Programme 

for Women, Money and Markets (1600-1900)

The Third Annual Conference at the University of Sussex

Brighton on June 13th and 14th 2019

DAY ONE: THURSDAY

9am: Registration opens

Tea and Coffee

Room 1

9.45am

Panel 1: Text and Ideology

Chair: Emma Newport

Dominic Walker (University of Sussex) “Austenomics” Through a reading of Northanger Abbey (1817), this paper will show that Hayek, acting as the stereotype of a rational, male economist, mistakes the market for a narrower social situation, inadvertently “feminizing” his putatively masculine object of enquiry. Hayek’s utopianized free market stands in the same relation to real economic life as Catherine Morland’s gothic fantasy does to the realist novel.

Olivia Biber (University of Zurich) “‘We None of Us Spoke of Money’: Broadening Economic Thought in Gaskell’s Cranford (1853)” Cranford is not an enclosed space with its own societal structures; the shabby-genteel women are neither immune to increased industrial and finance capitalism nor to imperialism. Needing to react to external pressures, one of the Cranfordians opens a tea shop, thereby adapting commercial structures entertained in the neighbouring industrial town of Drumble to fit Cranfordian terms. Instead of profit maximisation, however, she aims to combine her tea business with an economy of care.

Sarah Dredge (Sheffield Hallam University) “White hands, brown hands and the "invisible hand": the economy of "active sympathy" in The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”. Through tracing her references to figurative and physical hands, this paper argues that Seacole makes manifest the price paid by some for the ideologies of empire, gender and class that sustain British national identity.

11.00am Panel 2: Clothing, value and performance(s)

Chair: Vivienne Richmond

Claire Salmon (Royal College of Art) “Affording Mourning” This paper explores how half-mourning dress can serve to contextualise the ways in which Victorian women of different socio-economic backgrounds upheld the rigid mourning practices imposed upon them. Whether the dress was purchased by the latest known owner, by her employer or simply passed on to her, she was one of the thousands of women living in London who were expected to perform their grief in a strikingly public way.

Barbara Straumann (University of Zurich) “Making Dresses and a Fortune of One’s Own: Feminine Economic Independence in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890)” In addition to making use of her talent and eye for design, Kirsteen is able to turn her social capital (her descent from the Scottish Douglas family but also her celebrity arising from a tragic romance) into economic capital.

12.15pm LUNCH

Room 1

13.15 Panel 3: Guilds, societies and textiles

Chair: Joyce Goggin

Ben Schneider (University of Oxford)   “The Rise and Fall of Hand Spinning”  This paper describes and quantifies the growth and decline of hand spinning as a major occupation for women and children in 18th-century Britain.

Amy E. Creighton (The University of York)   “Selling Skill: Marketability and Exchange in York’s Merchant Taylors’ Company, c. 1650-1750” Although a number of textile guilds throughout England were slowly losing members and falling into disarray in the eighteenth century, York’s Company was expanding and gaining power within the city. It was not only unique for its reverse trend, it was also unique in that a large portion of its members (both masters and apprentices) were women. 

Vivienne  Richmond,  (Goldsmiths, University of London)  “Ann Ecroyd: industrialisation and female philanthropy in nineteenth-century Lancashire” This paper examines women’s philanthropy, family and religious networks, the dislocations resulting from industrialisation, tensions between hand- and power-loom weavers, and the material culture of the poor.

14.30 Panel 4: Case studies of female financial management  

Chair: Peter Collinge

Frances Nolan (Maynooth University, Ireland) “‘I am now five years out of all I have upon earth’: Frances Talbot, countess of Tyrconnell, the management of personal property and procurement of goods in exile, 1690-1702”.   This paper will explore the means by which Lady Tyrconnell’s property was transported from Ireland, into England and, in some instances, into France. It will also consider the ways in which the sisters used trade and circumvented customs, examining, in particular, the network of women who were tasked with moving goods around

Elizabeth Spencer (University of York) “‘Rul’d in a proper Manner for keeping an Account of Monies received, paid, lent, or expended’: Keeping account in the eighteenth-century printed pocketbook” This paper examines the different ways in which Ann Prest, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Porter used (or did not use) pocketbooks to record income and expenditure. The pocketbook was one of, rather than the only space in which women could keep account, and might form part of a wider process of which account ledgers, bills, receipts, and rough drafts were also a part. 

