Gamblor’s World

Dixon, Hope Cotton: “The Gambling Woman’s Revolution: An Alternative Gender, An Alternative Epistemology”

in Eighteenth-Century Women:  Studies in their Lives, Works, and Culture

by the same author

Women and Risk:  Gambling Women in eighteenth century England.  Auburn University, 1998.  Ph.D.

Abstract

Gambling was a popular pastime for English women in the long eighteenth century, and many women were notorious for their participation in and encouragement of gambling. By engaging chance and taking risks, the gambling woman moves into a realm of uncertainty that has the potential not only to expand her economic and social possibilities but also, more importantly, to give her the authority over that expansion. In this dissertation, I weave together representations of gambling women in novels, plays, poems, and satiric prints with analyses of gambling laws, newspaper accounts, and parliamentary and financial records of real-life gambling women in order to reconstruct the cultural attitudes toward and impact of the eighteenth-century gambling woman. As gambling women work to configure spaces that offer them the chance to revise their worlds epistemologically and materially, contemporary cultural representations work equally as hard to mediate this revision. Their horrific, mercenary, and virulent discursive representations speak to the overall cultural fear of the social ramifications of these risk-taking women and bring into focus the power of cultural discourse to silence revolutionary forces and to negotiate identity and power relationships. Ultimately, I suggest that the female gamester was the transgressive woman of the eighteenth century. For it is the gambling woman who reveals a connection between ways of knowing and thinking about the world and the individual’s material conditions. In a milieu committed to controlling chance, quantifying probability, and normalizing rational behavior, only the one who embraced risk, who challenged the hegemony on an epistemological level could successfully disrupt the social order on a material one. It is specifically the female gambler’s engagement with risk that contests an epistemology based on order and rational behavior and, thus, leads to potential changes in her socio-economic position, in who she is, and, by extention, in who other women can become.