ABSTRACT
In a recent article, Josephine Maltby and Janette Rutterford argued that more work was needed on ‘the part played by accounting and bookkeeping in women’s lives’. They acknowledged the existing canon but considered that there was room for a ‘deepening understanding’ of what being able to do accounts meant to women in both the past and nowadays.2 This chapter is an attempt to widen the subject by discussing how women in business learned about money management and how to avoid (or not) the more common mistakes. In short, to consider what bookkeeping might have meant to businesswomen in past times. Following this, and in order to offer a response based on real-life examples to Maltby and Rutterford’s enquiry, the accounting practices of three Georgian businesswomen will be examined. The case for the existence of independent women in business in the eighteenth-century British Isles is now wellestablished.3 We know where and when women ran what sort of businesses and it is evident that women were far more commercially active, and in a wider range of trades, than has been suggested by Davidoff and Hall. Indeed Hannah Barker’s claim for the centrality of businesswomen in the urban consumer boom of the late Georgian period challenges the dominance of domestic ideology argued for in Family Fortunes.4
