Women's Investment Research Articles

“The nesting instinct”: women and investment risk in a historical context

The objective of this article is to place the debate about women's investment behaviour — in particular their attitude to risk — in a historical context. We examine a number of case studies of investments made by English women between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and compare the results with the findings of recent surveys of women's attitudes to investment. Modern research consistently finds evidence of a gender effect, with women taking less investment risk than men. However, this research is primarily US-focused, restricted to pensions planning and based on questionnaire surveys. Using surveys of women's wills, share registers, and correspondence archives, we also find a gender effect, but one which is significantly reduced once education, knowledge and access, marital status and wealth are taken into account. We argue that such case studies are a valuable way forward for assessing the extent to which women were risk seekers or risk avoiders.

Ultrasound Consultation to Reduce Risk and Increase Resilience in Pregnancy

Clinical evidence indicates the influence of viewing ultrasound on women's investment in health during pregnancy. Ongoing work on the effects of ultrasound consultation (UC) include: establishing a replicable UC and demonstrating validity of the UC by examining effects of UC on behavioral and physiological indicators of increased resilience in maternal health and pregnancy outcome. The study indicated that UC significantly increased maternal-fetal attachment, decreased maternal anxiety, and increased positive attitudes toward health during pregnancy. Ongoing research involves using UC in two protocols with pregnant women, for instance, those experiencing moderate-to-severe depression and those at risk for noncompliance in treatment for gestational diabetes.

“THE WIDOW, THE CLERGYMAN AND THE RECKLESS”:1 WOMEN INVESTORS IN ENGLAND, 1830—1914

Modern historians infrequently acknowledge that women were financial investors before the twentieth century. Yet a study of nineteenth-century England shows substantial groups of women investing for income, capital growth, or a share in the family business. This article will summarize the evidence for women as investors and consider why their participation has been until recently largely ignored by scholars. Second, it will analyze the forms taken by women's investment, exploring the extent to which the development of the stock market and legal changes in married women's property rights facilitated a growing female role in investment. Third, it will analyze the objectives and needs of the three main groups of women investors: speculators, income-seekers, and family investors. The findings have implications for understanding the economic position of women before the First World War and also for contemporary discussion of women's wealth and investment.

Corporal Transactions: New Perspectives on Traditional Practices in China, India, and Africa

Dorothy Ko. Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley: Bata Shoe Museum and University of California Press, 2001. 162 pp.; ill.; maps; table; ISBN 0-520-23283-6 (cl); ISBN 0-520-23284-4 (pb). Ping Wang. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 320 pp.; ill.; ISBN 0-8166-3605-2 (cl). Veena Talwar Oldenburg. Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 288 pp.; ill.; ISBN 0-19-515072-4 (pb). Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson, eds. Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 176 pp.; ISBN 0-252-02741-8 (cl); ISBN 0-252-07273-1 (pb). These four books, though situated within different disciplines and centered on African, Indian, and Chinese practices respectively, nevertheless share a common objective. Their authors seek to illuminate how cultural practices that are often regarded as iconic touchstones of patriarchal violence against women by feminist and non-feminists alike need to be seen from the vantage points of African, Indian, and Chinese women participants instead. Although the authors are unanimous in their assessment that, at some level, the particulars of these practices are designed to control women's sexuality, they nevertheless take issue with the militant Western feminist characterization of these acts as being particularly virulent forms of patriarchal savagery. Accordingly, these books contextualize these practices historically and culturally in order to make sense out of what appears, at first glance, to be senseless, grotesque, or barbaric. In each instance, through the disciplinary approaches of history (Ko and Talwar Oldenburg), literature (Wang), and anthropology (James and Robertson), they succeed in moving beyond "the troubling stances of arrogant perception" (James, in James and Robertson, 90). To varying degrees, these studies seek to revisit the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialist ideology and science, which, despite the many social and legal restrictions that were imposed upon [End Page 142] European and American women at the time, nevertheless not only ranked other nations and cultures according to how well they treated women, but also made anti-female violence and female oppression in other continents a pretext for colonial intervention. By offering technically precise accounts of these practices, by regionally situating them within the varied cultures of Africa, India, and China, and by elucidating women's investments, these volumes offer a revisionist perspective of what made footbinding, genital cutting, and dowry socially and individually compelling for the women involved. Both Dorothy Ko and Wang Ping address footbinding, a practice that, unlike female genital cutting or sex-specific abortion, has been discontinued, which undoubtedly attests to the power of the modern Chinese state to institute socially normative behavior. Conceived as a companion piece to an exhibition at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Ko's Every Step a Lotus looks at the shoes made for bound feet as historical documents in order to account for what Ko deems "the single most important experience in a [Chinese] woman's life between the thirteenth and nineteenth century" (12), even if, as Ko readily concedes, class and ethnicity meant that many women living in the Chinese empire did not bind their feet. Part of the book's intent is to provide a brief overview of bound feet as a symbol of sensual grace of dancers at court to an icon of the Confucian cult of domesticity among gentry women. More importantly, perhaps, Ko seeks to desensationalize footbinding practices through a detailed examination of the shoes themselves. Ko shows that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, depending on climatic and economic factors, shoes from different provinces assumed distinctive regional styles. No matter what their provenance, Ko observes that feet were not necessarily as small as the shoes, but rather that a variety of shoemaking techniques were designed to make the feet appear as small as possible...

