Women and Nineteenth-Century Equine Economies (original) (raw)

This article has been peer-reviewed under the direction of Kristen Guest (University of Northern British Columbia) and Ronja Frank (Memorial University, St John's, Newfoundland). It forms part of the Equine Breed and the Making of Modern Identity project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

he special affinity between horses and women, especially girls, was part of twentieth-century cultural lore. Melissa Holbrook Pierson argues that a "deconsecration of the horse, from the church of the economy, was necessary before the animal — with the exception of those involved in still viable industries such as racing — was finally left to women" (Dark Horses 13). When horses were no longer useful as the living engines of western industrialization and militarization, women stepped in and began their romance with the animal. Yet, women took part in the nineteenth-century"s economic reliance on horses beyond being passive passengers in vehicles and in addition to being riders. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women participated in equine-driven economies including transportation, horse racing, visual art, and literature.

Equine historians have emphasized the importance of horses to all aspects of culture. Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfield argue that "horse-human relations have evolved symbiotically": "animals must walk beside humans in any study that hopes to explore the forces of modernity" (Equestrian Cultures 5). Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr argue: "Historians have largely neglected the tremendous influence of the horse, economically, as well as culturally" (The Horse in the City 14). Women are marginal to most equine histories, but although historians of business and finance have demonstrated the crucial role that women played across various economic sectors none of this scholarship includes equine economies. By combining women"s history and equine history, we get a fuller picture of nineteenth-century economies.

Throughout the nineteenth century, horses were essential to agricultural, urban, and military economies. Even after the coming of the railways, the nineteenth-century economy ran on horsepower. Ann Norton Greene writes that the nineteenth-century "was much more the age of horsepower than the age of steam power" (9). The steam engine, writes historian Margaret Derry, "triggered an almost insatiable need for horses" (Horses in Society xii). U.S. Census data shows that in 1840 there were 4.3 million horses and mules in the U.S. By 1910 the number was 27.5 million (Greene 41). In London, the horse population increased from 11,000 in 1800 to 200,000 in 1900 (Turvey, "Horse Traction," 49).

Horses generated their own economy of grooms, ostlers, farriers, traders, trainers, as well as the farmers who grew and imported to cities the massive quantities of hay and oats consumed by urban horses and exported the manure they generated back to the country. Farmers and landowners were also the breeders of the horses that continued to do the heavy pulling in rural and urban markets. These worlds were largely male, but women were a presence. The question of what women were doing with horses in addition to riding them is difficult to recover because of the gendered and classed structure of the workforce in the nineteenth century. Women helped with horse work on farms. In cities, working class wives and daughters did unpaid labor to help men in equine professions. Terms such as "ostleress," "stable wench" and "female groom" appear sporadically in literature throughout the century. Minor "ostleress" characters appear in Tennyson's The Princess (1847) and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).

There were of course women equestriennes in nineteenth-century life, literature, and art: fashionable ladies riding in London's Rotten Row; circus riders like those in Dickens's Hard Times (1854); actresses in "hippodramas," and female foxhunters, who appear in novels by J.S. Surtees, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot (May; Munkwitz 44). From the late nineteenth century, a growing number of white, middle- and upper-class women were driving carriages and involving themselves in horse care and breeding. McShane and Tarr note three women proprietors of a private boarding facility in Boston. Aston mentions Jane Young, who kept a livery stable in mid-nineteenth-century Leeds (201). Kim Marra writes that women began "taking to the saddle in large numbers in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century" ("Saddle Sensations," 31). Furthermore, "women proceeded to produce and consume their own knowledge" of how to practice equestrian arts (41). Women who worked in exclusively equine professions were rare. Yet if we look at equine economies more broadly, women were important participants in equine transportation, war efforts, racing, and art.

Transportation

In the early nineteenth century, two-wheeled carts drawn by one horse were the primary transporters of goods. McShane and Tarr found no registered cartwomen in nineteenth-century American cities (37). Yet Aston identifies several female "carting agents" in nineteenth-century England who arranged for horse-drawn carts to transport goods. After the 1850s, "teamsters" driving four-wheeled vehicles with two or more teams of horses gradually replaced cart drivers. McShane and Tarr record that: "Of the 120,000 teamsters in the United States in 1870, only 196 were women. Of the 368,000 in 1900, only 264 were women" (38). They identify a prejudice against women as unfitted for driving, but these numbers show that women did work as teamsters in nineteenth-century American cities, even if their numbers were small.

The grandmother of Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his photographs of horses in motion, ran a barge company, which required "stables of powerful horses" to pull the barges on England's early nineteenth-century canals (Solnit, River 8). His mother took over her husband's corn and coal business in Kingston-upon-Thames, which was listed in her name in 1845 (8). In 1924, when horses were still used in the small congested lanes of London, the parcel-carrying business Sutton and Co. (founded in 1861) was managed by women, prompting the Financial Times to remark that "offhand one would not select the carrying industry as a branch of transport in which the abilities of the fair sex would specially shine" ("Saturday Causerie").

Filling a gap in remote areas not serviced by the railways, horse vans provided transportation between market towns and villages. In Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887), Mrs. Dollery's van has run the same ten-mile stretch between Abbot"s Cernel and Sherton for 20 years. Because she needs to "hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers," Mrs. Dollery wears "short leggings under her gown for modesty"s sake" (7). In Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a chaise is driven by a "frizzle-haired brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was the cheerful servant of the establishment, who, in her part as factotum, turned groom and ostler at times" (20). The working-class horse drivers of Hardy"s novels provide insight into rural transportation and economies, and the emphasis on practical clothing contrasts with the impractical clothing and side-saddles that wealthier women riders were obliged to use.

