Long overlooked in histories of finance, women played an essential role in areas such as banking and the stock market during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet their presence sparked ongoing controversy. Hetty Green’s golden touch brought her millions, but she outraged critics with her rejection of domesticity. Progressives like Victoria Woodhull, meanwhile, saw financial acumen as more important for women than the vote. George Robb’s pioneering study explores the financial methods, accomplishments, and careers of three generations of women. Plumbing sources from stock brokers’ ledgers to media coverage, Robb reveals the many ways women invested their capital while exploring their differing sources of information, approaches to finance, interactions with markets, and levels of expertise. He also rediscovers the forgotten women bankers, brokers, and speculators who blazed new trails--and sparked public outcries over women’s unsuitability for the predatory rough-and-tumble of market capitalism. Entertaining and vivid with details, Ladies of the Ticker sheds light on the trailblazers who transformed Wall Street into a place for women’s work.

Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street "Merchant Prince" William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune. Motivated by their own experiences with sexism, and focusing on women's need for economic independence, these benefactors sought to expand women's access to higher education, promote suffrage, and champion reproductive rights, as well as to provide assistance to working-class women. In a time when women still wielded limited political power, philanthropy was perhaps the most potent tool they had. But even as these wealthy women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. As Johnson argues, restrictions tied to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardized efforts to establish coalitions across racial and class lines. As the struggle for full economic and political power and self-determination for women continues today, this history reveals how generous women helped shape the movement. And Johnson shows us that tensions over wealth and power that persist in the modern movement have deep historical roots.

They were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them--to be wives and mothers--and decided to live on their own terms. In the process, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit. There's Mina Loy, a modernist poet and much-photographed beauty who traveled in pivotal international art circles; blues divas Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the lyric poet who, with her earthy charm and passion, embodied the '20s ideal of sexual daring; the avant-garde publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; and the wealthy hostesses of the salons, A'Lelia Walker and Mabel Dodge. Among the supporting cast are Emma Goldman, Isadora Duncan, Ma Rainey, Margaret Sanger, and Gertrude Stein. Andrea Barnet's fascinating accounts of the emotional and artistic lives of these women--together with rare black-and-white photographs, taken by photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Man Ray--capture the women in all their glory. This is a history of the early feminists who didn't set out to be feminists, a celebration of the rebellious women who paved the way for future generations.

Excellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of 'the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,' helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a spinster in the England of the 1950s, one of those 'excellent women' who tend to get involved in other people's lives - such as those of her new neighbor, Rockingham, and the vicar next door. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest.

When Karin Housley asked the financial expert who was handling the family investments to explain his strategy to her, he said, "You just wouldn't understand." Grrrr, she thought, and with that an investor was born. But Karin didn't want to head into the stock market's uncharted fiscal wilderness alone. She called ten friends -- ten women ranging in age from twenty-nine to sixty scattered across the United States, all concerned about their financial futures -- and urged them to start an investment club with her. They called themselves the Chicks Laying Nest Eggs Investment Club, held their meetings in an online chat room, and used the Internet to research, buy, and sell their stock choices. After two years in action, the Chicks are beating the pants off Wall Street's wise men. Their philosophy: Girls just wanna have fun, but Chicks want to learn something -- and make a few bucks -- along the way. Chicks Laying Nest Eggs is all about doing it all! And they've been spreading the gospel on their investment club website -- www.chickslayingnesteggs.com -- showing Chicks everywhere how and why to invest. Okay, okay. The Chicks know what you're thinking: "Yeah, right. An investment book that I can understand. Like that can happen." Never fear! The Chicks didn't know a stock from a stocking when they started their club, but that didn't stop them from learning (fast) or beating the market (big!) right out of the coop. And they didn't know a thing about computers, either. Here in Chicks Laying Nest Eggs, founding Chick Karin Housley starts right at the beginning and recaps everything the Chicks learned on the way to becoming Dow Jones divas. * What this thing called the market is andhow it works; * How to start your own investment club, buy stock in some good companies, and build your own Chick-worthy returns; * All the essentials (and none of the double-talk) about the S&P, NASDAQ, market cap, mutual funds, bears, bulls, and all that other stuff that you always thought you'd never understand; * How to get a computer and get your club online so you can meet anytime, from anywhere -- without crashing your too-busy schedule, or even getting out of your pajamas; * And, most of all, how to have a blast while getting your money to work harder for you than it ever has before. Chicks Laying Nest Eggs is the simplest step-by-step guide to investing in the stock market ever put together. It is for every woman, because the time has passed (if it ever really existed) when any woman could afford to be ignorant about her finances.

"Harry Boxer's proven techniques for short-term traders...explains the trading tactics that draw on price, volume, and pattern recognition...offers the information needed to recognize chart patterns, identify trades, and execute entries and exits that will maximize profits and limit losses...reveals his concept of price-volume surges as the key to identifying the most lucrative trades...describes his routine for preparing for each trading day...his strategies can be applied for both day trading and swing trading"--

Opines that most people lack the skills and knowledge to invest their money but do it anyway, and unsuccessfully. Explains how to invest wisely and how markets really work. Looks at how to double a retirement fund.

America's Girl is an intimate look at the life and trials of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but broke the record set by men. The feat so thrilled America that it welcomed her home with a ticker tape parade that drew two million people. This fascinating portrait follows Ederle from her early days as a competitive swimmer through her gold medal triumph at the 1924 Olympics, to the first attempt the next year by Ederle to swim from France to England in frigid and turbulent waters, a feat that had been conquered by only five men up to that time. This is also a stirring look at the go-go era of the 1920s, when the country was about to recognize that women not only could vote, but compete on an international scale as athletes. At the height of Prohibition, Ederle's triumph over the formidable Channel was a triumph for women everywhere. America's Girl immerses readers in a pivotal era of American history and brings to life the spirit of that time.

This book is the first that describes the practices of any stock exchange; it makes evident a high development of practices, with puts, calls, pools, and manipulations; and it appeared as early as the seventeenth century. Not inappropriately the stock exchange described is that of Amsterdam, a city which at the date of the volume’s publication —1688 — was still the leading financial center of the world. The book, to be sure, is hardly a systematic account of the institution; the author pursued moral, philosophical, and rhetorical objectives, and, while saying a lot that seems now to be of little value, manages somehow to leave unsaid a great deal that would be of interest for us. Nevertheless, it represents, even in its peculiar form, a really important source of information about the stock exchange, and indeed about the Dutch business world of that period.

Petticoats and Pinstripes: Portraits of Women in Wall Street's History provides a fascinating chronological account of the contributions of women on Wall Street through profiles of selected individuals that set their achievements in the context of the prevailing times. The book documents how women frequently assumed financial roles as a temporary palliative to the nation's ills, only to be cast aside once conditions improved, and how they were often restrained from financial endeavors by various factors, including American legal, political, economic, and cultural norms. Author Sheri J. Caplan describes the accomplishments of women in the financial world against the backdrop of the general advancement of women's rights and the evolution of gender-based roles in society, and identifies the primary factors in the development of a greater female role in finance: wartime urgency, personal necessity, technological change, and financial education.