From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives, featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians. This episode, we’ll take a look at the history of women in the world of finance, from stockbrokers to financial advice columnists. Professor James Taylor invites us to discover more about the women who fought for a space on the Stock Exchange floor.

Dr Amy Edwards

Amy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s.

Professor James Taylor

James is a Professor in Modern British History at Lancaster University. His work explores business history from social and cultural perspectives. He has written on subjects including the history of company law, white-collar crime, financial advice, popular investment, and advertising. He has authored or co-authored five books. His most recent, Sexism in the City: Women Stockbrokers in Modern Britain, was published in March 2025 by Oxford University Press, and he’ll be telling us more about it in today’s episode.

James Taylor’s book, Sexism in the City: Women Stockbrokers in Modern Britain, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sexism-in-the-city-9780198879817

See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice