Priscilla Wakefield: Empowering Women Through Financial Literacy

So Victoria, why is she one of your most favorite women from history?

Well, Priscilla Wakefield might be one of the most quietly revolutionary mathematicians that you've never heard of, not because she proved theorems, but because she taught ordinary people how to use numbers in their everyday lives to survive, to plan, and to gain financial power.

She was an English writer, educator, and reformer who lived in Georgian Britain, so I want you to think bonnets and Bridgerton.

And while this was in many ways a revolutionary period, most people, and especially women, had almost no access to formal mathematical education.

Now, she herself published 17 books, and many of them were aimed at the homeschooling market, which would've been particularly important for educating girls, because girls were much less likely to be sent to school than boys.

But she also believed that women needed more than an education, that they also needed access to their own money and the ability to plan their future in a financial sense.

So in 1798, she set up a community insurance scheme for women, and through that scheme, women could make small, regular contributions in return for certain benefits, things like pensions, funeral expenses, and access to loans, including business loans.

And she then took it a step further, ultimately establishing England's first savings bank for women and children.

It became known as the Penny Bank because it allowed you to save with as little as a penny with the view that those pennies eventually turn into pounds.

And am I right that her bank proved so popular that men asked her to open her services for them as well?

That's correct, and she dutifully obliged.

Okay, that is fascinating.