OK I lied—I have one more thing to say about cryptocapitalism, and that is that under this economic system women were fully integrated into the economy. Family firms were just that—both husbands and wives worked, and both were responsible for running the business. Division of labour by gender in Georgian England was more fluid than we'd now tend to think, both because families wanted to use their collective skills optimally (e.g. if weaving were making money, and the woman of the house knew how to weave, then the man of the house cleaned and cooked and watched the kids and let her get on with it—that maximised household income) and because of the way families worked (men typically left their businesses to their wives in their wills; widows sometimes sold out, or passed the work on to their male children, but at least as often they, who knew as much about the business as their husbands, just kept right on doing whatever they were doing). In the particular business sector I write about there were certainly more men than women, but plenty of women—widows, married women and single women—also did this kind of work, and it seemed to be unremarkable when a woman was mentioned as doing it. You could find women working in pretty much any job--scholars reviewing wills, tax registers, church records and court records find the names of women associated with almost every occupation in medieval England, even ones from which guild regulations excluded them. They have also found evidence of women both serving as and taking on apprentices in many occupations. The economic activity of women is not my specific area of expertise, but I can recommend Davidoff and Hall's Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 for some understanding of the role women played in the peer-to-peer economy, and can go back into my notes for more references and case studies if anyone's interested.

The disappearance of women from the public sphere (both social and economic) seemed to happen very quickly—within a generation. I remember reading somewhere (I wish I could remember the citation) some man saying something like 'my mother used to run her own business—she'd go down to the pub and smoke her pipe and make deals with her colleagues...my wife will never do this.' This sudden change in women's status in the 1830s is sometimes referred to as the 'return to the parlour'; I've heard other historians talk about it but as far as I know no one's actually written about it. It seems more than a coincidence that this happens at the same time joint-stock companies become the dominant business form (at least in wealth, if not in number)--the difference between the cryptocapitalist world of gender-neutral employment and, if not precisely equality at least representation, and the entirely male early corporate capitalist world is striking.*

*Wait, that's not entirely true...some proportion, though it's hard to say exactly, of the anonymous shareholders of joint-stock companies were women. But women never appeared as acting managers or directors. I'm not exactly sure why though (of course) I have some theories….