Depicting a Female Fraud: Sarah Howe and the Boston Women's Bank

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Notes

Some notable exceptions include Wright; Rutterford and Maltby; and Henry.

For a general discussion of how the corporate form and new financial instruments were vulnerable to fraud, see Robb, White-Collar Crime 11-30.

Among the scholarship on American literature's engagement with financial themes, see Taylor; Westbrook; and Zimmerman.

Ponzi schemes are named after a 1920s Boston swindler, Charles Ponzi, but this type of fraud was quite common in the nineteenth century. In a classic Ponzi scheme, investors make payments to a business that then distributes returns to these investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profits earned by the business. Ponzi schemes are doomed to failure since they only work by bringing in new investors to pay off old ones. For the dynamics of Ponzi schemes, see Rampell.

Unidentified newspaper article, 12 November 1880, from James Mitchell Scrapbook, Vol. 1 (1878-1880), New York Stock Exchange Archives. Marion Warren was to have a long career as a bogus broker, at many different addresses under many different aliases: see “A Commonplace Swindler.”

Department stores were often accused of tempting women through their lavish displays. See Abelson 42-62.

For Victorian criminological debates about women, see Zedner; and Smart.

For Cesare Lombroso's influential theory of criminal atavism, especially as it applied to women, see Gibson, ch. 2.

For a discussion of degeneration theory applied to women, see Harris, ch. 2 and 3.

Gail Hamilton was the pen name of Mary Abigail Dodge, an influential writer and advocate of women's rights and political reform. See “Mary Abigail Dodge,” Dictionary of American Biography, for more information.

Irish women's immigration is detailed in Diner. For analysis of Irish women's propensity for saving, see Beckham.

For Victorian debates about free trade and financial regulation, see Robb, White-Collar Crime, 147-55.