Perhaps you’ve heard that women are finally finding their financial groove, pushing past the patriarchy, and crushing it in capitalism. Best-selling books and top-ranking podcasts are here to teach her how to navigate the new-to-her world of money. We have a narrative, cribbed from binge-watching Mad Men, that women used to be on the financial sidelines.
Some of that is true. Yes, wives’ credit applications required husbands’ approval until 1974. Yes, many middle-class women were given “allowances,” childlike, in the twentieth century. But that history has a problem: Most women weren’t middle class. The vast majority did things differently, but their history got lost behind what we think happened. In many American families for three centuries, she, not he, managed the money.
On the wife, not the husband, rested the burden of managing a modern capitalist family. The two main objects of a wife, the very real Housekeeper’s Book explained in 1837, were “the comfort of her family, and the care of her purse.” She held the financial fate of the family in her hands.
A wife was a harried human spreadsheet paying bills, balancing account ledgers, and keeping figures running in her head all while in constant states of interruption from children and meal preparation. The popular The American Business Woman dealt with everything from family budgets to investing profitably in mortgages.
WOMEN WERE ALWAYS ACTIVE INVESTORS
Before banks, before financial planners, before Suze Orman, women knew how to handle money. Where did they learn? Mostly from one another. All those drawing room conversations were a bit less frivolous than Jane Austen would have you believe.
Abigail Adams was the most famous matriarch in the market. The Adams family was middle class. There was nothing about her husband, John, that screamed, “This man will be our second president!” He was short and his father made shoes. Abigail had a nice life before politics, but nothing you can’t find in any suburb today. She possessed, however, the kind of practical smarts her husband lacked. Whereas John just wanted more land so the Hancocks would treat them like equals, Abigail understood the big money was made in paper.
While John was away in France, Abigail started buying government bonds after the American Revolution. There was so little faith in the government her husband helped start that prices went down to 15 cents on the dollar, indicating widespread fear the United States wasn’t going to survive to pay its debts. This is when Abigail started buying. She sold when they rose to 85 cents, over 400% returns on her best buys.
John abhorred financial risk, but she understood it. “Do not be afraid,” she explained, “one must wait for interest & Run risks, but at all events it will fetch what is given for it.” Having bought low, she could always cash out with little loss. The upside was more than worth the downside. She was the Intelligent Investor well ahead of Ben Graham. Before anyone could stop her, she was in soldiers’ notes (back pay for Revolutionary service), Massachusetts bonds, and even Vermont land speculation. When it was over, she far surpassed her husband’s real estate deals, with a spectacular lifetime annualized return of around 18%. Warren Buffett’s is 19.9%.
Adams may have been her generation’s best securities investor, period. She was not alone, however. Women accounted for a minimum of 10% of all financial deals, including some of the most complex trading and debt schemes, in early America. In the early republic they were as much as 16% of the total stock and bond market, and in sectors like banking around 25% of shares were in female hands.
As stocks grew in prominence, so did women’s investments in them. “They came from all classes,” an observer gushed of women investors, “heiresses, stenographers, businesswomen, housewives, farmers’ wives, cleaning ladies, waitresses, telephone girls, cooks, and washerwomen.” Women controlled about 40% of post–World War I securities. They held 30% of U.S. Steel, and over half of shares in both AT&T and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Investment reporters dubbed them “the Lady Bulls.”
Women’s magazines frequently reported on investments. Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping ritually offered financial advice and stock market features through the 1910–20s. Ruth Boyle, on the personal finance beat for Good Housekeeping, focused on how women could invest “as a businessman does.” Elizabeth Frazer compiled her pieces for The Saturday Evening Post into 1926’s A Woman and Her Money.
In textbooks on the Great Depression, students read that some poor fool wrote an essay called “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” just before the market crashed. That poor fool was John Raskob. That essay appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal. It was no anomaly. The actual essay tries to help women convince men to start investing $15 a month. Raskob wasn’t trying to sway women off to the sidelines. They were already in the game.
A generation later, Vogue ran an article titled “What a Woman Should Know About Investing.” Merrill Lynch followed it up offering Vogue readers an eight-week lecture course on investments. Thirty thousand enrolled. Female investors were not the creation of first-, second-, or third-wave feminism. They were not legislated into being. Women wanted to invest, and invest they did.
Stock exchanges were male-dominated spaces, but women intruded upon them just fine. Often hailed as “firsts” or noted for their rarity, thousands of women became finance professionals well before Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith battled for respect in Working Girl.
Victoria Woodhull, famous for advocating free love and running for president in 1870, opened a stock brokerage in Wall Street with her sister, to much fanfare. Alice Carpenter, a wealthy Bostonian, self-managed her inheritance so well that she was asked to open a women’s department for a bond company. Her success led many firms to create internal departments targeting female investors. By 1910, over 200 U.S. women were brokers, including four black women. Twenty years later, there were nearly 2,000. In 1967, Muriel Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She called it the most expensive piece of jewelry she ever bought.
Women were always active investors. None of this glosses over the unfairness, the misogyny, or the barriers women regularly encountered. But it begs the question why each generation seems to give its best shocked-face emoji when “discovering” women actively invest.
I honestly don’t know, but I wish we would stop. The female investor isn’t an “exciting new phenomenon.” They’ve existed since the ladies of Rainbow Row loaned the money that built Charleston.
Excerpted from HOW TO GET RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Joseph S. Moore, PhD. Copyright © 2026 by Joseph S. Moore. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
