, what they owed, and what they were owed’.
6 R. E. Connor, Women, Accounting and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), p. 2. Beyond the cognitive reasoning tied to the act of making lists, tabulating, or balancing accounts, the daily practice of writing was supposed to have an effect on willpower. It was a form of self-discipline. As stressed by Harro Maas, ‘moral accounting was not a property of the mind, but a tool-based practice with normative consequences for one’s personal life’.
7 H. Maas, ‘Letts Calculate: Moral Accounting in the Victorian Period’, History of Political Economy 48 (1996), pp. 16–43 at p. 32. As claimed by promoters of daily planners and diaries, writing in everyday life, whether numbers or facts, was a way to improve the self along several dimensions – financial, social, and personal. It is thus important to bear in mind that the ‘real value’ of record-keeping extended well beyond statements of gain and loss, as some of the authors examined here clearly expressed in their emotive pleas for accounting. We don’t have the women’s words nor their practices for the long nineteenth century. But we can at least put forward the idea that the accounting education they received may have enabled some of them to better negotiate their autonomy and gain agency. This argues for a reversal of perspective. The use of figures, the advocacy for accounting and even the historical work (accounting history is a masculinized academic sub-field)
8 S. Walker, ‘Accounting Histories of Women: Beyond Recovery?’, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 21 (2008), pp. 580–610. all bear the hallmarks of a gendered approach, in which men play the leading if not the unique role. We still need to make room for women’s accounting role in documenting the process of agricultural modernization, in which they have so far remained the missing link.