Women, Money & Markets

Crisis & Resilience (1650-1950)

9th Annual Conference & Book Launch

The Foundling Museum, London
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, June 12-13, 2026

womenmoneymarkets.co.uk

Overview

We invite submissions for our 9th interdisciplinary conference exploring how women’s interactions with money, markets, and finance have shaped, and been shaped by, economic crises, financial literacy practices, and strategies for resilience across time and borders. This year, we especially welcome reflections on how evolving political landscapes reshape economic power, knowledge access, and inclusion.

We will be celebrating the publication of our first edited collection, Women, Money, and Markets: Uncovering the Invisible Hands of the Economy (Boydell & Brewer, 2026).

DRAFT PROGRAMME

WMM 2026 PROGRAMME

(DRAFT SCHEDULE)

THURSDAY 12 June 2026

Welcome address: 14:00-14:15

Refreshments

Panel 1 — Thursday 14:15–15:35

Early Modern Material Economies and Skilled Labour

Laura Burnett — University of Exeter
Her Halfe Penny: Women as money makers, users and subjects in the mid‑17th century

Astrid Wendel Hansen — Tallinn University
From the Margins to the Market. Women, Material Culture, and Economic Practices in Early Modern Tallinn

Mario Grassi — University of Padua
Women’s Embodied Financial Agency through “Material” and “Immaterial” Inheritance

Q&A: 20 minutes

Panel 2 — Thursday 15:35–16:55

Seeing Coastal Trade

Paola Avallone — Italian National Council of Research
Invisible Capitals: Women’s Economic Practices in Naples between Land and Sea (17th–19th c.)

Yuwei Qiu — University of Sussex
British views of Women traders in Qing China during the Macartney Embassy

Joyce Goggin — University of Amsterdam
Women’s unseen labour in the sponging industry (late 19th–early 20th century)

Q&A: 20 minutes

17:00 – Casual drinks and networking at local bar or pub

18:30 – Dinner at curry house

FRIDAY 13 June 2026

09:00—09:30 Arrivals and tea/coffee

Panel 3 — Friday 09:30–10:45

Skills, Guilds, and Reform (I)

Lily Ford — Independent
A Great Lever: The Society of Woman Welders, 1916–1919

Andrew Seltzer — Royal Holloway
Female occupational upskilling in early 20th century Britain

Eva Bažantová, Assoc. Prof. Ilona Bažantová - Faculty of Law, Charles University, Prague

Financial Discrimination against Employed Women during the Great Depression in Czechoslovakia

Q&A: 15 minutes

Panel 4 — Friday 10:45—12:00

The Elite in Financial Crisis

Elena Korchmina — University of Bologna
Creating Economic Agency Under Patriarchal Constraint: Russian Noblewomen’s Property Management and the Ideological Transformation, 1780s–1840s

Clementine Garcenot — University of York
Aristocratic bias and financial hardship in the memoirs of French female aristocrats (1795–1799)

Nisha Kumari — The English and Foreign Languages University, India
To Keep Out of Debt: Army Wifehood, Financial Crisis, and Making Do in Colonial India

Q&A: 20 minutes

Lunch 12:00–12:40

Lunchtime Folktale Reading – Friday 12:40—13:00 - Irene Sotiropoulou

Panel 5 — Friday 13:00–14:15

Keeping Account(s): Women and Money Management

Lizzy Spencer — University of York
Women and accounting in Yorkshire, c.1650–1830

Swenja Hiller and Juliane Clegg — University of Stuttgart
Building Bridges: Women, Capital, and Business Transitions in the Nineteenth Century

Idit Ben Or — Tel Aviv University
Foundling Tokens as a Source on 18th‑Century Money Markets

Q&A: 15 minutes

Panel 6 — Friday 14:15–15:30

Sweat, Sex and (Dis)interest in Fiction

Jolene Zigarovich — University of Northern Iowa
Jane Austen’s Heroines of Interest

Irene Sotiropoulou — Independent Scholar
Doing the “bad job”: Folktales as sources of marginalised women’s voice

Ella Dzelzainis — Newcastle University
Seamstresses, Antisemitism and the Economics of Sweating: Ernest Jones’s “The Young Milliner” (1852)

Q&A: 15 minutes

Tea and Coffee Break — Friday 15:30-15:45

Women’s Studies Group Roundtable — Friday 15:45–17:30

Karen Lipsedge — Kingston University
Storytelling Enhances Conversations about 18th‑century Representations of Women of Colour’s Financial Agency

Eleanor Franzén — Birkbeck, University of London
“Prostitutes from Necessity”: Economics, Sentiment, and the 18th‑Century Magdalen House

Diane Clements — Institute of Historical Research
A very anxious and affectionate mother: dealing with personal indebtedness in Georgian England

Carolyn D. Williams — University of Reading
“Having sighed away my Senses for my departed Pork”: Charlotte Charke (1713–1760) and the Economy of Makeshifts

Panel 7 - Women and the Market for Books – Friday 17:30-18:30

Carol Stewart - University of East Anglia
He that would keep his Integrity, must dwell in a Cell: resisting the market in the fiction of Penelope Aubin

