There may be made no doubt that in Cheapside, women are rendered passive objects, commodified by males in the sexual economy. Moll is sold to her suitors, the Welsh whore is sold to Tim, Mistress Allwit is sold to Whorehound; we even see a baby daughter make her grand entrance into the marketplace, concealed as a piece of meat to be more readily sold. However, despite these recurring instances of 'commodified females', the status of the passive role of women within this exchange economy, may not be as simple as it first seems. Middleton complicates the formula by portraying several of Cheapside’s females as vendors themselves, actively selling their sexuality for their own benefit. In the case of Mistress Allwit, for example, though her husband profits off of her own infidelity to him, she is ultimately the one in control of her own sexual commodity. Kirsten Uszkalo describes this control metaphorically through Mistress Allwit’s consuming body: “She swallows and stores Whorehound’s semen and gifts, saving them in the bank of her pregnant belly in anticipation of a financial and sexual drought, looming on the horizon” [34]. Indeed, when this drought approaches, and Whorehound proves no longer a source of profitable exchange, Mistress Allwit abandons her customer, using the profit she made off of him to start a new life with her cuckolded husband. Ironically it is her decision—she, who had been essentially “whore’d” off by her “pimp” husband -- to establish their own “house in the Strand” (V.i.169) where the cycle of selling sex can return full circle, with the “commodity” (Mistress Allwit) now in the place of the vendor.

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