This collection is based on papers given in 2008 at a conference hosted by the Open University on wealth, investment, and gender during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like most such collections, there is considerable variety and variation among the individual chapters. Some are more readable, original, and densely researched than others. The overall structure of this collection is looser than most. The title leads one to believe that gender is the organizing principle for the volume, but many of the essays have little or nothing to say about this issue, focusing instead on wealth structure, investment strategies, and global finance. If there is an overriding theme to the book, it would be the investment opportunities and decisions of the propertied classes in Britain. For, as the industrial and commercial economy swelled the savings of the middle and upper classes, “these individuals sought out ever more varied avenues for the profitable use of money”(1).

Since there are eleven chapters in the book, I will not attempt to summarize, let alone evaluate, them all, but I will highlight some of the more original and provocative contributions. Most of the chapters are based on British data. Two, however, are devoted to Canada and Australia, and these are among the strongest in the volume. Martin Shanahan examines the wealth holdings of women in South Australia from 1875 to 1915 in “Colonial Sisters and Their Wealth.” Australian women, he concludes, were wealthier than their British counterparts, in large part due to their extensive ownership of land, a more plentiful commodity in Australia. The women of South Australia were active participants in the real estate boom that accompanied the agricultural expansion of the colony. By the early twentieth century, Australian women derived a larger proportion of their wealth from mortgages and rent than did men. Livio DiMatteo found a similar expansion of women's property holdings in Ontario from the 1870s to the 1920s. In Wentworth County, for example, only 12 percent of probated estates belonged to women in 1872. By 1927, the figure had increased to 40 percent. Canadian women, unlike their Australian counterparts, owned less real estate and more financial securities. Indeed, the women in DiMatteo's sample held a greater percentage of their wealth in financial assets than did men. Because women were less likely to own businesses or engage in professional occupations than were men, they were more dependent on investment income and thus more likely to concentrate their wealth in real estate, banks, and stocks and bonds.

Important new work by David Green, Alastair Owens, Claire Swan, and Carry van Lieshout uses probate records to reveal a wealth of new data about how Britons invested. In their essay, “Assets of the Dead,” the authors demonstrate that share ownership was not exclusively a phenomenon associated with wealthy Londoners but was “spread further down the social hierarchy and more widely dispersed around the country” (80). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the ownership of securities (stocks and bonds) grew in significance from 43 percent of personal property in probated estates to 58 percent. Furthermore, company shares came to surpass government bonds as the preferred investment. By the end of the century, British women owned a greater proportion of their wealth in financial securities than did men, since women were less likely to be engaged in active business, instead investing passively in the businesses of others. Geographically, people in the South, especially London, invested more heavily in government bonds, while people in the Midlands and Northwest preferred industrial shares.

In contrast, the essay by Josephine Maltby, Janette Rutterford, David Green, Steven Ainscough, and Carien van Mourik finds no evidence for a “democratization” of share ownership in early twentieth-century Britain, despite long-standing assumptions that such a development took place. Based on a detailed examination of company records, the authors conclude that neither employee share ownership schemes nor the widespread sale of war bonds resulted in modest investors wading more deeply into the national securities market. Instead, the wealthiest investors continued to own the lion's share of securities, even increasing their percentage of the nation's total shareholdings from around 50 percent in the 1870s to more than 70 percent by the 1920s. Middle-ranking investors declined somewhat, and those at the lower end of the social spectrum remained below 10 percent over the same period. It appeared to contemporaries, however, that share ownership was broadening, as companies reported an increase in individual shareholdings of less than £100. As Maltby, Rutterford, et al. explain, small shareholdings did not indicate an increase in working-class investors but a move by the wealthy to diversify their portfolios through smaller holdings in a greater number of companies.

The essays found in Men, Women, and Money add to a growing body of scholarship devoted to teasing out the various strands associated with a burgeoning securities market in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. By uncovering the investment decisions and strategies of ordinary Britons, the contributors to this volume shed new light on such varied phenomena as the expansion of overseas markets, the broadening of the investor base, popular attitudes toward risk, and new economic opportunities for women. While the volume is a bit of a hodgepodge, it contains much original and important research that will be of great interest to economic and social historians.