Dr Jocelynne A Scutt - UNSW Sydney
The Three Marys and the Money in Jane Austen

Women, Money and Markets Book launch and conference drinks – Friday 18:30-19:30

Dinner – Friday 20:00

SATURDAY 14 June 2026

09:00-09:30 Arrivals and tea/coffee

Panel 8 — 09:30–10:45

Skills, Guilds and Reform (II)

Sara D’Anna — LUMSA University
Women’s Work in the Guilds of Eighteenth Century Naples

Jane Skelding — Institute of English Studies, SAS
Working class women and the economics of charity – the Women’s Cooperative Guild in Plumstead 1888–1897

Ruxandra Pavelchievici - Université Côte d'Azur

Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, Actors of Double Emancipation: Promoting Social Work to an Academic Rank and Renewing the Vision of Women Workers  (1905-1935)

Q&A: 15 minutes

Panel 9 — 10:50–12:05

Advice, Authority and Circulation

Mark Edward Hay — Erasmus University Rotterdam
Female Entrepreneurship on the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1770–1825

Hazel Vosper — Independent Scholar
‘My husband would be deeply offended should I demand to make my own investments’: Negotiating Women’s Economic Authority in the Late Victorian Family

Dr Jenna Zmrzel — University of Oxford
More Than Wardrobe Advice? Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (1875–1912)

Q&A: 15 minutes

Lunch — 12:05–13:00

Panel 10 — 13:00–14:15

Breadwinners and Family Enterprise

Francesca Murray — Queen Mary University of London
Money Management of the nineteenth‑century Gardener’s Widow

Beatrice Moring — University of Helsinki
Women family and business in 19th‑century urban Northern Europe

Peter Collinge — Keele University
The £20 red herring: Margaret Beeland, milliner and dressmaker

Q&A: 15 minutes

Tea and Coffee Break — 14:20–14:35 (15 mins)

Panel 11 — 14:35–15:50

Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminist Economies

Maria Patricia Tinajero — IDSVA
Soil as Currency: Decolonial, Feminist, and Transhistoric Economies in Claire Pentecost’s Soil‑Erg

Karoliina Kantola — University of Helsinki
Exploring Alternatives to Microcredit and Microeconomics

Sophia Tzeng — Independent
The Great Erasure: Women, Sense Suppression, and the Hidden Architecture of the Modern Economic Order

Q&A: 15 minutes

Panel 12 — 16:00–17:15 (80 mins)
Women, Fiction and the Speculative Economy

Johanna Harrison Oram — Royal Holloway
None of your betting and gambling in my kitchen: The gendered problematics of financial speculation in Esther Waters and A Child of the Jago

Christina Ballinger — University College London
Playing for Money: Becky Sharp and her winning ways

Sarah Dredge — Sheffield Hallam University
(Working title) Margaret Oliphant and gendered speculation

Q&A: 15 minutes

Closing remarks: 17:15-17:30

END OF CONFERENCE

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Tickets: Please email e.newport@sussex.ac.uk for links to payment

Early bird
23 February to 7 March 2026
Student or unwaged: £145
Waged: £160

Standard
8 March to 7 May 2026
Student or unwaged: £155
Waged: £170

Late registration
8 May to 9 June 2026
Student or unwaged: £165
Waged: £195

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Thematic Areas

Potential contributions may address (but are not limited to):

• Material Culture & Financial Activism

• Drawing inspiration from The Foundling Hospital’s archives, how material items, including but not limited to sewing/knitting, tokens, calendars, etc., were used by women to teach, learn, or execute financial skills, especially when formal institutions excluded them; and how artifacts – e.g. pocketbooks, receipts, letters, teaching pamphlets – help to reveal financial practices that women adopted when formal systems were under threat or failed.

• Resilience in Marginalisation

• Examination of women’s survival strategies, real or fictional, in the face of systemic exclusion from formal markets, such as through cooperatives, informal credit, or communal aid.

• Literature, Media & Representation

• How women’s financial roles are portrayed during economic collapses or shifts, both in historical and fictional narratives of money and agency.

·        Comparative and Cross-cultural Dimensions

o   Global case studies comparing diverse legal and economic environments, from colonial economies to more recent policy changes.

o   Investigations into differences and commonalities in how women in different societies responded to economic marginalisation or inclusion.

·        Surviving Economic and Political Backlash

o   Literary or artistic depictions of women exhibiting financial ingenuity or deftness against barriers, or amidst repression, particularly when legal safeguards are weakened.

o   Women-led and women-participating resilience practices during discriminatory regimes or policy rollbacks.

• How women acquired, deployed, or withheld financial knowledge during periods of political and economic upheavals (e.g., panics, bank collapses, depressions, pandemics).

• Explorations of how diminished legal protections (e.g., in property rights, employment, reproductive rights) have disrupted women's financial agency.

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts: Up to 300 words for individual papers.

• Panel Proposals: Include abstracts (≤300 words each) for up to three speakers.

• Formats: Individual papers, panels, or roundtable discussions.

• Publication Interest: State whether your work is suitable for future collections or journal issues.

Submit to: Enquiries to Dr. Emma Newport at e.newport@sussex.ac.uk,.

Submissions via Google Form or via QR code below.

Deadline: February 1st 2026