Janette Rutterford (Professor Emerita, Open University) “Women managing money: the case of Lady Westmeath” Lady Westmeath  sought funds from her estranged husband in the form of pin money, maintenance payments, damages for non payment of promised annuities and payment of her trade debts.  She went so far as to encourage her creditors to sue Lord Westmeath. for non-payment  of her debts and to organise that his cattle be physically distrained for non-payment of maintenance.

15.45 AFTERNOON TEA

16.15 Room 1

Chair: Catherine Packham

Panel 5: Female economists and the development of Economic Theory

Wendy Robins (Independent) “‘A swarm of stock jobbers and tax gatherers’: Catharine Macaulay’s critique of modern finance and government debt” A major writer on national and international finances, Catherine Macaulay is a rare female economist of the Enlightenment Age. 

Philippy David (Walras-Pareto Center, University of Lausanne) “Ellen S. Richards’s “Euthenics” and the Birth of the Economics of Consumption” This paper explores how the home economics movement became focused on consumption and consumer choice.

Room 2

Chair: Joyce Goggin

Panel 6: Fit or fat? Risk, value and the female body in the economy

Peter Radford “A Holland Smock to be Run For”: The Economics of Women’s foot-racing in the 18th Century” What were the chances of winning?  Was it worth the risking the entry fee (if there was one)?  Was it worth the time and cost of travelling to the competition?  Was it worth the time and effort of running even if there was no entry fee?  Was it worth the time and effort of preparing and training to run - time away from other activities or duties?  The relative values of their time and effort on other activities, therefore, had to be assessed too. 

Emma Newport (University of Sussex) "A broad, squat, pursy, fat thing… yet deadly strong": Fat and The (Sexual) Economy in Richardson’s Pamela” This paper examines economic agency and the figure (literally and figuratively) of the working-class woman. How does Richardson use fatness and thinness to critique economic activity and female value?

17.15-18.00 Drinks Reception, sponsored by Gale Cengage

18.00 Keynote Lecture:   Professor Alannah Tomkins (University of Keele)

Small bills, big implications?  Women’s trade with the Old Poor Law.

Historical accounts of women in business 1700-1850 have been beset by two key challenges.  They have been freighted with concern for the impact of domestic ideology: did it apply an increasingly-powerful brake on female enterprise? They have also been segmented by issues around evidence.  Trade directories, advertisements and insurance records have dominated the roster of viable resources and while these materials alone or in combination have yielded significant returns, they can all be qualified by their limited reach.  All three were most-readily deployed by prosperous concerns.  The AHRC-funded ‘Small bills and petty finance’ project utilises an alternative class of surviving source for insight into women’s trading activity, the voucher or receipt.  This keynote lecture will briefly survey the historiography for women’s trade in this period, before focusing on the typology of women’s involvement on the supply side of the Old Poor Law for goods, services and as intermediaries of various kinds.  It will conclude that although the numeric survival of vouchers may seem overwhelming, the next advances in the history of women in commercial work will derive from sources like these.

20.00 Dinner in Brighton (please purchase tickets here)

DAY TWO: FRIDAY

10.00 Panel 7: Societies, assistance and the workhouse: Women's Networks of trade and exchange

Chair: Louise Falcini

Peter   Collinge (University of Keele)  “Women, business and eighteenth-century provincial workhouses: open and hidden investment in the supply chain” This paper examines how money collected as part of the poor rate was recirculated within parish economies; repeat orders placed by the overseers shows that these enterprising women were recognised for the consistent quality of goods (if not always the finest) they supplied, and their ability to meet orders in a timely fashion. Echoing Douglas Brown’s work on London’s Victorian workhouses, analysing eighteenth-century provincial supply chains through overseers’ vouchers will also generate a greater appreciation of the poor law system as a significant consumer of goods and services in local economies.  

Beatrice   Moring (University of Helsiki/Cambridge)   “Women, collaboration and the ‘grey economy’”  This paper analyzes assistance in kind between related and non related women, for example collaboration creating economic advantages like sharing rent or lodging, providing child care that made economic activity possible as well as transfer of small sums of money and goods. The time frame is 1890 to 1918 and the location is Finnish and Swedish urban or industrial areas. The datasets consist of budgets of female headed households before WWI, poor relief records, working class biographies, census and survey data.

