T he five books under review address important issues about white women, money, and power from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century in Great Britain, the British Americas, and the United States. Previous scholarship covers women's work in the home (paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive), the paid labor force, and women's charitable efforts, as well as women's activities as shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers. 1 The authors being considered here, however, analyze women in additional financial arenas-investments (Froide and Robb); philanthropy and social change (Neuman and Johnson); and manufacturing (Sparks)and they provide various lenses through which to examine capitalism and women. An earlier generation of women's historians, influenced by socialist feminists and labor historians, focused on working-class women. 2 When historians like Edward Shorter argued that capitalism benefited women, they treated capitalism as a historical actor. 3 As Froide observes, "Women's Journal of Women's History 142 Spring historians have been reluctant to consider that women participated in and were agents of capitalist enterprises, as much as capitalism was something that acted on them" (2). These five studies find women's agency in social orders, ranging from the financial capitalism of early eighteenth-century imperial Britain to the corporate capitalism of mid-twentieth-century Cold War America.In Silent Partners, Froide uncovers white Englishwomen's financial activities, demonstrating the importance of what she calls women's "financial patriotism" both for themselves and the British imperial project (202). She distills a half century of scholarship on women as financial actors and establishes the need to consider factors like age, education, income, and marital status for women rather than assuming "a generic 'female investor'" (3-4). Middling, genteel, and elite women, unsurprisingly, are the most visible in the records. She explains that women learned to invest by acquiring "some level of mathematical proficiency" and accessing instructions in financial guidebooks (16,(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). She looks at women's economic functions-managing their families' assets, providing for their own security in later life, and promoting Britain's fiscal-imperial project.Women, Froide argues, were "early adopters" of new financial instruments (61). Beginning in the 1690s, the British government used state lotteries to support its foreign excursions (32). For purchasers, lotteries returned their investments with interest, even when they did not win a prize (30). Froide finds the actions (and even voices) of women lower in the economic order; lotteries permitted tickets to be divided into portions as small as one-sixty-fourth of the cost, meaning even servants could purchase them (33). The (new) Bank of England also offered opportunities for investing. Calculating the percentage of capital invested by women is not always possible with the existing records, although it undoubtedly was lower than the percenta...