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton As the end of our first full year as co-editors of the Journal of Women's History comes into view, we marvel at how fast it has gone and how much we have learned since our road trip from Columbus to Champaign-Urbana, when we transported all the file boxes and looked forward to the challenges ahead. We've now experienced the life cycle of many manuscripts, warmed to the rhythms of scheduling, copyediting, and proofreading, and all but perfected the balancing act of all the phases of production that must be entertained at once. As always, we remain both indebted to and in awe of our managing editors, Rebecca McNulty and Jen Edwards, who run the day-to-day operations and succeed in doing so with apparently inexhaustible reserves of efficiency, patience, and goodwill. We are continually humbled by their ability to juggle the demands of journal with their own dissertation work, and to help us shape the directions it will take. Most if not all of the essays that appear below come from the bulging "pipeline" we inherited from the last year of Leila Rupp and Donna Guy's co-editorship. We've grouped them into two sections, the first of which, "Accounting for Women," focuses on a wide variety of women's work—from the managing of household money to conservation reform to the doing of manicures—and raises questions about the relationship of such activities to the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they took place. Susan Rimby's "Better Housekeeping Our of Doors" tells the story of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women, a Progressive-era group that was active in all manner of local and regional conservation efforts. Although the literature on American conservation has focused on famous men (like Gifford Pinchot, Commissioner of Forestry under Theodore Roosevelt) and on projects in the west and south (like national and state parks), Rimby makes a case for unearthing the work of northeastern women like Mira Lloyd Dock, a trained botanist who promoted local clean-up initiatives and, through the SFPW, supported health and welfare programs that targeted community girls and women. Nor were the Pennsylvania women unique. As Rimby demonstrates, civic clubs and women's organizations "cleaned up" countless communities across the region, improving towns, suburbs, and cities and leaving new spaces such as playgrounds both as boons to working-class neighborhoods and as enduring evidence of white middle-class women's investment in the environment and quality of life issues. If accounting for Mira Dock and her contemporaries compels us to rethink the narratives of American conservation history, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's essay invites us to refigure the relationship between domestic [End Page 6] labor, economic activity, and the realm of affect and emotion. "Abigail's Accounts" excavates the record books of an early-nineteenth-century Quaker woman who presided over her family's account books and in the process, left us an invaluable archive of the operations of daily life two hundred years ago. Drawing on the riches offered by Abigail's books, Hartigan-O'Connor reads debits and credits against the backdrop of a vibrant market economy and mines the payment of servants' wages, gift giving, and charity for what it can tell us about the emotional dimensions of economic transactions. So, for example, we see how Abigail's relationships with her domestics, her friends, and even her young relatives drew her into the cash nexus, even as they developed in her a fine-tuned and highly "flexible understanding of values and exchange" at both the monetary and the symbolic level. Hartigan-O'Connor's work adds welcome nuance to debates about the history of women's work, and especially to scholarship on the labor and economic value of housework, by suggesting that we will cease to exceptionalize domestic labor as unpaid or disconnected from market forces only if we work to materialize the "web of financial and affective connections" and thereby to view economic life as a whole. Julie Willett's piece on manicurists, aptly titled "Hands Across the Table," provides a more modern account of the social and cultural worlds...

How Has Body Image Changed? A Cross-Sectional Investigation of College Women and Men From 1983 to 2001.

Body-image dissatisfaction is not uncommon and can adversely affect individuals' psychosocial functioning and quality of life. Various oft-cited surveys and a meta-analysis implicate a worsening of body image over the past several decades, especially among women and possibly among men. The present cross-sectional study examined changes in multiple facets of body image among 3,127 college students from 1983 through 2001; the same standardized assessment was used in 22 studies conducted within the same university. Results confirmed non-Black women's increasing body-image dissatisfaction until the early or mid-1990s, after which significant improvements occurred in terms of overall body-image evaluation and overweight preoccupation among both non-Black and Black women, despite heavier body weights. A reduction over time in women's investment in their appearance was also evident. Men's body image was relatively stable during the 19-year period. Explanations, limitations, and implications of the findings are discussed.

