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Women and Their Money, 1700-1950: Essays on Women and Finance. Edited by Anne Laurence, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford. London: Routledge, 2009. 336 pp. Figures, tables, notes, index. Cloth, $160.00. ISBN: 978-0-415-41976-5.
This is the first collection of writings on women's financial history in the West. While much good scholarship has come out on female business owners, this book presents a different type of women's business history. The editors have collected writings that focus on women as shareholders and investors in public companies and on their forays into accounting, clerical, and bank jobs. Most of the twenty essays examine the financial history of British women from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In a refreshing change, the essays do not only deal with England; they also examine Scottish women and Welsh and Scottish companies. A handful of essays compare women and finance in the United States, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. The authors constitute an interdisciplinary group: half are historians; the rest are professors in economics, finance, accounting, and management. This means that the topics range from treatments of highly quantitative subjects to cultural analyses, ensuring the book a broad audience.
Women are examined in many different guises: as investors in jointstock companies and banks (primarily in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain); while engaged in accounting practices (in eighteenthcentury Britain and twentieth-century Japan); while controlling wealth and inheritance in Britain, the United States, Sweden, and Italy; in their relations to wealth as depicted in literature; as property managers and business owners in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States; as accounting clerks in Britain during World War I; and while both managing...