Magnus Bohman (Umeå University, Sweden)   “Helping women to the market? The impact of new rural organizations on the development of female labour and skills in 19th century Sweden” This paper investigates the role of a new type of agricultural institutions – the Hushållningssällskapet (HHS) – for the development of female labour and skills. Similar organizations, or societies, were founded all over Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries and they shared the paramount aim to improve agriculture. 

11.30 Keynote Lecture: D’Maris Coffman (University College, London)

12.30 LUNCH

13.15 Panel 8: Colonial women, credit and debt  

Chair: Giuseppe de Luca

Eva Brugger (Universität Zürich)   “She-Merchants, Female Consumers and Matriarchs. Women in the Colony of New Netherland” Dutch women in the colony as well as indigenous women desired fashionable clothes and textiles as men did likewise. Trading correspondences, ship loadings and inventories offer an insight how women address their longings and how they explored opening markets.   

Christine Walker (Yale-NUS Singapore)   “The “diverse goods” and “merchandise she delivered to him”: Credit and Debt Transactions in Colonial Jamaica” Female colonists, in their capacities as creditors and debtors, greased the wheel of the local, Atlantic, and increasingly global market. Positioned in Jamaica, their localized financial actions had profound consequences. As members of a small free minority population, women aided in the creation of a spectacularly lucrative yet profoundly exploitative from of colonialism which relied upon slave labor.

14.15 Panels 9 and 10

Room 1

Panel 9: Credit, Debt and Autonomy: Women and the Chancery in the Eighteenth Century

Chair: Hazel Vosper  

Aidan Collins, (University of York) “Women, Bankruptcy and the Court of Chancery, 1680-1750” Women are represented within the court as active participants — such as creditors, debtors, servants, mistresses, co-partners and sole traders — within bankruptcy procedure. Ultimately, such an exploration will demonstrate women’s dynamic engagement in the credit-based economy. Chancery not only acted as a debt-recovery mechanism, but also as an institution which provided a platform for the expression of social and cultural narratives of credit, debt and failure.

Emily Ireland (University of Adelaide) “Financial Management Through the Lens of Eighteenth-Century Equity” This paper offers a new exploration of the common law doctrine of coverture: married women’s financial autonomy thus intersected with their ability to exercise independent legal agency. One site of this interaction was the court of Chancery. 

Room 2

Panel 10: Widows, Credit and (Public) Debt: Women and the Capital Market in 17th-Century Italy

Chair: Joyce Goggin

Marcella Lorenzini and Giuseppe De Luca (University of Milan) “Women and capital in 17th-century northern Italy” Widows in Milan used to invest in public debt and in bills of exchange fairs of Bisenzone, with sums that ranged form 10 to 10,000 lire. Moreover, in case of bankruptcy they were the privileged creditors. Such capital market was liquid and dynamic; loans could be sold to third partied, which contributed to create a lively secondary market.  

15.15 AFTERNOON TEA

15.45 Panel 11a Female investors, shareholders and directors in the nineteenth century  

Chairs: Joyce Goggin and Emma Newport

Hazel Vosper (University of Lancaster) “Women Investors and Risk-aversion: Challenges and Opportunities in Recovering Historic Behaviour” This paper will argue that certain levels of aggregation can obscure a more complex, and potentially more interesting, picture of risk in relation to women’s financial agency. This suggestion will be considered from two perspectives. Firstly, the extent to which the “sweet simplicity of the three per Cents” (Disraeli), actually represented a low risk investment by the end of the nineteenth century in England. Secondly, the underlying assumption that the financial securities in a women’s portfolio was an expression of her own agency. 

Carry van Lieshout (University of Cambridge)   “Women on Board: female entrepreneurship in 19th century Britain” This paper examines female directors in the context of wider director networks as well as wider patterns of female entrepreneurship, and discusses the different pathways open to different types of female entrepreneurs.

