The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship

Enterprise, Home and Household in London, c. 1800-1870

Alison Kay

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415522687
• eBook ISBN: 9781135255022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship explores the relationship between home, household headship and enterprise in Victorian London. It examines the notions of duty, honor and suitability in how women's ventures are represented by themselves and others and engages in a comparison of the interpretation of historical female entrepreneurship by contemporaries and historians in the UK, Europe and America. It argues that just as women in business have often been hidden by men, they have often also been hidden by the 'home' and the conceptualization of separate spheres of public and private agency and of 'the' entrepreneur. Drawing on contextual evidence from 1747 to 1880, including fire insurance records, directories, trade cards, newspapers, memoirs, the census and extensive record linkage, this study concentrates on the early to mid-Victorian period when ideals about gender roles and appropriate work for women were vigorously debated.

Alison Kay offers new insight into the motivations of the Victorian women who opted to pursue enterprises of their own. By engaging in empirical comparisons with men's business, it also reveals similarities and differences with the small to medium sized ventures of male business proprietors. The link between home and enterprise is then further excavated by detailed record linkage, revealing the households and domestic circumstances and responsibilities of female proprietors. Using both discourse and data to connect enterprise, proprietor and household, The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship provides a multi-dimensional picture of the Victorian female proprietor and moves beyond the stereotypes. It argues that active business did not exclude women, although careful representation was vital and this has obscured the similarities of their businesses with those of many male business proprietors.

1 Separate and Suitable

In the mid-nineteenth century, paid employment detracted from women’s standing in middle-class society and work deemed suitable to meet standards of feminine behaviour, that could ‘be pursued without endangering their virtue, or corrupting their manners’, was not plentiful.¹ Small business presented an alternative pathway to independence and survival. However such enterprises are often hidden from view not only by their nature (often small and carried on from the home) but also by the too eager acceptance of the Victorian rhetoric of domesticity. Separate spheres, the term used to refer to the ideal of the public versus private realms of Victorian men and women, has been used by the historians of women’s lives as a model to illustrate the capitalist power of men and as a demonstration of ‘how far we have come’. However this has resulted in accusations of the model’s ‘sloppy’ metaphorical use, referring interchangeably ‘to an ideology imposed on women, a culture created by women, a set of boundaries expected to be observed by women’.² In particular, until recently the domestic woman / public man dichotomy was erroneously taken as a description of social reality. This book falls into that camp of scholarship demonstrating that the lives of Victorian women could and did permeate the boundaries of rhetoric.

Although the Victorians themselves do refer to spheres of duty, separate spheres as an interpretive paradigm for understanding women and work largely originates in the work of two early twentieth-century authors: Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) and Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1930).³ Although they disagreed on the chronology and nature of the impact, both authors depicted a transition in women’s labour market participation somewhere between 1600 and 1850. The separation of home and workplace into factory or workshop was key to both Clark and Pinchbeck’s analysis of transition. It is likely that Clark and Pinchbeck’s models of ‘separation’ were at least loosely informed by contemporary theories on the subjection of women, particularly that of Friedrich Engels. His book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that the transition to individualistic commercial society drove a wedge between the public world of work and the private household, consigning the sexes to different arenas.⁴

However, Clark and Pinchbeck were writing at a time when the traditional ‘industrial revolution’ had not yet been called into question. More recently, quantitative analysis has enabled a re-examination of the economic trends, changing the landscape of economic history. Crafts, Mokyr and Wrigley have argued for a picture of continuity rather than discontinuity in the economy’s development.⁵ This in turn has led those who specialise in women’s work to re-draw the economic environment in which their subjects operated. For example, Hill points out that factory work did not become the overriding experience of the many. A great part of the nineteenth century saw small-scale domestic handicraft industry, operating within the home or workshop, persist alongside Pinchbeck’s factories.⁶ Similarly, much of Clark’s analysis rests on the prophesied breakdown of pre-industrial production patterns of domestic and family industry by the monolithic force of capitalism: ‘That force which, while producing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, has hitherto robbed us of so large a part of the joy of creation.’⁷

