Women, Money and Markets conference, London 2026

Dear reader, gather round: there’s a conference to talk about! Back in June I spent three days at the Foundling Museum in London for the 9th annual Women, Money and Markets conference, this year with a theme “Crisis & Resilience, 1650–1950” (more information about the research network can be found here). Across eleven panels the papers kept circling back to the same underlying question: when the historical record makes women’s economic lives hard to see, what counts as evidence, and who decided that coins, and “real” work looked the way they did in the first place? Here are some threads from my notes that stuck with me most.

Money was never just coin

Several papers pushed against a narrow definition of money as coin and nothing else. Idit Ben-Or’s paper on the Foundling Hospital’s own token collection was a highlight: of the roughly 300 coins left by mothers with their children in the eighteenth century, most dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alongside Spanish and Portuguese coins, metal love tokens, halved pennies, and tally sticks. Old, foreign, and broken money kept circulating long after it had any formal legal status — a reminder that Gresham’s Law (people hoard “good” money and spend the “bad”) only makes sense once you accept that several kinds of money were moving through the same economy at once, and that women, disproportionately, were the ones dealing with that messy, low-value end of it.

Laura Burnett’s talk on mid-seventeenth-century British trade tokens made a similar point from the other direction: when the state was slow to issue small change, ordinary shopkeepers stepped in and issued their own farthings and halfpennies. In Reading, for example, roughly one trader in thirty was doing this. It was private coinage, but crucially not private currency: nobody was trying to create a rival money system, just to solve an acute, everyday liquidity problem created by cash wages and piecework. Women made up only about 3,5% of issuers, but the risk calculus was noteworthy: credit was a risk the shopkeeper took on the customer, while a trade token was a risk the customer implicitly took on the woman who issued it.

Invisible agency

A recurring theme was that women’s economic activity often had to be hidden or reframed to stay within what was considered socially acceptable. Beatrice Moring’s paper on the Sinebrychoff brewing family in nineteenth-century Finland made the case sharply: Anna Sinebrychoff was, by any functional measure, an exceptional business manager, but the historical record — and she herself — emphasised her philanthropy rather than her business role, because visible economic activity by a woman simply wasn’t considered proper at the time. Elena Korchmina’s paper on eighteenth-century Russian noblewomen extended this into the legal territory: a poor husband, under Russian property law, was legally not a wife’s problem, since her property was kept separate from his. By the end of the eighteenth century, 40 % of the nobility’s property belonged to women in Russia, and women commonly managed their own estates. Yet, the surrounding culture, which notably included the Rousseau admirer Catherine the Great, still insisted women’s place was in the home. From the 1820s the social norm hardened further: economically active women were something to be embarrassed about, not celebrated.

War as a temporary opening

Andrew Seltzer’s paper on female occupational upskilling was a fitting closing note. World War I pulled huge numbers of British women into the workforce and, crucially, into skilled labour for the first time, but the shift proved largely temporary, with employment patterns sliding back toward pre-1911 levels once the war ended. His analysis relied on the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO), and it received some pushback from the largely female audience. HISCO carries a male bias built into its categories, since occupational titles for women have historically often simply not existed, which is not at all the same thing as women not having worked. There was also a sharper objection to the word “upskilling” itself: it implies British women were unskilled before the war, a useful reminder that the words historians reach for can smuggle in the very assumptions the research is trying to dismantle.

The throughline

Many of the presentations dealt with questions that are relevant for our project as a whole and for me in particular. Ben-Or’s and Burnett’s papers highlighted the point that I have been grappling with for several years: that an object’s status as “money” was never just a matter of what an economist’s definition allows, but of the social, symbolic, and emotional work it was doing for the people exchanging it. The conference’s recurring insistence on reading margins, gaps, and awkward categories as evidence rather than noise speaks to the court cases that I use to decipher people’s quotidian monetary practices and their knowledge and understanding of money. If Money(-)Making Empire is about how ordinary people, not just states, made and unmade money in practice, this conference was a useful reminder that who counts as an economic actor and whose practices are seen as economically significant is itself a historical question worth asking.

Astrid Wendel-Hansen