Julia Felix (first century CE)

The property developer of Roman Pompeii

Amongst the ashes of Pompeii can be found an advertisement on the facade of a building, which reads: ‘To rent for the period of five years’. Consisting of baths, a bar, shops and apartments – all accessed via a grand entrance replete with columns – this was the property empire of Julia Felix, a businesswoman of the first-century CE. Felix was the self-made woman par excellence of the Roman world. According to her rental advert, she was the ‘daughter of Spurius’, which suggests that either Julia or her father were ‘illegitimate’ – a fact which she did not choose to hide in her advertisement. Whereas exclusive property was, historically, decorated with images of famous battles or mythological scenes, at the heart of Julia’s property complex were murals representing business life. The decoration tells us that those who frequented Felix’s bar, baths and shops would not have been offended by business and had likely made their way in the world not through military or political means – as was typical of the elite class – but instead through commerce. This was a building owned by a woman whose ancestors had likely risen from the class of slaves and one that served the Roman bourgeoisie. As Economica shows, women like Felix were at the heart of the Roman economy. Their freedom to engage in business and paid work helps explain why – economically speaking - the Romans were so much more successful than the ancient Greeks.

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Khadija (sixth century CE)

The merchant and wife of the prophet Muhammad

From the start, women and business were at the heart of Islam. Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was a wealthy merchant who employed the prophet-to-be to take care of her caravans. Making the most of Mecca’s geographic location, Khadija operated a sizeable fleet of camels that moved animal skins, leather and cloth northwest along the coast of Arabia up to the trading hub of Damascus. While Khadija did not accompany her caravans, she funded and arranged the trips, connecting the Arab world with the Christian world. Trust was all important in long-distance trade: since a caravan of camels could be away for months, merchants needed people they could rely on to make journeys on their behalf. Impressed by Muhammad’s integrity, Khadija invited him to become her business partner. After successfully working together, Khadija went on to initiate marriage, proposing to Muhammad. She went on to become the first Muslim convert and her business acumen funded the spread of Islam across the Arabian desert. Embracing her respect for business, the Islamic world entered an economic golden age that lasted from the eighth to the eleventh centuries.

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Priscilla Wakefield (b.1751)

The writer who set up the first English bank for women and children

In the eighteenth century, northwestern Europe was undergoing a financial revolution. The centre of Europe’s economy was shifting away from its historic home in Italy towards cities such as Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London. Stock markets, banks and insurance companies sprung to life. Relative to the needs of wealthy landowners and merchants, the financial needs of everyday people – particularly women - were, however, being overlooked. That was despite the fact that plenty of women were in paid work and wanted to save for their future (and to do so in something safer than a pot hidden under their bed). Wakefield spotted the gap in the market and so, in 1798, taking the situation into her own hands, established the first ‘Penny Bank’ in England, opening up the world of banking to women and children. Her first saver was a fourteen-year-old orphan girl, who made a deposit of two pounds. Instead of running her bank from a grand building, Wakefield set up a table in a local school after the children had left for the day, advertising where she could be found in the local press. In 1804, in response to popular demand, Wakefield extended her bank accounts to men. By 1817, inspired by Wakefield’s own bank, savings banks were springing up across the UK. While Wakefield was busy challenging the male-dominance of the City of London, women were also making inroads when it came to the stock market. By the end of the nineteenth century, one in three investors in the railways were women – placing the economy full-steam ahead.

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Ching Shih (b.1775)

The female pirate who controlled trade in the South China Sea

Ching Shih was born into poverty at a time when China’s economy faced difficulties – not just as a result of Britain’s economic rise but also, relatedly, because Chinese women lived lives that were much less free. Shih spent her early life working in a floating brothel in the port of Guangzhou – known to European merchants as Canton – where one of her clients was the pirate Zheng Yi. Soon, the couple were sailing off into the sunset together and forming the Cantonese Pirate Coalition, which comprised 400 ships and 70,000 pirates. Shih helped to draw up the formal constitution, which assigned registration numbers to each pirate ship and made each pirate leader responsible for the medical costs and pensions of their crew. When Zheng Yi passed away, Shih took full command of the fleet. She created her own ocean-going mini-state – one whose fleet outnumbered the Chinese navy by three boats to one. She even took one British commander (Richard Glasspoole) prisoner and turned him into her ‘Advisor for Western Affairs’. In more ways than one, women have always been at the heart of global trade.

