Shennette Garrett-Scott’s book delivers on its title and more. By focusing on women’s experience, Garrett-Scott gives the field a more complete picture of early twentieth century African-American economic life. Additionally, she provides the most complete discussion of African-American shadow banking, informal credit markets, investment, and benefit societies to date. Researchers studying race and/or gender will find much in this book. Development economists will also want to read this book for an example of women in an oppressed minority increasing the economic opportunity of the community. For economic historians studying African-American achievement after the Civil War, following, among others, Cook (Reference Cook2011) and Logan (Reference Logan2018), incorporating Garrett- Scott’s work will be essential.

Garrett-Scott focuses on the financial life of African-American women from 1900 to 1929, adding to the literature started by Butler (Reference Butler1991). Butler changed the study of African-American entrepreneurship by arguing that African-American economic achievements were remarkable given the repression of the Jim Crow era.

In African-American households, women faced additional challenges responding to Jim Crow depredations. According to Garrett-Scott, their role in household and community finance was complicated by gender and class expectations. One such expectation was respectability: African-American middle-class (or middle-class-aspiring) women wanted to be exemplars for others.

Women, Garrett-Scott shows, used pawn shops to get short-term loans. But borrowing from pawn shops was expensive, and transacting business in these shops was not seen as respectable. Enter African-American banks like the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank.

Richmond’s St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank was led by Maggie Lena Walker, the de facto head of the African-American sororal society The Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL). Walker is not the Garrett-Scott’s subject. Instead, she uses Walker’s decisionmaking and advocacy to explore the wider issues of how race and gender interacted.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide the necessary context: an overview of African-American financial institutions from 1863 to 1903. Chapter 1 discusses the Freedman’s Bank and the effects of its failure in 1874. Scholars of the era will be familiar with the federal reimbursement process that lasted 40 years.

Chapter 2 discusses the antebellum history of the IOSL and its late 19th century decline. The chapter then describes Walker’s background and her rise through the IOSL hierarchy until she was part of an executive committee that inherited, in 1899, one thousand members and $32 in the bank (p. 69).

Chapters 3 and 4 form the heart of the book. Garrett-Scott describes, first, the rise of the IOSL, which increased its membership eightyfold and employed the most African-American women in Richmond. Alongside, the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank increased its size to over $500,000 dollars in assets in 1921. The argument that spans these chapters is not an economic one. Garrett-Scott frames these successes by arguing that the women who were customers of the bank molded the bank’s business operations and loan decisions. The bank took steps to court the business of women from all classes, such as accepting deposits in small denominations, providing loans of similar small sizes, and locating the bank inside an IOSL market. While doing this, the bank and the larger organization provided respectability to customers, shareholders, and members. Respectability also made the bank’s debt collection more effective (through the embarrassment of warrants served by law enforcement) and the work environment more regimented (through dress codes and required recreational activities).

Chapter 4 shows that the bank used membership in the IOSL, and references from local IOSL chapters, as part of their loan decision-making. Chapter 4 is well-supported with multiple sources: the correspondence of loan applicants and past due borrowers are highlights. That level of detail is missing from the Chapter 3 discussions of Walker’s class views and the bank’s risk management strategy. This left me wondering if these points were directly supported or were assertions.

Chapter 5 begins by discussing the Great Migration and the new aspirations of the younger generation of employees of the IOSL, who chafed under Walker’s management. It continues with an examination of three African-American investment funds, illustrating other African-American financial ventures of this time. Finally, the chapter looks at the Harlem IOSL branch that ran a proto-real estate investment trust from 1918 to 1928, showing a counterfactual financial institution that did not make the careful riskmanagement decisions that the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank did.

Two cavils: first, the brief sections of creative nonfiction in the first two chapters would have been more effective and less confusing if set off from the text. Second, the discussion of harsh state regulation of African-American financial institutions would have benefited from engaging with Harris (Reference Harris1936), which argues the opposite: that regulators were lax and paternalistic.

These aside, Garrett-Scott provides essential context for economic historians currently studying the economic lives of African-Americans after the Civil War (among them Stein & Yannelis (Reference Stein and Constantine2019) and Derenoncourt (Reference Derenoncourt2019)). Garrett-Scott accomplishes her stated objective and more, and the literature on African-American finance is richer for it.