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Consols, Home Rails and Foreign Things: women and investment in England and Wales in the early twentieth century
| A major ESRC-funded study of women and wealth in England and Wales 1870 to 1930 suggests that over this period the proportion of women in the shareholder population increased from fewer than 10% to just under 50%. There is an emerging literature on women and wealth in the nineteenth century, but little is yet known about women’s investment behaviour in the early twentieth century. This paper concentrates on the period 1900 to 1930, with the intention of trying to identify differences in women’s investment behaviour pre- and post- World War I. It examines differences between women’s investments in the two decades before and the two decades after World War 1. We concentrate in particular on female attitudes to investing in domestic versus colonial or foreign enterprises; large or small, profitable or poorly performing companies; new or older sectors; debentures, preference or ordinary shares. We also consider the relative importance of married women, spinsters and widows as investors, pre- and post-World War I, in the light of demographic changes, male mortality in the war, and increased financial opportunities for women.
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