ABSTRACT
Historians working in social and economic history and in women’s and gender history usually discuss the economics of women’s lives in terms of poverty, powerlessness and absence of money and of waged and unwaged work. Women’s financial affairs have made little impact on accounting history, business history or financial history. Where moneyed women have attracted notice, historians’ views have been highly gendered. W.D. Rubinstein’s study of the very wealthy in Britain since the industrial revolution excludes women ‘because of the haphazard nature of inheritance of large fortunes by women in England and the difficulties of tracing biographical details of their lives’.1 The very small number of women who were wealthier than their husbands or fathers, he argues, probably owed their funds either to tax-avoidance schemes or to ‘shrewd investment and cautious spending by the heiress or her advisors’.2 He notes the small number of women who made business fortunes, and also the small number of inherited industrial fortunes by comparison with fortunes derived from commerce or land.3 His views are not surprising in view of the kind of attention given to the wealthy in the nineteenth-century press. In 1872, the Spectator published a list naming the 124 individuals who had left £250,000 or more at death between 1861 and 1871; this included five women, of whom one was a noted heiress and political hostess, two appeared in lists of charitable donors from time to time, and the other two made virtually no public impact.4
