‘She possessed her own fortune’: Women investors from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century

Abstract

There is a growing literature on the history of investment in Britain. However, the role played by women as investors has been almost wholly ignored. This paper argues that women were an important class of stock market investors and produces empirical evidence, most notably share registers, to show that women engaged in a number of different types of investment, and were important in both public and private companies as long-term holders of securities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article concludes by suggesting the impact of these findings on our understanding of women's financial position and of their role in corporate governance.