Magdalene  Antreou (Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation)   “Bridging separate spheres in a family type economy: Women bank shareholders in Cyprus (1899-1930)” The investment activity of women in Cyprus is as old as the island’s local banking system. This paper seeks to promote the argument that the investment activity of women within the family framework blurs the lines between domestic and public life and punches holes in the “separate spheres” argument

16.45 BREAK  

17.00 Panel 11b   Female investors, shareholders and directors in the nineteenth century

Anders Perlinge (Institute for Economic and Business History Research at Stockholm School of Economics) “Female Financial Agency in Stockholm 1855–1880” There have been contradictory views about the importance of private share investments in financing industrialization, when compared to direct investments or credits from the banks. Empirical evidence from this study seems to indicate that private investors even so added substantial capital, perhaps even fostered the resilience of the private credit market, which sector dominated the capital market for long even in the capital city. Also, female financial agency formed part of an even more important forthcoming change: democratization.

Áine  Gallagher  (Queen’s Management School) “Independent Women: Shareholders in the Age of the Suffragettes” In this era, when the suffragette movement was at its height, we analyse whether women were also demonstrating their independence through their investment decisions. Using a novel dataset of almost 500,000 shareholders in some of the largest British railways, we find that women represented about 30 to 40 per cent of shareholders in each railway company in our sample at this time. This implies that women were not only being influential in affecting political change during this era, they were also playing a very important role in financial markets. However, we find that they were deliberately excluded from being eligible for election to boards of directors.

18.30 Closing of the conference and drinks reception sponsored by Gale Cengage

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Alannah Tomkins Professor D’Maris Coffmann

(Keele) (UCL)

Director of Humanities Research Professor in Economics and

Principal Investigator of Finance of the Built Environment

“Small bills and petty finance: (Click for more here)

co-creating the history of the

Old Poor Law”

(Click: https://thepoorlaw.org/)

To celebrate the first year of the AHRC funded project, “Small bills and petty finance: co-creating the history of the Old Poor Law”, a joint investigation led by the Universities of Keele and Sussex, this year’s conference theme is ‘Petty Finance’. ‘Petty Finance’ not only refers to the perceived marginalisation of women's finances in traditional economic histories and literature and its historically ‘petty’ stature amongst academics, but also to the little-used records of female financial practice, including household bills, gambling records and so on, to which the ‘Small Bills and Petty Finance’ project is drawing attention and increasing ease of access through digitisation.

 In keeping with the ‘Petty Finance’ theme we invite exploration, whether literary, historical or economic, of the experiences of women across the social spectrum. Although we welcome submissions on a wide range of topics connected with women’s involvement in the marketplace and finance, of especial interest to the conference are women involved in the receipt or delivery of relief; volunteerism; working class experience; trading networks; social and/or economic bonds forged between the poor and the non-poor; attitudes and emotions associated with wealth and poverty; women’s engagement in banking, finance, gambling, or exchange, especially as documented through bills, petty finance documents or other under-used sources.

 The conference will address themes including consumerism, shopping, global trade, domestic trade, markets (literary and otherwise), currency, and varying practices of exchange. The conference is interdisciplinary in nature, bridging literature, material culture, gender studies and economic history, and aims to relate the debates of the period to modern day issues about the presence and position of women in the economy and media.

More broadly, we welcome submissions in the form of individual papers, panels and roundtable discussions on the following themes:

• The varying practices of women associated with currency, global and/or domestic markets and marketability

• Material practices associated with value, exchange and/or female creativity

• Women as investors, risk-takers or gamblers

• Women as producers and/or consumers in the literary or other marketplaces (including, but not limited to, food, clothing, agriculture and raw materials)

• Representations of women at work or women’s involvement in: Trade and industry; professional services (such as law, finance, hospitality and the media); domestic service; the rural economy

• The place of women in the literary marketplace (past and present)

 We particularly welcome cross-cultural considerations of the above issues. Please send 300-word abstracts to e.newport@sussex.ac.uk with an indication of your proposed format (individual paper, panel, roundtable, etc.).

 If you are submitting a proposal for a panel, please include an abstract for each paper (up to 300 words each). Please indicate if you would like your paper to be considered for the edited volume that will be published after the conference.

