This book examines women's financial activity from the early days of the stock market in eighteenth century England and the South Sea Bubble to the mid-twentieth century. The essays demonstrate how many women managed their own finances despite legal and social restrictions and show that women were neither helpless, incompetent and risk-averse, nor were they unduly cautious and conservative. Rather, many women learnt about money and made themselves effective and engaged managers of the funds at their disposal. The essays focus on Britain, from eighteenth-century London, to the expansion of British financial markets of the nineteenth century, with comparative essays dealing with the US, Italy, Sweden and Japan. Hitherto, writing about women and money has been restricted to their management of household finances or their activities as small business women. This book examines the clear evidence of women's active engagement in financial matters, much neglected in historical literature, especially women's management of capital. .

This book examines women's financial activity from the early days of the stock market in eighteenth century England and the South Sea Bubble to the mid-twentieth century. The essays demonstrate how many women managed their own finances despite legal and social restrictions and show that women were neither helpless, incompetent and risk-averse, nor were they unduly cautious and conservative. Rather, many women learnt about money and made themselves effective and engaged managers of the funds at their disposal. The essays focus on Britain, from eighteenth-century London, to the expansion of British financial markets of the nineteenth century, with comparative essays dealing with the US, Italy, Sweden and Japan. Hitherto, writing about women and money has been restricted to their management of household finances or their activities as small business women. This book examines the clear evidence of women's active engagement in financial matters, much neglected in historical literature, especially women's management of capital. .

This volume brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. It looks at women working outside conventional canons, and are shown how they negotiated relationships with canonical forms of artistic production across the different disciplines, focusing in each case on the gendered associations and exclusions and the implied structures of sexual difference, which may or may not be revealed. Women discussed include authors like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson, actresses such as Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson, women critics like Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke, historians such as Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith, the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists such as the Shiress sisters and translators like Anna Swanwick, as well as many others.

Drawing on a wide range of recent research, WOMEN IN ENGLAND is an intimate social history of women who experienced life between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. Anne Laurence writes about marriage, sex, childbirth, work within and outside the household, education, religion and women's activity in the community and the wider world. 'A marvellously rich and fresh survey of English women from the Reformation to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution' Roy Porter, The Sunday Times

This volume of original essays is designed to be of interest to students not only of Bunyan, but of the history, religion and literature of the seventeenth century