Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 152

Froide’s colourful opening description of the hustle and bustle of eighteenth-century London beautifully illustrates the activities of the numerous female investors and the public places that they (and their male contemporaries) visited to conduct their business. In painting this picture, Froide also makes the important point that the activities and voices of these women are not (and have never been) silent, rather they have just not been listened to.

The author situates her work squarely in the revisionist historiographical camp, alongside other historians such as Pamela Sharp and Amy Erickson. She states that ‘this book will provide some of the evidence to strengthen Erickson’s assertion that English financial markets were open to female capital, especially femme soles’ (p. 2) but crucially Froide’s work expands upon this to demonstrate that married women were also able to act as independent investors. Moreover, whilst the majority of investors (measured numerically as well as by the amount of capital they controlled) were men, women represented up to 20 per cent of investors and there is an important story to be told. Froide further extends the existing historiography on female investment in the eighteenth century by looking beyond the individual incidents of the 1690s or the South Sea Bubble, and instead examining female investment over two generations. This allows long-term patterns of behaviour to be examined and the activities of women from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds to be considered.

In Silent partners, Froide makes the timely argument that female investors did not act as a homogenous group who followed the same patterns of investment and displayed the same financial behaviours. This is an important point as it highlights the fact that simply acknowledging the existence of these women is not enough, historians must also take care to allow the different motivations, levels of interest and education of women to be expressed through the sources. To achieve this, Froide has examined three main groups of sources. The first is the records of the British government and the financial corporations themselves: these have been examined many times in the past but rarely with the purpose of extracting data about women’s economic activities. Secondly, she analysed periodical literature of the time including newspapers, pamphlets and other contemporary commentary. Finally, family papers and archives were cross-referenced to uncover the personal papers, account books and correspondence of individual women who made financial investments and/or managed financial portfolios.

Silent partners is broken into eight chapters including the Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter Two, ‘Playing the Lottery for Marriage and Profit’ examines the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion for lotteries and the extent to which women participated in and encouraged the development of the industry. Froide then goes on to explore the way that fictional representations of single women using these lotteries to generate a marriage portion were reflected by reality. Although her initial findings that some 20 per cent of investors in lotteries were female is interesting in its own right, it is Froide’s analysis of fiction and contemporary commentary that adds another layer of rich detail to our understanding of unmarried women, their prospects and society’s perception of them.

Chapter Three, ‘Early Adopters, Women Investors in the Early Years of the Financial Revolution’, scrutinizes the very earliest female investors in public investments, paying particular attention to those women who were active investors from the 1690s, some 30 years before the more commonly examined female investors in the South Sea Company. Froide comments that the term ‘early adopter’ has been borrowed from entrepreneurship literature, and her use of it to describe the investment activities of women in 1690s London who ‘quickly availed themselves of the new financial instruments made available by the Financial Revolution’ (p. 61) seems apt given her later arguments that these investments were often just one of several financial strategies employed by women to secure the economic future of their family. Their ability to recognize the opportunity of the emerging financial markets points not just to an entrepreneurial acumen, but also a level of financial literacy that is difficult to quantify, or even pinpoint in archival material. Froide attempts to circumvent this through three case studies of Sarah Churchill the Duchess of Marlborough, Martha Hutchins and Elizabeth Freke. These case studies demonstrate how successful the careful combing of family papers and correspondence can be and although it is perhaps inevitable that these rich archives most often belong to elite women, the details within the Bank of England and public corporations presented elsewhere in this volume demonstrate that such activities were not solely their preserve.

Chapter Four, ‘Women as Investors for their Families’ and Chapter Five, ‘Unmarried Women Investing for “Retirement”’ focus on exploring the active role that women played in shaping and managing their finances to ensure the economic security of their immediate and extended family members as well as their own long term comfort. The case studies presented in these chapters of Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos, single gentlewoman Mary Barwell, widow Barbara Savile, spinster Gertrude Savile and unmarried sisters Patty and Teresa Blount, all demonstrate the importance of lifecycle and circumstance to women when making investment decisions. Furthermore, these middling, genteel and elite women were all depended on by their male kin; it was not only elite women with their own fortune who were able to take control of the financial reins.

Chapter Six, ‘Gender and Risk in the Early Stock Market’, and Chapter Seven, ‘The Financial and Political Agency of Female Investors’, provide yet more evidence, this time from individual account ledgers, as well as contemporary publications such as newspapers and pamphlets, to argue that women were not passive observers, but active agents who manipulated and drove financial deals on both sides of the law – and were held accountable for their actions. Froide examines lesser-known financial scandals including the fraudulent London Orphan’s Fund and the Charitable Corporation and the results suggest that contrary to the historiography of the nineteenth century, investing in financial markets actually represented a less risky option than private loans; this is markedly different from the characterization of female investment behaviour in later centuries. Spreading financial risk is explored through the portfolio of businesswoman Hester Pinney, who used her capital and profits from her lace-making business to invest in the stock market on both her own account and on behalf of other male and female investors. Froide goes on to argue that the power associated with such investments gave women the opportunity to develop a political authority that would otherwise have been denied to them, indicating that the role of women in the financial workings of the British Empire has not yet been fully explored.

The footnotes of some of these sources, particularly the contemporary newspaper articles, shows that Froide accessed them over a decade before the publication of Silent partners; this, along with the substantial bibliography, reflects the thoroughness of the research and the extent to which this work has clearly been a labour of love for the author. As well as presenting important new data about women’s role as public investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, Silent partners is charmingly written and entertaining to read and has relevance far beyond women’s historians of eighteenth-century finance.