Five ways women have historically powered the economy
How many female entrepreneurs, bankers, and industrialists from the past can you name? You could be forgiven for thinking that, until relatively recently, there were none at all. Women are commonly assumed to have spent most of history as housewives. But in my new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, I present a revised economic history of the world—one that places women at the heart of the development of the global economy. Here are just five of the (many) ways that women have powered the global economy from the Stone Age to the present day.
1. Creators of global money
Before electronic payments, banknotes, and silver coins, it was cloth—woven by women—that was the most popular form of currency. It was lightweight, nonperishable, and easier to judge in terms of quality than a lump of precious metal. Cloth therefore underpinned the first trade boom in history, connecting economies—and people—across the world during the Bronze Age. Four thousand years ago, it was packaged up into the side packs of donkeys that journeyed across the peaks and plains of Eurasia in the quest for tin. When mixed with copper, this tin created a far harder and more workable metal—bronze—driving one of earliest economic revolutions in human history (akin to the steam engine, electricity, and even AI today). By providing the cloth that paid for tin, women were at the heart of the economic revolution.
2. Builders of Ancient cities
While ancient Athens might have been the birthplace of democracy—and the home of many a great playwright, philosopher, and poet—it was ancient Rome that had the far more successful economy. And this was in large part because the Romans had a far more favorable attitude to both business and to women. Not only did Roman women own ships and shops—and trade their wine and olive oil across the Mediterranean—they also helped to build the ancient city itself. A third of the clay beds that supplied the capital’s bricks were owned by women and, in percentage terms, the proportion of Roman plumbers who were women was four times that of the U.S. today.
3. Merchants of International Trade
As Europe disintegrated after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Middle East was moving in the opposite direction, in no small part thanks to a businesswoman called Khadija. In the sixth century, Khadija was one of the wealthiest merchants operating out of the oasis town of Mecca. Her trading caravan—a fleet of pack animals—moved cloth, leather, and animal skins through the deserts of Arabia and, to help look after it, she employed a young man by the name of Muhammad, who was known for his honesty and hard work. After developing a business relationship, Khadija proposed marriage to the Prophet-to-be. Not only was Khadija’s financial support crucial to the subsequent spread of Islam, but the couple’s background in business meant that trade and merchant activity were revered within the early Islamic Empire, fuelling a “Golden Age” that made the Middle East the richest part of the world in the eighth to the eleventh centuries.
4. Technological Innovators
From Henry Ford to Bill Gates, men are typically seen as the heroic geniuses who drove the technological innovations that have allowed our economies to prosper. However, in preindustrial China, women led the way in innovation, and no more so than Huang Dao Po. Aged only 10, Dao Po ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage, boarding a boat for Hainan Island, where she met the women spinners and weavers of the Li people who took her under their wing and taught her the secrets of their trade. Later returning to her hometown of Songjiang (near Shanghai), she set up a cotton cloth-making business and passed on her knowledge of the most advanced spinning and weaving techniques to local women. The technologies she introduced included a treadle-operated spinning wheel that enabled multiple threads to be spun at the same time, which more than quadrupled productivity and so made China the centre of global cloth production.
5. Inventors of consumer banking
By the eighteenth century, Europe was catching up with China and London was in the midst of a financial revolution. But while men were serving the financial needs of the wealthy elite, women had their eyes on a much wider market. In 1798, a woman by the name of Priscilla Wakefield set up England’s first bank for women and children. Rather than operating her bank from plush offices, she simply set up a desk at a local school, where she opened her ledger to deposits as small as a penny. Driven by the belief that pennies make pounds, and that saving was the best form of self-help, Wakefield saw banking not just as a form of business but also as a means of helping people to help themselves. Like Wakefield in England, Maggie L. Walker extended banking services to underserved groups in America. The daughter of a former slave, Walker was troubled by the way in which banks ignored the needs of African Americans and so rolled up her sleeves to fill the gaping hole. In 1903, she set up St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank, making her the first American woman to charter a bank. Between them, Wakefield and Walker made banking accessible to millions of ordinary people—and so created the modern consumer banking world.
Wherever you look across history, women have supercharged the most successful economies of their day, including in the Bronze Age, the Roman world, the Islamic Empire and preindustrial China. It was also by embracing women’s economic freedom that the West was able to transition from poverty to prosperity and deliver the standards of living that we enjoy today. And it is by maintaining it—rather than beating a retreat—that we can avoid the types of civilizational collapses suffered by our predecessors.