Historians have for some time now been demonstrating the range and depth of women’s economic activity, challenging earlier beliefs about the influence of the separate spheres ideology. George Robb’s new book is consistent with this historiographical trend, arguing that women’s involvement as investors—and even as entrepreneurs—on Wall Street began much earlier, and was far more significant, than is usually supposed. Assumptions about women’s exclusion from markets derive from cultural sources, but Robb argues that prescriptive literature provides a deeply misleading picture of the realities of investment, which historians have for too long taken at face value.

The argument develops across five themed chapters. The first chapter offers a lively survey of the ways in which women’s investment was portrayed across popular culture, from journalism and investment guides to fiction and board games, highlighting the overwhelming negativity of such representations. Women were unsuited to the financial world, and those seeking to dabble in the markets risked being “unsexed” by the encounter. Their best investment, according to one stockbroker, was to marry a rich man. This material sets up the second chapter, which uses the archives of two stockbroking firms, Morton, Bliss, & Co. and George P. Butler & Brother, to explore women’s actual investment behavior from the 1870s to the early 1900s. Robb finds confident, well-informed, and successful women investors in the archive, a far cry from the ridiculous or pathetic figures populating the wider culture of the day.

Because women were thought to be particularly vulnerable to financial chicanery, the next chapter considers women’s experiences of fraud, and suggests that female victimhood was exaggerated due to wider political factors: for conservatives, doing so helped to shore up the separate spheres (women should be excluded from the market), while for progressives, the notion of the helpless female victim was a useful catalyst for change. Intriguingly, the chapter explores not only women as the victims of fraud but also as perpetrators, showing how at least some women were able to operate as stockbrokers or other financial intermediaries (and how some of these were very happy to defraud investors, female and male alike).

The final two chapters develop this theme with a pair of case studies. Chapter 4 explores the career of Victoria Woodhull, the nation’s first female stockbroker. Though Woodhull has received much attention from biographers and historians, these have tended to focus on her political ambitions (she ran for president in 1872) and sexual politics (her advocacy of “free love”), whereas Robb is more interested in her financial career. The chapter uses Woodhull as a means of exploring wider feminist debates on finance, showing that radical women were not simply opposed to or uninterested in capitalism, but had more complex attitudes, often showing great interest in women’s financial education and rights. The final chapter has as its focus Hetty Green, the richest woman in the United States, leaving an estate worth $100 million at her death in 1916. While a very different figure from Woodhull, not at all progressive politically, there are nevertheless parallels between the two—Green was also keen for women to be financially literate and to have control over their own money. Moreover, both women faced obsessive and sometimes ugly media coverage, a result of society’s horror at the challenge these women posed to male privilege. Although Woodhull’s reputation was destroyed by the press, Robb’s exhaustive searches show that though Green was demonized after her death as “the Witch of Wall Street,” during her lifetime she managed to craft a more positive, folksy public persona as “Aunt Hetty.”

Well researched, engagingly written, and nicely illustrated, the book succeeds not only in shedding light on how women behaved in financial markets but also in excavating the broader investment culture of the Gilded Age, with its clairvoyants-turned-stockbrokers, its bucket shops, and its get-rich-quick schemes. Robb refuses to overgeneralize when drawing conclusions, rightly stressing the importance of factors like class in shaping behavior. For a book that emphasizes so strongly the chasm between representations and reality, it is a pity that the stockbrokers’ archives only really inform the analysis in one of the five chapters, and do not cover the years after 1910. Are there more such papers lurking unread in the archives, or is this it? The other chapters rely much more on representations of investment practice, and though Robb avoids taking this material at face value, it does give the book a slightly uneven feel. Although the book continues through 1929, coverage of the later years feels a little sketchier, and the argument that by this point women’s involvement in the market had become normalized perhaps underestimates the persistence of traditional prejudices. However, these are minor criticisms of a superb book, which, with its ability to fuse cultural, social, economic, legal, and political perspectives, deserves a wide readership.