This book covers a topic that is receiving increasing attention, that is, the role of women as investors in financial securities. As author Amy Froide points out, it was not that long ago that scholars “viewed capitalism as something that acted on or affected women, and not vice versa” (p. 2). Researchers did not explore whether women benefited from capitalism or, indeed, whether they actively sought to invest in financial securities. More recently, though, Pamela Sharpe (Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy [1996]) and Amy Erickson “Coverture and Capitalism,” History Workshop Journal [2005]) have highlighted how single women—spinsters and widows—were able to participate in and even further England's financial revolution. Indeed, Erickson goes further. She argues that the need to find ways of allowing women to invest in financial securities, whatever their marital status, stimulated innovation in the financial markets.

This book is a socioeconomic study of the women who invested in the new public funds that began to emerge in the late seventeenth century, covering the period from 1690 to 1750. The securities analyzed include not only public debt but also the well-known Bank of England, South Sea, and East India stocks as well as securities in lesser-known companies such as the Mine Adventurers and York Buildings. The results show that a large number of women, albeit with very different investment strategies, bought public investments during the financial revolution and that these financial investments allowed women—particularly spinsters and widows—to benefit from higher returns than on other asset classes as well as to diversify risk. Froide argues that the theory of gentlewomanly capitalism, posited by David Green and Alastair Owens (“Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters, widows, and wealth holding in England and Wales, c. 1800-1860” Economic History Review [2003]) with respect to female holders of government debt in the early nineteenth century, can be applied more than a century earlier.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides the book's rationale, which is to show that women were indeed involved in buying and selling financial securities in this period, and highlights how these women made investment or trading decisions. The case studies cited in the book highlight the fact that even married women could sometimes get around coverture and make their own decisions, including keeping their income and profits from investment, provided the husband agreed. They also highlight how women invested not only for themselves, but for their families and business associates. It is worth noting, though not emphasized by the author, that women often bequeathed their investments to other women, secure in the knowledge that the investments would provide a regular income and, because of their marketability, could be sold if need be.

Chapter 1 also shows how women learned to invest via newspapers, arithmetic teaching at school, memorandum books, and brokers' guides. There was no shortage of information available to, and even specifically aimed at, women in this period. Chapter 2 looks at the women who bought public funds, especially state lotteries. Chapter 3 focuses on the women who were “early adopters,” buying new-fangled stocks such as those of the East India Company or the Bank of England. The book then changes tack, shifting attention from types of security to reasons for investing. Chapter 4 covers women who invested specifically for family members, and Chapter 5 considers single women who invested for their retirement. Chapter 6 looks at gender and risk through the lens of women's experience of speculation and fraud between 1690 and 1750, a turbulent period for stock markets. Chapter 7 considers the financial and political agency of women—those who acted as financial agents for others (of whom there was a significant number) and those who were involved in corporate governance, for example, of the South Sea Company. Chapter 8 concludes.

The book is clear on the legal circumstances for women, single or married, which determined the types of assets they could hold directly, or via a settlement (trust), and when they could and could not make their own investment decisions. It also highlights how financial securities could be more attractive to women than land and mortgages, which were illiquid, were difficult to repossess if the borrower defaulted, and involved maintenance costs. Such advantages can explain the importance of women investors in stockholder or shareholder registers. However, the importance of women in registers is taken by the author to be the measure of the percentage of investors who were women. Table 5.1 is an example of this approach for public securities (p. 123). From this table, we learn that the importance by number of women holding each type of government security ranged from 14.4 percent to 30.2 percent. It would have been useful, however, to also measure women's importance by value. More could also have been said on the methodology used to obtain samples from the stock registers.

At the core of the text is a set of detailed case studies, two or three per chapter. The author researched diaries, correspondence, account books, and other sources to piece together not just portfolio values at a point in time but also buy-and-sell trades and financial discussions with family or intermediaries. These sources allow us to understand how women felt about risk. They also surprise us with how much women bought and sold, how canny they were (investing and reinvesting surplus pin money, for example), and how they took risks that today we might consider unacceptable. The case studies show both how investment income could radically improve quality of life and how taking risks could lead to severe financial difficulties. To the current generation of women, protected by insurance policies and pension rights, it may be difficult to understand their courage. The case studies bring financial investment during the financial revolution to life.