[PW] Women's arithmetic

[JT Thompson]

Some years ago I read a book about zero, which had references to 
"women's arithmetic" - a method of arithmetical calculation used in 
markets, and apparently much simpler than the method I learned.

According to this book, it was banned in European schools once Arabic 
numbers began to be used, with their concepts of dot-one-and-carry.

I've never been able to find out more about "women's arithmetic", and 
the explanations of how to do it weren't very good in the book. 
Anyone know of an actual book about it?