To Clark, capitalism and its sidekick waged labour erased the egalitarianism of economic endeavour within the family.⁸ In the words of Thirsk, she delivers us ‘a somewhat idealistic picture of family life under a regime of near self-sufficiency in the seventeenth-century.’⁹ The notion that such harmony ever existed in the organisation of the home has increasingly been called into question. Middleton offers stern warnings against such generalisation and over simplification of economic organisation under the feudal mode of production.¹⁰ Similarly, Simonton has argued that men and women’s complementary and mutual dependency of activities does not mean they were equal. Women’s status in the workplace was not necessarily determined by their participation in it but by gendered meanings attached to it.¹¹ The implication of such criticisms is that Clark’s ‘golden age’ was not quite so golden, nor was Pinchbeck’s radical economic changes quite so radical. Ultimately, Hudson and Lee have stressed, only a disaggregated, regional and sectoral approach will allow us to view the subtleties of women’s economic lives.¹²

In fairness, and sometimes overlooked by historians, Pinchbeck did distinguish women in business as a special category, conceding them a chapter all of their own.¹³ She noted the existence of skilled trades left almost entirely in the hands of women—millinery, mantua making, embroidery and the role of the sempstress. However in keeping with her model of industrial capitalism, by the nineteenth century, she argues, these women withdrew into their separate sphere.¹⁴ She concludes:

It is only necessary to contrast the vigorous life of the eighteenth century business woman, travelling about the country in her own interests, with the sheltered existence of the Victorian woman, to realise how much the latter had lost in initiative and independence by being protected from all real contact with life. ¹⁵

Earle’s analysis of the church court depositions of 1,436 London women collected between 1695 and 1725 led him to estimate that one in five of all working women opted to run businesses at this time.¹⁶ However, he criticises the ‘golden-age to withdrawal’ dichotomy. He claims many of the trends, most notably relegation into what he terms ‘feminine trades’, can already be witnessed in the latter half of the seventeenth century.¹⁷ Other studies have questioned whether the businesswoman disappeared as the eighteenth century progressed. Wright’s examination of occupations in the Midland town of Ludlow found that an increasing number of female household heads were involved in trade across the century. Furthermore, she found that of 148 women bereaved between 1710 and 1749, just under half carried on their husband’s trade and that over the period an increasing percentage did so.¹⁸ Similarly, Sanderson’s study of the Edinburgh trading community also reveals the extensive role of women in business, with women as young as twenty setting up in trade. She concludes that in the Scottish urban context there is little evidence to suggest any objection to single women exerting their economic effort outside the home.¹⁹ Despite such evidence the notion of a withdrawal from business into domesticity and idleness has proved enduring in the historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

One explanation for the enduring nature of the separate spheres paradigm is the place it has been given in explanations regarding the formation of middle-class identity. It is commonly accepted that the expanding group positioned between the nobility and commonality, referred to as the middling sort followed by the middling class, were growing in numbers.²⁰ They varied in occupation but could predominantly be characterised by their involvement in commerce.²¹ Nenadic has suggested that, in the Scottish context, the commercially preoccupied constituted at least 80 per cent of the total.²² Consumerism and its predicator wealth contributed to their ‘sense of class’ and in particular the ability to maintain a non-working wife.²³ Claims for middle-class recognition as an economic and political group were thus refracted through a gendered lens. Masculine identity was equated with an emerging concept of ‘occupation’, while women remained within a familial frame.²⁴ Furthermore, it has been argued, the fear of economic and political disorder as a result of the counter-revolutionary French wars (1790–1815) encouraged separation of social categories, exaggerating differences between groups, including men and women. This re-formulation of gender roles could also still be accommodated within classical liberal theory. Although Locke rejected familial authority as the model for political authority, he nonetheless saw the development of rationality as hand in hand with a split between public and private /reason versus passion.²⁵