The Effect of Women's Rights on Women's Welfare: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper explores whether the welfare of women increased following the extension of women's rights between 1960s and 1990s. Using individual level data on life satisfaction and focusing on changes in birth control rights in twelve European countries, it shows that the extension of both abortion rights and the pill is strongly linked to an increase in life satisfaction of women of childbearing age. Birth control rights also increased women's investment in education, probability of working and income. Other women's rights have proved less beneficial. Mutual consent divorce laws decreased women's welfare. High maternity protection on the job has negligible effects.

Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters, widows, and wealth holding in England and Wales, c. 1800–1860

This article examines the demographic and geographical importance of wealthy middle‐class women. It argues that in certain towns and cities, notably London, such women were of sufficient importance to merit attention in their own right. Drawing upon a sample of wills, it describes the types of wealth owned by these women. By examining women's investment in government securities, it argues that women's wealth was of crucial importance to the British state. Its findings challenge conventional understandings of the relationships between gender ideology, wealth holding, and economic development.

Capitalizing on women's intellectual capital in the professions.

omen and minorities nowmake up almost 80% of thelabor force. Yet women inthe professions, including those in aca-demic medicine, live in a half-changedworld. Women make up more than halfof college students and almost half ofthe students in most professions. Andthere have been large numbers ofwomen in the faculty pipeline in highereducation and academic medicine forover two decades now—plenty of timefor them to emerge from the other endas major players and leaders. But re-search on women’s careers demonstratesthat increasing the number of womenentering the pipeline is not translatinginto substantially increased numbers ofwomen professors. The AmericanCouncil on Education reports that only13% of doctorate-granting institutionsare headed by women, and the Associ-ation of American Medical Colleges re-ports that only 8% of medical schooldepartment chairs are women. Thus,while women have achieved equal ac-cess to higher education and other pro-fessions, we as a society are still wastinga great deal of their potential. How canwe better capitalize on women’s intel-lectual capital?*

'The Women Are Coming': The Transformation of Gender Relationships in a Gay Synagogue

The social context of women's entrance into positions of spiritual and organizational leadership in a formerly male-dominated New York gay and lesbian synagogue is presented. The paper explores the intricacies of women's investment with authority in the public forum, and the reactions of men to the 'intrusion' into 'their' space - from resentment and protest to active acceptance. Circumstances that maintain the exclusion of women from hierarchies of organizational power, or promote their inclusion, are inquired into.

Men's work, masculinities and gender divisions of labour

Gender analysis with an explicit focus on men and masculinities has yet to be applied to many developing country contexts or to issues of gender divisions of labour. This article explores the shape that such analyses might take, arguing for a greater conceptual emphasis, in studies of gender divisions of labour, on embodied subjectivities, on agency and on the complexity of gender domination, and for further methodological critique of definitions and measurement of work. Through a discussion of mainly south Asian examples it is suggested that specific groups of men experience well‐being threats as a consequence of high work intensity. It is also proposed that we gain a better understanding of gender divisions of labour, including how women might make use of codes of manliness, through greater analytical attention to men's work and masculinities, since women's investments in subject positions, and agency, develops in relation to men's.

Dominance, sexual activity, and sexual emotions

Men's interest in sex partners' status traits and commitment (investment thoughts) declines with number of sex partners and permissiveness of attitudes; women's investment thoughts do not seem to decline. Testosterone, dominance, sexual attractiveness, and number of sex partners are correlated in men but not in women. It is plausible that these sex differences are part of sexually dimorphic feedback systems. This type of feedback is consistent with both reciprocal and basal models of testosterone.

Investment in Women's Human Capital.

Investment in Women's Human Capital.

Book Review: Labor Economics: Investment in Women's Human Capital

Book Review: Labor Economics: Investment in Women's Human Capital

Signing the pledge? Women's investment in university education and teacher training before 1939

(1997). Signing the pledge? Women's investment in university education and teacher training before 1939. History of Education: Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 207-223.

Married Women's Property Laws and Female Commercial Activity: Evidence from United States Patent Records, 1790–1895

Nineteenth-century laws granted wives previously withheld rights to their own property and earnings as well as liability for debts and contracts. I use 4,198 women's patents to assess whether these laws encouraged greater female commercial activity. Patentees were motivated by potential profits and were responsive to market incentives. Women's patenting jumped significantly in states with legal reforms and was lowest in states without such laws. Much of the subsequent increase occurred in metropolitan centers where property rights were of greater concern. Thus, by reducing transactions costs and increasing expected benefits, legal reforms arguably stimulated women's investments in patenting and commercial activities.