 Deadline for submissions: March 1st 2019

Conference Organisers: Dr Emma Newport (University of Sussex) and Dr Joyce Goggin (University of Amsterdam)

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————--

Second Annual Conference at the University of Amsterdam

June 2018

Building on the success of the conference created by Dr Emma Newport and co-organised by Amy Murat at King's College London in 2017, the second Women, Money and Markets conference will continue to address contemporary scholarship on the role of women in consumerism, shopping, global trade, domestic trade, markets (literary and otherwise), currency, and varying practices of exchange. The conference is interdisciplinary in nature, bridging literature, material culture, gender studies, theatre and economic history, and aims to relate the debates of the period to modern day issues about the presence and position of women in the economy, the market and the media.

Our confirmed keynote speakers are Danielle van den Heuvel (University of Amsterdam), author of Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands c. 1580-1815, and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, who specializes in British eighteenth-century literature and culture and feminist and cultural theory. She has published on eighteenth-century women writers and eighteenth-century consumer culture, and mostly recently on the way that the British slave trade has been remembered and represented in the popular imagination.

Women, Money and Markets,2nd Annual Conference

University of Amsterdam

June 7th and 8th, 2018

Chair: Dr Joyce Goggin (UvA), Co-chair: Dr Emma Newport (University of Sussex)

Venue: Doelenzaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek van Amsterdam, Single 425,

Day One

Thursday

Panel Contributors

9:00 – 9:30

Joyce Goggin and Emma Newport

Welcome, housekeeping

9.30-11.00am

1: Women, Investment and Mercantilism

Chair: Emma Newport

1. Janette Rutterford (Open University) “Women Investors in the Mid-to-Late 19th Century”

2. Helen Paul (University of Southampton), “Women and the use of power of attorney in the early eighteenth century: a South Sea case study”

3. Eileen Chanin (Australian National University) “Colonial Women, Growing Fortune, Moving Money: Colonial women merchants in India”

11.00-11.30

Break

11.30-12.30

Keynote 1

Danielle v. d. Heuvel

Chair: Joyce Goggin

12.30-13.30

Lunch

13.30-15.15

2: Women and Literary Marketplaces

Chair: Helen Paul

1. Clara Dawson (University of Manchester) “Literary Value and the Gift Annual in the Early-Nineteenth Century”

2. Alexis Wolf (Birbeck, university of London) “Editor with a Capital E: Women-Authored Biographies and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace”

3. Christine Pullen (Ind.) “‘Whiteley’s was Her Happy Hunting Ground’: Commerce and Consumerism in Amy Levy’s Novels”

4. Adam Schoene (Cornell University) “Rags to Riches: Poverty and Domesticity in Riccoboni and Charrière”

15.15-16.15

3: Oliphant (1)

Chair: Peter Collinge

“An Excellent Man of Business”: The Female Banker and Her Socio-Economic

Agency in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883)

1. Barbara Straumann (University of Zurich)

2. Olivia Biber (University of Zurich)

16.15-16.30

Break

16.30-18:00

4: Women and Their Contributions to Local (Global) Economies

1. Corina Brumaru (independent) “Growing Hemp in Transylvania Women and dress, Fabrics and consumption”

2. Elizabeth Spencer ('The John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester) “Accounting for the Wardrobe in Eighteenth-Century England”

3. Kyung Hwa Eun (University of Alberta) “Frances Burney’s Literary Realism: Ephemerality of Shopping and Daily Life in Camilla”

Day Two

Friday

Panel Contributors

9.30-10.30am

6: Oliphant (2)

Finance, Capital and Value

1. Ben Moore (University of Amsterdam) “‘Of pride and joy no common rate’: Family, Finance and Jouissance in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester”

2. Jakob Nielson (Aarhus University ) “‘Beyond the Writers Power’: Financial Forms and the Affordances of Gender in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883)”

10.30-11am

Break

11am-12.00

Keynote 2

Elizabeth Wallace

Chair:  Marieke de Goede

“Lady Credit Among the Bankers: The Female Body as an Imaginative Site in Early Capitalist Discourse”