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Born in 1805, Madam Tinubu learned her business acumen from her mother and grandmother, eventually becoming the most respected ‘middleman’ in the trade which operated between Lagos and the Nigerian interior. She lived in a part of the world where women were – historically speaking – considered in charge of the marketplace. As one British observer commented on Igboland (present-day Nigeria), ‘Ordinarily no Igbo man takes any part in the actual buying and selling – if an Igbo man be seen buying in the market it is almost an indication that he is either a stranger or a man with no womenfolk to act for him.’ Amongst Tinubu’s other trades, which included tobacco, salt and slaves, she also bought and sold ammunitions, becoming the firearms dealer par excellence in the region. But, in 1851 - under the banner of abolishing the slave trade - British ships attacked her home city of Lagos and - by 1856 - Tinubu had been sent into exile. She moved to the town of Abeokuta in the southwest of Nigeria, from where she continued trading arms, supplying the region’s indigenous military commanders with weapons – including to fight European colonialists. For her work as an arms dealer, she was honoured with the title Iyalode – the highest-ranking female chieftain.

Madam Tinubu (b.1805)

One of the wealthiest female merchants of Lagos, sent into exile by the British

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Hetty Green (b.1834)

The woman who became America’s first female tycoon

Public Domain / Library of Congress

Hetty grew up around her elderly grandfather and, since his eyesight was starting to fail, was tasked as a child with reading out to him the prices of stocks and shares from the daily newspaper. At the age of eight, she made her way alone into the nearest town – New Bedford, Massachusetts – where she opened a bank account with the pocket money she had started to save. This was just the start of Green’s financial career: by the time she passed away in the early twentieth century, she was worth $100 million, the equivalent of $2.5 billion in today’s money, making her the first female tycoon in the USA. Her investments included New York and Chicago real estate, mines, railroads and government bonds. She knew very well not to put all her eggs in one basket, and she refused to act impulsively in response to the natural ups and downs of the stock market. But, rather than recognising Green’s financial genius, the press disparaged her, nick- naming her the ‘Witch of Wall Street’. To her friends she was, instead, the ‘Queen of Wall Street’. She is reported to have told the Ladies’ Home Companion: ‘American women would be much happier if they learned the principles of business in girlhood’.

Sarojini Naidu (b.1879)

The poet and activist who fought for India’s economic and political independence

Naidu was a child genius. She had entered the University of Madras aged only twelve, after which she studied at King’s College, London, and at Girton College, Cambridge. She travelled the British colonies campaigning for independence, cofounded the Women’s Indian Association, and became the first Indian woman to lead the National Congress, the political party that pushed for independence. Naidu worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi, accompanying him on his trip to London to meet with the British government. She believed that independence would only be successful if women were actively involved: that the liberation of India and the liberation of women were inextricably linked. She encouraged the people of India to spin and weave their own cloth in resistance to British imports and to support the local village economy, something which she saw as a feminist as well as an anti-imperialist act. Known as ‘the Nightingale of India’, Naidu was imprisoned on several occasions for her resistance to British rule. She was one of many women who – across the world – fought for decolonisation in the course of the twentieth century.

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Mary Coombs (b.1929)

The first female commercial computer programmer in Britain

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During the twentieth century, computing transformed the economy’s potential – and continues to do so into the present day. But while Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee are the names most associated with computing, women were advancing the computer industry from the beginning. Indeed, women were themselves the first computers, charged with doing the repetitive and laborious calculations in many an office. Since the earliest computer programs were considered akin to such work, programming was similarly left to women, who were self-taught, treated as low-skilled and paid a pittance. Twentieth-century computing pioneers included Mary Coombs – who worked on a computerised stock-control system for Lyons tearooms, designed to ensure that they never ran out of tea and cake. The Lyons computer – nicknamed LEO I – was the world’s first business computer: it was so large that it occupied an entire room. Once debugged by Coombs and her fellow programmers, it was so efficient – not just in terms of managing stock control but also in terms of speeding up payroll – that Lyons diversified away from selling afternoon teas to selling its technology to other businesses around the world. While the world of ‘tech’ might today appear to be dominated by men, the legacy created by women like Coombs (and, of course, Ada Lovelace before her) lives on in the much more gender equal world of biotech.

Read about all of these women, and so many more, in Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power.

Order your copy here (UK) and here (US).