Petticoats and Pinstripes: Women and Finance in Victorian America

On Sunday, Sept.28, 2025, 2-4 p.m., The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum will present a talk by independent historian Sheri Caplan titled, Petticoats and Pinstripes: Women and Finance in Victorian America.

The talk will be held at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum, 295 West Avenue, Norwalk, CT. To reserve tickets, attendees can visit the Events page on the Museum’s website at www.lockwoodmathewsmansion.com. Admission is $15 for members, $20 for non-members. Light refreshments will be offered following the presentation.

The lecture will take note of the relationship between women and money leading up to and including the Gilded Age and highlight the achievements of several groundbreaking women who forged unique paths in finance during this era.

Sheri J. Caplan is the author of Petticoats and Pinstripes: Portraits of Women in Wall Street’s History (2013), the first book that traces the contributions of women in American finance from colonial days to modern times. The book was featured on C-SPAN and won the 2014 Axiom Business Book Bronze Medal in the Women and Minorities division. In 2020, she published Old Enough: How 18-Year-Olds Won the Vote & Why it Matters, a young adult title that was a bestseller in its category and recounts events and circumstances leading to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment and describes the youth vote since its passage. From 2021-24, she published the Remember the Ladies Newsletter, an annotated daily almanac of U.S. women’s history. Her articles, commentaries, analyses, and book reviews have been published or commissioned by American Banker, Forbes.com, the National Women’s History Museum, The Motley Fool, the German Historical Institute, American National Biography, Kirkus Media, and BlueInk Reviews. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and serves as an arbitrator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Prior to her editorial career, she served as Assistant General Counsel and Vice President of Goldman Sachs and holds degrees from Yale (B.A., History) and the University of Virginia School of Law (J.D.).

LMMM’s Lecture Series is sponsored in part by The DiNardo-Aiello Family Fund and Designer/Artist/Author Gail Ingis. LMMM’s 2025 programs are made possible in part by LMMM’s Founding Patrons: The Estate of Mrs. Cynthia Clark Brown; LMMM’s Leadership Patrons: Dr. Michele and Attorney Miklos Koleszar and The Sealark Foundation; and LMMM’s 2025 Season Distinguished Benefactors: The City of Norwalk, The Maurice Goodman Foundation, Inc., and Lockwood-Mathews Foundation, Inc.