12.00-13.30

7: Female Consumerism, Activism and Radicalism

1. Angelika Trawinska (Warsaw School of Economics SGH)

2. Ewelina Nowak (Warsaw School of Economics SGH)

3. Flore Janssen (Birkbeck University) “Work, Money, Influence: International Consumer Activism and Labour Legislation”

4. Sarah Comyn (University College Dublin) “‘The Ladies’ Committee’: Women and the Mechanics' Institute on the Goldfields of Victoria”

13.30-14.30

Lunch

14.30-15.30

8: Gender and the Formation of Political Economy

1. Catherine Packham (University of Sussex)

2. Richard Adelman (University of Sussex)

3. Elisabeth Wallmann (University of Warwick)

4. Claire Wilkinson (University of Cambridge)

15.30-17:00

9: Women and Image

1. Peter Collinge (Keele) “Image and Meaning in Joseph Wright’s Portraits of Two English Businesswomen”

2. Lieke van Deinsen (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) “Image and Imago: Branding Female Authorship in the Late eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic’s Literary Market Place”

3. Nora Rodríguez (Universidad de Sevilla) “Dedications and Symbolic Capital: The Patronesses of Drama in Queen Anne’s Reign”

We welcome submissions in the form of individual papers, panels and roundtable discussions on the following themes:

·         The varying practices of women associated with currency, global and/or domestic markets and marketability

·         Material practices associated with value, exchange and/or female creativity

·         Women as producers and/or consumers in the literary or other marketplaces (including, but not limited to, food, clothing, agriculture and raw materials)

·         Representations of women at work or women’s involvement in:

o   Trade and industry

o   Professional services (e.g. law, finance, hospitality and the media)

o   Domestic service

o   The rural economy

o   The stock market and speculation

o   The place of women in the literary marketplace (past and present)

 We particularly welcome cross-cultural considerations of the above issues.

Guide for submissions:

Please send 300 word abstracts to the conference email address (womenmoneymarkets@gmail.com) plus a covering email outlining briefly your proposed format (individual paper, panel, roundtable, etc.).  If you are submitting a proposal for a panel, please include an abstract for each paper (up to 300 words each). Please indicate if you would like your paper to be considered for a monograph to be published in conjunction with the conference.

 Important dates

Deadline for submissions: March 15th 2018

Notification of acceptance: April 15th 2018

Deadline for final paper submissions: April 1st 2018

Organising committee:
Chair: Dr. Joyce Goggin

Co-chair: Dr. Emma Newport

The conference is generously supported by ASCA (The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis). http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/cesk/index.aspx

For any enquiries regarding the programme, please contact: j.goggin@uva.nl

For all general enquiries, please contact: womenmoneymarkets@gmail.com

We look forward to seeing you at Women, Money and Markets (1700-1900) in June 2018.

Joyce Goggin, Senior Lecturer, University of Amsterdam

Emma Newport, Teaching Fellow, the University of Sussex

CALLS FOR PAPERS FOR 2017 ARE NOW CLOSED

We would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals

Please see below for our panel selection

King’s College London, Thursday May 11th 2017

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Hannah Barker (University of Manchester)

Caroline Criado-Perez, OBE
One of the leading voices in the campaign for female representation on the banknote and an active promoter and supporter of women in the media

Programme outline

Women, Money and Markets (1750-1850)

King’s College London

May 11th 2017

Women, Money and Markets (1750-1850)
Thursday 11 May 2017, Strand Campus, King’s College London
Supported by the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s and the Arts & Humanities Research Institute
 

Registration, Refreshments and Welcome
8.45-9.15

Registration: Old Committee Room

Refreshments and welcome: Council Room (K2.29)

Session one

9.30-10.30

Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre

Bankers, Financiers and Grocers: Women in Business

 Chair: Joyce Goggin (Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands)

 Catriona Macleod (University of Glasgow), ‘Women’s financial management in Scotland, c.1750-1850’

Peter Collinge (Keele University), ‘A taste for finance: businesswomen and the grocery trade in Georgian England’

Amy Louise Erickson (University of Cambridge), 'Estimating businesswomen in London, 1700-1750'

River Room

Inside the Archives: Women’s Material Lives

 Chair: Lara Perry (University of Brighton)

 Madeleine Pelling (University of York), ‘Selling the Duchess: narratives of celebrity in A catalogue of the Portland Museum’

