A Silent Revolution? explores how urban women managed wealth at a time when they were thought to have little independence - including economic - and shows that women were in fact important players in the world of capital.

Peter Baskerville situates women in their immediate gendered and familial environments as well as within broader legal, financial, spatial, temporal, and historiographical contexts. He analyses women's probates, wills, land ownership, holdings of real and chattel mortgages, investment in stocks and bonds, and self employment, revealing that women controlled wealth to an extent similar to that of most men and invested and managed wealth in increasingly similar, and in some cases more aggressive, ways.

Traditional historiography has highlighted women's fight to acquire cultural and political rights during this period, but it is less well known that women acquired and exercised many economic rights as well. In doing so they put pressure on men to reconceptualize the notion of middle class and women's proper place.

One of Canada's leading business social scientists, Peter Baskerville is professor of history, University of Victoria, in-coming chair of Modern Western Canadian History, University of Alberta, and the author of several books, including, with Eric Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada.

Peter Baskerville's profile page

"A Silent Revolution? Is a fascinating study of female capitalists in Victoria and Hamilton at the turn of the twentieth century. Peter Baskerville employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to establish that women were willing and active participants in building the financial infrastructure of the liberal bourgeois state in modern Canada." BC Studies

"By making so clear the gap between quotidian practices ... and the ideas of women's incapacity for business, Baskerville's empirical contribution in this work makes a superb case study of a fundamental methodological problem. Polemical enough to be interesting, but measured enough to be taken seriously, A Silent Revolution? should be required reading for graduate students." Journal of Social History

"Baskerville's study provides a welcome upset even to contemporary attitudes about women and wealth." Jennifer Blair, Canadian Literature

"Baskerville's history does that welcome work of opening the doors to future study in our own areas of scholarship." Canadian Literature

"The analysis and discussion of the issues are of the highest order and interest - A Silent Revolution? is a major contribution to the field of women and gender history." Françoise Noël, director of the Institute for Community Studies and Oral History, Nipissing University

"Potentially, one of the most important books in the last two decades in Canadian social history." David Burley, history, University of Winnipeg