Anne Okeley was born in Quinton in Northamptonshire in 1691, and her parents saw that she was “taught and learned the solid and useful accomplishments of her sex, according to their middling station in life”. She married in 1718, but her Bedford husband was a spendthrift and when he died left her destitute with five children under 11.
Initially she supported them as a jobbing seamstress, but then she decided to start her own business, raising capital by renting part of the house that she’d managed to save from her marriage settlement and persuading her father to give her the money he’d left her in his will. She went to London, then return Bedford with the stock to open a millinery shop.
And for 33 years it prospered, so she was able to send one son to Cambridge and another to become a naval officer. She was crippled in one arm in her mid-50s through being struck by a wagon, and suffered from breast cancer (allegedly for 30 years), which finally killed her. All of this accomplished despite her lack of mathematics. “She never knew her stock, she never knew her profits; a stream of cash circulated weekly through her hands our of which she took what she hoped she could afford.”
(From Lawrence Jameses’ The Middle Class: A History, p. 82-83.)
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