George Robb’s Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression contributes to a growing historiography that studies women’s role in business by adding to our understanding of white American women’s participation in finance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A significant portion of the book analyzes prescriptive literature on women and investment, and because women’s control over capital was restricted by laws determining property rights, the book also studies the conditions that circumscribe women’s participation in the financial markets.

Robb’s goal is to uncover a “hidden” history of women as investors and financiers. The text presents prevailing ideas about women and finance in the financial press, investment guides, and popular literature, and then challenges them through the biographies of women like Hetty Green and Victoria Woodhull and the activities of other white women investors from the account books of two investment banks, highlighting the “tension between practice and representation” (p. 184). According to Robb, the text is explicitly a “recovery” project “whereby the actual behavior and investment choices of American women have been set against the largely negative judgements of their contemporaries” (p. 77). In critiquing historical views of women and finance, Robb is also challenging our contemporary understandings about the nature and extent of white women’s involvement in finance and the market before WWII.

Robb’s study of the prescriptive literature describes America’s complicated relationship with finance as gender norms were challenged by the rise of industrialization. Even as “popular literature usually assumed that women’s place was in the home,” Robb persuasively shows that the domestic world was intimately connected to the world of finance, as evident in the dramas and narratives that circulated at the time. Building on previous literature that study how gender norms were embedded in financial institutions [see Mary A. Yeager, ed., Women and Business, vol. 1 (1999)], Robb’s text makes a clear argument that the history of business cannot be considered separate from the history of society.

To the extent that Robb looks at differences within the population of women investors, his focus is mainly on class. Robb does not explicitly state that his main subjects are white women, but when he writes, “In the early 19^th century when few American women worked outside the home,” we know that he must be then talking about white women of a certain class given that a significant percentage of African American women in general worked after the Civil War and were still found to be working in larger numbers than white women by 1930 (p. 142).Footnote ¹

The lack of discussion about racial diversity among women investors cannot be because African American women were completely absent from the world of finance. Robb has one small mention of black women and finance citing the work of Lynn M. Hudson and her study of Mary Ellen Pleasant (p. 57), and as Angel Kwolek-Folland has demonstrated in Engendering Women (1998), black women may have been segregated but they were present in banking and financial services in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The separation of the study of race and gender is not uncommon in history (see Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedom (2002) for a critique) or in the subfield of business history where studies of “white women” are often not specifically identified as such, though there are exceptional precedents in the literature on women and business. The problem, of course, is that white women’s experience is not generalizable. This is the case even when studying prescriptive norms like the law or in culture, as Louise Michele Newman has shown in White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (1999), which covers the same period of study as Robb’s text.

Robb’s discussion of the public discourse would benefit from further developing an analysis of how gender and class proscriptions on women and finance were intertwined with race for several reasons. As he notes, in popular literature and films, such as H.H. Boyesen’s A Daughter of the Philistines (1883) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), finance was represented as a place of “sexual danger” for white women, who could be taken advantage of by Asian and Jewish businessmen. It is not by accident that the perpetrators of the texts that Robb studies are men of Asian and Jewish background. The racial overtones of these stories are by design and have been noted by other scholars from other subfields. [See, for example, Robert G. Lee’s Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (1999) and Daisuke Miyao’s Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (2007)].

Literature on German Jewish, Anglo-American, and Irish Catholic financiers, for example, has also shown how the world of finance was a contested space fraught with social tensions between male competitors. This was a gendered space, where men of different ethnicities and religions established their identities and their activities as men in relation to one another and to women, whether they were present or not. Studying white women as a group without analysis of their race thus makes it more difficult to understand the relationships of power reflected in their very exclusion or inclusion. Fundamentally, the study of gender is the study of the creation of difference, which is apparent not just in the attributes of historical and economic actors but in the relationships that make those differences meaningful.

To the extent that Robb’s analysis refers to white women investors in general or speaks to an institutional structure that referenced all women as a group as distinct from men, he poses an implicit question: If we know more about “ ‘what women did’ as financial players” (to quote Robb), how would this change our understanding of either women’s history, the history of finance, or American economic development (p. 2)? Because the book has a corrective tone and is explicit in its goals to dispel stereotypes and reveal hidden histories, it needs systematic evidence to make its case.

Robb builds a picture of white women investors in the Gilded Age through the records of two firms, Morton, Bliss & Co. in the 1870s and 1880s and George P. Butler & Bros. in the 1900s. The study of investment portfolios is a welcome addition and speaks to a greater appreciation for the study of quantitative records in the history of business as evident in the work of Caitlin Rosenthal and others. Given that Robb’s sample is very small and the firms are not contextualized within a larger community through other sources, however, the accounts are more like snapshots. Thus, it is difficult to say how generalizable they were and what impact the women investors of these firms or other firms had on the larger market.

Robb makes a good case for stating that white women were more active as investors and financiers than contemporaries would want to believe. Studying the relationships of these women investors to other groups and institutions would help to contextual the significance of their activities and expand the reach of his analysis.