Women investors and financial knowledge in eighteenth-century Germany

Any attempt to survey the bases for women’s financial activity in eighteenthcentury Germany faces a serious problem of evidence. This is to some extent a consequence of the relatively limited historiography. Business historians in Germany have been slow to adopt the kinds of cultural analysis that have enabled the dissection of gendered representations and practices and made women’s financial activity visible in Britain.1 Similarly, the vision of the eighteenth century as a key period in the emergence of a consumer society, which has been central to historical understanding of changing attitudes to money, savings and investment, has only recently been taken up in the German historiography – in spite of the pioneering conceptual work done by German social theorists on this very theme earlier in the twentieth century.2