Investments in Women's Human Capital.

How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility and training? Presenting 13 empirical analyses, this text explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family. The first section considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining topics such as: the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labour market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children. The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, discussing issues such as: the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.

Investments in Women, Economic Development, and Improvements in Health in Low‐Income Countriesa

Investments in human resources are more likely to have higher rates of return than investments in capital resources like factories, equipment, inventories, and infrastructure. There are a variety of studies that estimate the ratio of return from primary and secondary schooling to be between 5-40% annually. The primary factor affecting return is the level of development of the country in question. Developing countries are able to achieve higher rates of return than already developed countries. Determining the rates of return on public and private health investments and related research and developments is much harder because the major improvements that have occurred in the past were accompanied by other significant improvements in trade, nutrition, and income. However, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that improvements in health were significantly responsible for the economic growth following World War II. Analysis of education expenditures indicates that the less educated a country's women are, the lower its standard of living. 90% of the intracountry variation in enrollment rates for men and women for 80 countries between 1960-1980 indicate that this is the case. Studies conducted during the 1970s and 1980s by demographers, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists clearly show a trend in education of women and child mortality. Every additional year of female education translates to a 5-10% reduction in child mortality. It is clear that women play a central role in the health determinants of family members. The education of women is a strong, although not clearly understood, force affecting child mortality, nutrition, health, and school achievement. Household resources and maternal education must always be determined before any study of health care delivery effectiveness is conducted. The same is true for any studies of the effectiveness of local family planning expenditures.

Little Women and Big Men in Business: A Gorokan Development Project and Social Stratification

The goal of this paper is to analyse how a women's commercial development project that was initiated by the Papua New Guinea Government and an international agency contributes to social differentiation in Eastern Highlands Province.1 I am concerned with the dynamics of social stratification, the process which results in increasing disparities in people's control over property and in their access to power and prestige. The title of this paper should cue the reader that this is the latest chapter in the history of business development in the Goroka Valley that was so ably started by Finney ( 1973) in Big Men and Business, and continued by Good and Donaldson (1980), and Donaldson and Good (1981). My paper continues themes found in my colleagues' work. I deal with the history of Gorokan commercial development, increasing inequalities among categories of persons, and Government intervention in the process of social stratification. My work does, however, differ somewhat from the earlier research. I attempt to broaden the analysis of women's participation in Gorokan business. Previous research on the topic has not gone beyond noting that women's labour has been indispensible to commercial development in the region. In this paper I discuss the Goroka Women's Investment Corporation (GWIC), its place in the growth of Gorokan business, and its implications for social stratification. GWIC was established in 1976 with financial and technical support from the Papua New Guinea Department of Commerce and the International Labour Office. The corporation is significant for understanding Gorokan business history and social stratification for two reasons. First, GWIC channels resources and services to and through women who are an elite in Papua New Guinea terms. The leaders and shareholders as a group are better educated and more affluent than the average village woman and most are linked to the wealthy business leaders in the Goroka area. Second, although GWIC was founded to enhance women's partici-

The Increasing Pay Gap for Women in the Textile and Clothing Industries, 1910 to 1970: An Alternative Explanation

In a recent article in this Journal Paul McGouldrick and Michael Tannen undertook an interesting study of male and female wages in the clothing and textile industries for the years 1910 and 1970.1 For 1910, their cross-section regression results showed little or no earnings differential between the two groups after controlling for other factors. Their analysis of substantially the same industries in 1970, however, uncovered a very marked earnings differential in favor of men. McGouldrick and Tannen (M-T) suggest several possible explanations for this rather surprising result of an increasing pay gap, among them a decline in women's investment in human capital relative to that of men, changing government and union tax and benefit patterns that have the effect of discriminating against female human capital investment, or even rising market discrimination against women.2 But, as they admit, their explanations are speculative and the precise reason for the gap is unclear. We would suggest, however, that the increasing pay gap that M-T discovered may be merely a statistical illusion. The illusion could have resulted from the following difficulties: 1) Although M-T included a dummy variable in the 1970 equations to indicate whether a worker was employed in the North or the South, there was no attempt to differentiate workers by region in the 1910 equations. 2) Although the data which they used for 1910 pertained only to immigrant workers, their 1970 data set was almost exclusively made up of native-born workers. These two difficulties are potentially serious (although perhaps not equally so). As we will explain below, the absence of a regional variable and the non-homogeneity of the two groups in the two years studied could have led M-T to observe erroneously an increasing pay gap for women in the textile and clothing industries over the period studied.