‘A doe in the city’: Women shareholders in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of women as shareholders in joint stock companies, and how far they can be characterised as active investors. It is based on a large database of company constitutions, together with procedural records and the pamphlet literature of the period. The penetration by women of the private sphere of investment did not always extend to the more public sphere of participation at shareholder meetings. Literary representations of women as speculators reinforced such boundaries. While the separate spheres may have been blurred, considerable limitations were set on the extent to which female shareholders could participate fully in the governance of joint stock companies.

Keywords:

• Women and finance
• joint stock companies
• shareholders
• corporate governance

Acknowledgements

This paper derives from ongoing research into the corporate governance of British stock companies, 1720–1844, supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), award number RES000230096 (see www.corporategovernancehistory.org.uk). We are most grateful for this support. We have also benefited from the comments of two anonymous referees, and of participants at the Social History Society Conference, Dublin, and the Association of Business Historians Conference, Glasgow (both 2005).

Notes

1. Reading Holcombe's account, however, the situation at common law is not entirely clear and several questions remain unresolved. Shares, we are told, were a species of ‘chattel incorporeal’, being an intangible asset, neither real nor personal property (like bonds, patents, copyrights, contract debts, etc.). They could, however, be converted into money, thus becoming personal property or ‘corporeal chattels’. Technically a married woman's shares counted as ‘legal choses in action’ which a husband had the right to convert into his personal property and then to dispose of freely. His wife could bequeath them only with his consent. If she died intestate, her husband had the right to serve as administrator of her estate and in that capacity to reduce her choses in action into his possession, thereby becoming the absolute owner. Holcombe also says, however, that a married women's legal choses in action resembled her real property, in that her husband could not sell or dispose of them. If he died before her without reducing them into possession, they reverted to her ownership and control. Perhaps this meant that a husband could not sell or bequeath his wife's shares without first ‘reducing them into possession’, and perhaps this meant actively transferring her shares into his name, in which case many stock companies were anticipating or promoting such reduction through their regulations. Could a married women sell her shares if not reduced into her husband's possession? She could not bequeath them without his consent, so perhaps the same applied to a sale, even where the shares remained in her name. However, as wives could not make contracts in their own names, any partnerships they had entered into before marriage, dissolved upon marriage. Does this mean that the very presence of a married women as a proprietor in a joint stock company made that partnership illegal? Did incorporation negate this effect? In any case, husbands seem to have been entitled to the income from their wives' choses in action (whether or not they were reduced into his possession?). Thus companies with married women in their share registers would be placed in the impossible position of being required to pay dividends to A on shares owned by B.

2. A list of all sources used, too long to include here, is available from the authors on request. These will also be fully listed in the database to be deposited with the ESRC as part of the end of award report in December 2006 (award number RES000230096).

3. Hudson (2001) has compiled an invaluable database of c.6,500 investors in 20 rail, canal and bank companies, which also includes data on women shareholders. This database, however, has fewer companies and covers fewer sectors than ours.

4. Davies reported that women held only 2 to 4 per cent of India stock in 1685 and 1 per cent of Africa stock in 1675, but nearly 20 per cent of bonds issued by both companies. Between 1675 and 1691 the number of women shareholders in the EIC doubled to reach 56, or 12 per cent of the total.

5. On Parkes see Holcombe (1983: pp. 58–60).

6. Twelve and 5 per cent of the companies in Tables 4 and 5 respectively had no female proprietors.