Horse Racing

As Pierson notes, the horse racing industry was an exception to the handing over of horses to women. Horseracing was, and is, primarily a male preserve, but a sport with such tremendous cultural and economic impact could not be without its female contributors. The first nineteenth-century female jockey was Alicia Thornton, who rode sidesaddle against male riders. In 1805, she won a match race against the leading jockey of the day. Ellen Chaloner (1846-1944) was the first woman trainer in England. She took over when her husband died and was the first woman to train a winner at Royal Ascot in the 1887.

Women were also gamblers on horse races. Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, was drawn to betting on horses in the 1840s. She frequented the races at Doncaster and Epsom and was friendly with the aristocratic owners of Voltigeur, who won both the Derby and the Doncaster Cup in 1850. Despite her inside connections and mathematical system, her gambling left her £2000 in debt when she died in 1852. Later, Helen Vernet (1875-1956) achieved success as a bookmaker on the racecourses of England in the early years of the twentieth century, becoming a director of Ladbrokes in 1928.

War and Art

Women were not engaged in warfare, but female artists brought the reality of war and the economy of warfare to life through their paintings. Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler (1846-1933), painted dramatic images of the Crimean War (1853-56), which are an enduring record of that conflict and which show sympathy both for traumatized soldiers and horses. Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958) represented horses in the Second Boer War (1899-1902). From her friend, Lord Robert Baden Powell (1847-1941), founder of the Boy Scouts, Kemp-Welch inherited the former warhorse Black Prince, who served as a model for her illustrations of Black Beauty in 1915. Artist Cecil Aldin, also an illustrator of Black Beauty, oversaw army remount depots during WWI and hired women to run them, claiming that "women could train remounts more efficiently, quickly and gently, than most male grooms" (Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 129). In 1919, Kemp-Welch was commissioned by the Women"s Work Sub-Committee of the Imperial War Museum to visit Russley Park in Wilshire to record women training horses for the battlefield, resulting in two major works, "Exercise" and "The Straw Ride," which portray working women who sit astride, wearing breeches with their hair tied back in scarves.

Lucy Kemp Welch's The Straw Ride (1919-20). IWM (Imperial War Museums), Art UK. Image copyright granted by David Messum Fine Art Ltd. Click the image to enlarge it.

Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair (1853). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain. Click the image to enlarge it.

French artist Rosa Bonheur infiltrated the Marché-aux-Chevaux in Paris dressed as a man to make sketches for her canvas, "The Horse Fair." Other equine artists include Frances Mabel Hollams (1877-1963), a prolific painter of horse portraits for wealthy owners, and equine painter Rosa Corder (1853-1893), who specialized in equine portraits at Newmarket (Hladik). Representing horses was one way that women contributed to equine cultures as well as art markets generally.

Conclusion

The historical record is surprisingly silent about what women were doing with horses apart from riding them. I have tried to complicate the argument that women only took over the management of horses after horses had been supplanted as economic engines and that their relationship to the animal was primarily an affective one of emotion, fantasy, and romance. Studies of women and economic markets should keep horses in mind given that all nineteenth-century economies were in fact equine economies.

The author would like to thank Janette Rutterford and Tim Cox for information, respectively, about female management at Sutton and Co. and Ellen Chaloner's career in racing.

Bibliography

Aston, Jennifer. Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Barker, Hannah. Family and Business During the Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Derry, Margaret. Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800-1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Financial Times. "Saturday Causerie." January 12, 1924.

Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Guest, Kristen, and Monica Mattfield, eds. Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 1891. Edited by Simon Gatrell and Juliet Grindle. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

Hardy, Thomas. The Woodlanders. 1887. Edited by Dale Kramer. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2009.

Henry, Nancy. Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Hladik, Karen J. "Rosa Corder: The Unusual Life and Career of a Woman Horse Artist in Late 19th Century Newmarket." The Michael Kidson Essay. The British Sporting Art Trust Newsletter, no. 17 (Autumn 2024): 1-8.

Laurence, Anne, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford, eds. Women and Their Money, 1700-1950. London: Routledge, 2009.

Marra, Kim. "Saddle Sensations and Female Equestrian Prowess at the National Horse Show." In Showing off, Showing up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power. Pp. 27-52. Laurie Frederik, Kim Marra, and Catherine Schuler, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

May, Allyson N. The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781-2004: Class and Cruelty. Routledge, 2013.

Munkwitz, Erica. Women, Horse Sports and Liberation: Equestrianism and Britain from the 18th to the 20th Centuries. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021.

Pierson, Melissa Holbrook. Dark Horses and Black Beauties: Animals, Women, a Passion. Grand Rapids, MI: Granata Books, 2001.

Phillips, Nicola. Women in Business, 1700-1850. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2006.

Robb, George. Ladies of the Ticker: Women and Wall Street from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadow: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking, 2003.

Turvey, Ralph. "Horse Traction in Victorian London." Journal of Transport History 26, no. 2 (2005): 38-59.

Wortley, Laura. Lucy Kemp-Welch, 1869-1958: The Spirit of the Horse. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1996.

Created 30 October 2025