 Val Derbyshire (University of Sheffield), ‘“The phantom coach”: The longings and letters of Alicia Maria Greame, a woman for sale’

Amy Murat (King’s College London), ‘“I value it as a gift from him”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the material worth of friendship’

 Room K2.40

Literature by Women as Economics: Rethinking Female Epistemological and Economic Agency

 Chair: Sarah Crofton (King’s College London)

Joanna Rostek (Universität Giessen, Germany), ‘Re-centring female epistemological agency, or: how to find women economists in the period 1750-1850’

Barbara Straumann (Universität Zurich, Switzerland), ‘The Eccentricity of Female Economic Agency: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’

Morning coffee break

10.30-11.00 Council Room (K2.29)

11.00-12.00 

Keynote Speaker: Hannah Barker (University of Manchester)

'"For the benefit of her family": Women, families and business during the early industrial revolution'

Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre

Lunch

12.00-13.00 Council Room (K2.29)

Session two

13.00-14.30

Edmond J.Safra Lecture Theatre

Global Markets: Currency, Trade and Exchange

 Chair: Anne Goldgar (King’s College London)

 Jelena Šesnić (University of Zagreb, Croatia), ‘Sentimental women in the post-revolutionary American geoculture of the 1790s’

Karin Pallaver (University of Bologna, Italy), ‘Small change: forms of currency and female monetary practices in 19th-century East Africa’

Joyce Goggin (Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands), ‘Mrs Centlivre and the South Sea’

Mark Hay (King’s College London) ‘“The matriarch of Amsterdam high finance”: Johanna Borski and the establishment of the Bank of the Netherlands’

River Room

Working Women: Women and Employment

 Chair: Amy Erickson (University of Cambridge)

Kathryne Crossley (University of Oxford), ‘Oxford laundresses: family and college economies’

 Carolyn D. Williams (University of Reading), ‘“This uncommon employment”: women, makeshifts and morality in the second half of the eighteenth century’

 Pattie Flint (King’s College London), ‘Having your cake and eating it too: cookbooks as commodity’

 Theresa Mackay (Royal Roads University, British Columbia) ‘Women at work: innkeeping in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1790-1840’

 K2.40

 Contemporary Issues in a Global Context

(Institute for New Economic Thinking INET YSI Gender Economics and Social Sciences Working Group)

‘Femina Oeconomica? Gender effects in the society and related economic policies’

Chair: Marcella Corsi (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

Francesca Bertolino (London School of Economics / International Training Centre of the ILO), ‘Diverging gender equality trajectories in Italy and Spain meet austerity: the end of progressive policy making?’

Claire Moll (Centre for Theology and Community) ‘Attitudes not Quotas: The hidden cost of the synthetic normalization of women leadership’

Erica Aloe (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), ‘The relationship between labour policies and unpaid care work. Evaluation of the potential impact of the Italian labour market reform on the care system and gender equality’

Dhritisree Sarkar (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research), ‘Possible Impacts of Demonetization of Currency Notes on Women in India’

Giulia Porino (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), ‘Diversity is an asset. How increasing the representation of different interests in the financial sector top positions could

promote the public interest perspective in finance’

Session three

14.45-15.45 Edmond J.Safra Lecture Theatre

Money, Management and Motherhood in Austen

 Chair: Christine Kenyon-Jones (King’s College London)

 Rita J. Dashwood (University of Warwick) ‘“Abilities, as well as affections”: The surrogate manager in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Persuasion’

Lynda Hall (Chapman University), ‘Valuing women in Jane Austen’s fiction’

Helen Charman (University of Cambridge), ‘Paradoxical productivity: the maternal economy from Austen to Eliot’

River Room

Imagining the Economy: Signs, Credit and Value in Women's Writing

 Chair: David Worrall (Nottingham Trent University/ University of Roehampton)

 Catherine Packham (University of Sussex), ‘“Extreme Credulity”: Wollstonecraft, the 1797 Bank Restriction Act, and the credit instrument of fiction’ 

 Silvana Colella (University of Macerata, Italy), ‘Doing it like a woman: Charlotte Riddell and the economic imagination’

 Jon Dietrick (Babson College, USA), ‘Hester in the marketplace: women’s labor in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter’

