ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

The Business of Investing: the Public Stock Portfolios of Female Investors in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The historiography on businesswomen in early modern Britain has primarily focused on women in trade, as shopkeepers, or as managers of alehouses and other businesses. One area that has not been so well explored is the business of investing. This paper argues that public investment was a new business opportunity for British women at the turn of the eighteenth century. Whether investing for long term retirement or speculating in the new financial markets furthered by the Financial Revolution, female investors had to decide where to invest their capital, how much to invest and for how long, whether to diversify their investments, and whether to manage their portfolio directly or put it in the hands of others. Some women not only invested their own money, they invested for female friends and relatives, for male kin, or served as financial agents for unrelated men and women. This paper explores the business of investing through an analysis of the account books of Gertrude, Lady Cheyne and her kinswoman, Gertrude Tolhurst. The accounts cover the years 1715-22, the heady years of Britain’s revolution in finance, which produced investment opportunities in the Bank of England, the government debt, and joint stock companies such as the infamous South Sea company as well as lesser known bubbles. These two women engaged in the business of investing in all of these financial options.