Alongside counter-Jacobinism and classical liberal thought, a third influence has been woven into the formation of middle-class identity—religion. Most of the attention here has focused on Evangelicalism. A reform movement working within the Church of England, this group held as its central aim the reform of manners and morals—the creation of a new ethic. It was the religious consciousness of England after all, they argued, which determined her political condition. Reform by example, from the aristocracy downward, was the way forward. By the end of the French wars, much of this responsibility had filtered down to rest on the shoulders of the middle class.²⁶ It is here, Alexander has argued, that the Victorian ideal of womanhood originated. The woman, as wife and mother, was the pivot of the family and consequently the guardian of all Christian and domestic virtues.²⁷ The domestic abode was seen as a key place where attempts could and should be made to curb sin. In this domain, the woman provided a haven from the corrupting influences men faced daily, a juxtaposition epitomised in Coventry Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel in the House’.²⁸

Thus, although ‘work’ has had a central place in the writing of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s history, this has only included middle-class women in a very limited way. Women’s work has primarily been defined as working class waged labour, mainly in factories and domestic handicraft production, or unpaid labour in the domestic environment.²⁹ Although the 1980s brought innovative research on the role of gender in middle-class formation this did not progress, on the whole, into an investigation of the working lives of middle-class women.³⁰ As a result, until quite recently women’s work in historical scholarship had come to be viewed through the concentric prisms of working class drudgery, middle-class symbolism and theoretical abstraction. Middle-class women were extracted from much of the economic and social reality of their daily lives and partitioned firmly within a separate spheres interpretation of the past, as the dominant ideology’s role models for working class women. Increasingly the nature of middle-class female identity has been more fully unpicked to reveal multiple, competing identities.³¹ Furthermore, identity has been recognized as more fluid than static, adapting with experience and circumstances—daughter to orphan, spinster to wife, wife to widow, widow to wife, child-free to mother or guardian, religious to irreligious, supported to unsupported.

Probably the most key point to make here in relation to the focus of this book is that the gendering of ‘proper’ spheres of activity for men and women is not necessarily the same as equating the female with the domestic.³² In any regard, even if it can be assumed that the role of the kept wife was the preferred one, this was not an option for a significant proportion of the female population. Nationally at mid-century, some 1.8 million adult women were unmarried or widowed.³³ Women outnumbered men to a significant degree, especially in London where between the ages of 20 and 40 there were 119 women to every 100 men of this age. Those between 40 and 60 years of age exceeded men by 116 to 100 and those aged between 60 and 80 by 137 to 100.³⁴ There were simply too many women, especially in the middle and upper classes; at least this was the common complaint of contemporary commentators. These ‘redundant’ women, wrote W.R. Greg, were ‘quite disproportionate and quite abnormal’ in numbers and consequently were forced ‘to earn their own living, instead of spending and husbanding the earnings of men’.³⁵ Furthermore, some of those women that did successfully marry could still find themselves left unsupported by the death, desertion, sickness or chronic unemployment of their husbands, often with children to raise and dependent adults to support.³⁶ Therefore by default or choice, a substantial number of middle-class women turned to the economic marketplace for their survival. Nineteenth-century commentators, such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme, frequently asserted this reality:

It is assumed in the face of the most patent facts that all women marry and are provided for by their husbands; whilst nothing is more plainly to be seen by those who will open their eyes, than these three things:—1. That a very large minority of women do not marry. 2. That of those who do marry, a very considerable proportion are not supported by their husbands. 3. That upo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Separate and Suitable
• 2. Barriers and Bridges
• 3. Insuring Her Assets
• 4. Retailing Respectability
• 5. A Household of Enterprise
• 6. Property, Home and Business
• 7. Historical Female Entrepreneurship
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibiliography
• Index