K2.40

Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837

Material Girls: Trading and Manoeuvring in a Material World

 Chair: Amy Murat (King’s College London)

 Rebecca Mason (University of Glasgow), ‘Moveables, markets, and married women’s access to credit in eighteenth-century Scotland’

 Johanna Holmes (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘Enterprising painters: women in the art market 1820-1850’

Miriam Al Jamil (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘The “fiery force” of Eleanor Coade’s business success’

Afternoon coffee break 15.45-16.15 Council Room (K2.29)

Session four

16.15-17.15

Edmond J.Safra Lecture Theatre 

Jane Austen and Property: An Anniversary Panel

 Chair: Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London)
Christine Kenyon-Jones (King’s College London), ‘Entail in the work of Jane Austen’

Helen Paul (University of Southampton), ‘Ways to Avoid Potential Financial Pitfalls for the Women of Jane Austen’s Time’

Emma Clery (University of Southampton), ‘Risk and speculation in Jane Austen’s dealings with the book market’

River Room

Author and Image: Marketing the Woman Writer

 Chair: Emma Newport (University of Sussex)
Lara Perry (University of Brighton), ‘George Smith, publisher and the commercial potential of women authors’ portraits’

 Christine Clark (University of Newcastle, Australia) ‘Creating the Commodity: Henry Austen Re-Writing Jane’

 Diana Arbaiza (University of Antwerp, Belgium), ‘“Not a woman’s work:” Cecilia Böhl von Faber’s paradoxical writings on female authors in the literary market’

 K2.40

Money Matters: Acting, Writing and Marketplaces

Chair: Emrys Jones (King’s College London)

 David Worrall (Nottingham Trent University/ University of Roehampton), ‘Drury Lane and Covent Garden: Theatrical Funds, actress and female playwright earnings, lifetime pension annuities, c.1780-1815’

Nancy Henry (University of Tennessee, USA), ‘Charlotte Riddell’s financial life’

Wendy Robins (Open University), ‘Catherine Macaulay’s Plea for Copyright, 1774’

17.30 Conference closing speeches Council Room (K2.29)

18.00-19.00  Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre.

Keynote speaker: Caroline Criado-Perez

Please take your seats by 17.45

19.00-20.00  Council Room (K2.29)

Private reception for conference delegates only

Conference outline:

In 2017, Jane Austen will feature on the £10 note as the sole female representative on English currency.  To mark this occasion, and explore its problematic significance, the English department at King’s is running a one-day conference with the aim to consider debates about women in relation to ideas of value, market, marketability, as well as debates about different forms of currency and exchange amongst women, and the place of the female writer in the literary marketplace past and present.  The conference will address themes including consumerism, shopping, global trade, domestic trade, markets (literary and otherwise), currency, and varying practices of exchange. The conference is interdisciplinary in nature, bridging literature, material culture, gender studies and economic history, and aims to relate the debates of the period to modern day issues about the presence and position of women in the economy and media.
We welcome submissions in the form of individual papers, panels and roundtable discussions on the following themes:

• The varying practices of women associated with currency, global and/or domestic markets and marketability

• Material practices associated with value, exchange and/or female creativity

• Women as producers and/or consumers in the literary or other marketplaces (including, but not limited to, food, clothing, agriculture and raw materials)

• Representations of women at work or women’s involvement in:

  • Trade and industry

  • Professional services (such as law, finance, hospitality and the media)

  • Domestic service

  • The rural economy

• The place of women in the literary marketplace (past and present)

We particularly welcome cross-cultural considerations of the above issues.

Please send 300 word abstracts to the conference email address (womenmoneymarkets@gmail.com) with an indication of your proposed format (individual paper, panel, roundtable, etc.).  If you are submitting a proposal for a panel, please include an abstract for each paper (up to 300 words each). Please indicate if you would like your paper to be considered for the edited volume that will be published after the conference. 

Conference Organisers: Dr Emma Newport (University of Sussex) and Amy Murat (King’s College London) 
For enquiries regarding the programme, please contact: emma.newport@kcl.ac.uk 
For all general enquiries, please contact: womenmoneymarkets@gmail.com 
The conference is generously supported by CESK (Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s) and AHRI (Arts and Humanities Research Institute). http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/cesk/index.aspx