Women, Money & Markets

Crisis & Resilience (1650-1950)

9th Annual Conference & Book Launch

The Foundling Museum, London
Thursday, Friday & Saturday, June 11-13, 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 11 JUNE 2026

14:00–14:15 — Welcome, housekeeping, tea and coffee

Panel 1: Early Modern Material Economies

14:15–15:30 (3 papers + Q&A)

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

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

• Idit Ben‑Or — Foundling Tokens as a Source on Eighteenth‑Century Money Markets

15:30–15:40 — Short break

Panel 2: Authority, Agency, and Change

15:40–16:50 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Elena Korchmina — Creating Economic Agency under Patriarchal Constraint: Russian Noblewomen’s Property Management, 1780s–1840s

• Hazel Vosper — ‘My Husband Would Be Deeply Offended Should I Demand to Make My Own Investments’: Negotiating Women’s Economic Authority in the Late Victorian Family

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

17:15 — Informal drinks at  The Lamb, 94 Lamb's Conduit St, London WC1N 3LZ

18:30 — Informal conference dinner (Thursday) - Salaam Namaste, 68 Millman St, London WC1N 3EF, tel. 02074053697

 FRIDAY 12 JUNE 2026

09:15–09:30 — Arrivals

Panel 3: Accounting, Credit, and Market Engagement

09:30–11:05 (4 papers + internal break + Q&A)

• Lizzy Spencer — Women and Accounting in Yorkshire, c.1650–1830

• Laura Burnett — Her Halfe Penny: Women as Money‑Makers, Users, and Subjects in the Mid‑Seventeenth Century

Short break

• Swenja Hiller & Juliane Clegg — Building Bridges: Women, Capital, and Business Transitions in the Nineteenth Century

• Nisha Kumari (online) — To Keep Out of Debt: Army Wifehood, Financial Crisis, and Making Do in Colonial India

11.05–11:30 — Tea / coffee break

Panel 4: Moneys, Markets and the Novel

11:30–12:40 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Carol Stewart — “He That Would Keep His Integrity, Must Dwell in a Cell”: Resisting the Market in the Fiction of Penelope Aubin

• Jolene Zigarovich — Jane Austen’s Heroines of Interest

• Jocelynne Scutt —  The Three Marys and the Money in Jane Austen

12:40–13:45 — Lunch

Panel 5: Women, Finance, and Authority in Europe

13:45–14:55 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Francesca Murray — Money Management of the Nineteenth‑Century Gardener’s Widow

• Beatrice Moring — Women, Family, and Business in Nineteenth‑Century Urban Northern Europe

• Paola Avallone (online) — Invisible Capitals: Women’s Economic Practices in Naples between Land and Sea (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

14:55-15:15— Break

Women’s Studies Group Roundtable

15:15-16:45

• Karen Lipsedge — Storytelling and Eighteenth‑Century Representations of Women of Colour’s Financial Agency

• Diane Clements — A Very Anxious and Affectionate Mother: Personal Indebtedness in Georgian England

• Carolyn D. Williams — “Having Sighed Away My Senses for My Departed Pork”: Charlotte Charke (1713–1760) and the Economy of Makeshifts

• Eleanor Franzén — “Prostitutes from Necessity”: Economics, Sentiment, and the Eighteenth‑Century Magdalen House

16:45-18:30 — Book launch and conference drinks (Foundling Museum)

19:00 — Conference dinner (Friday) Nostimo

SATURDAY 13 JUNE 2026

09:00-09:15 — Arrivals and coffee

Panel 6: Skills, Guilds, and Reform

09:15–10:50 (4 papers + Q&A)

• Sara D’Anna (online) — Women’s Work in the Guilds of Eighteenth‑Century Naples: Between Marginalisation and Inclusion

• Jane Skelding — Working‑Class Women and the Economics of Charity: The Women’s Co‑operative Guild in Plumstead, 1888–1897

Short break

• Ruxandra Pavelchievici — 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)

• Andrew Seltzer — Female Occupational Upskilling in Early Twentieth‑Century Britain

10:50-11:00 – tea and coffee

Panel 7: Sweat, Sex Work and Stories

11:00-11:50 (2 papers + Q&A)

• Irene Sotiropoulou — Doing the “Bad Job”: Folktales as Sources of Marginalized Women’s Voice

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

11:50-12:00 – short break

Panel 8: Gambling & Speculation

12:00-13:10 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Johanna Harrison‑Oram — None of Your Betting and Gambling in My Kitchen: Gendered Problematics of Financial Speculation in Esther Waters and A Child of the Jago

• Sarah Dredge —  Margaret Oliphant and Gendered Speculation

• Christina Ballinger — Playing for Money: Becky Sharp and Her Winning Ways

13:10-14:00 - Lunch

13:20–14:00 — Optional guided tour of the Foundling Museum

Panel 10: Capital, Crisis and Discrimination

14:00-15:10 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Mark Hay – Female Entrepreneurship on the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1770-1825

• Eva Bažantová, Ilona Bažantová —  Financial Discrimination against Employed Women during the Great Depression in Czechoslovakia

• Joyce Goggin — Women’s Unseen Labour in the Sponging Industry (Late Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Century)

15:10-15:20 — short break

Panel 11: Milliners, Makers, Material

15:20-16:00 (2 papers + Q&A)

• Peter Collinge — The £20 Red Herring: Margaret Beeland, Milliner and Dressmaker

• Jenna Zmrzel (online) — More Than Wardrobe Advice? Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (1875-1912) as a Record of Middle-Class Women’s Financial Agency

16:00-16:10— tea and coffee break

Panel 12: Global Economies: Then to Now

16:10–17:20 (3 papers + Q&A)

• Yuwei Qiu — British Views of Women Traders in Qing China during the Macartney Embassy

• Karoliina Kantola — Exploring Alternatives to Microcredit and Microeconomics

• Sophia Tzeng (online) — The Great Erasure: Women, Sense Suppression, and the Hidden Architecture of the Modern Economic Order

17:20-17:30— Closing remarks and farewells

   ——————

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