We would like to thank BĂ©atrice Craig, Susan Ingalls Lewis, Richard White and Mary A. Yeager for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
End AbstractIn the Beginning
Never underestimate the power of a serendipitous âGoogleâ search. One such query for âfemale business ownershipâ led an Australasian historian (Catherine Bishop) to email a British one (Jennifer Aston) having discovered a common passion for nineteenth-century businesswomen. We realised that we had been following similar paths 12,000 miles apart, uncovering the presence of entrepreneurial women in nineteenth-century Australasia and England.1 Yet, even in this, the age of the internet and transnational history, we had been unaware of each otherâs existence. We had each operated within historiographical traditions that for the most part denied the existence of respectable businesswomen in this era; a critical century which saw rapid economic change and increasing regulation of business. We were excited, firstly to discover our âownâ entrepreneurial women, and then to discover that they also existed on the other side of the world. Even more important than our discovery of a historiographical soul mate, however, was that it immediately meant that the presence of businesswomen could not be simply explained by Englandâs industrialisation or by Australasiaâs settler colonial status. These two locations and that email were just the beginning. We began to reach out and make further connections, initially with North American scholars.2 We organised a conference panel with Susan Ingalls Lewis, one of the pioneers in US feminist business history, on âNineteenth-Century Businesswomen in the Anglophone Worldâ. Our ensuing discussions highlighted the commonalities in laws and customs among Australia, the UK and the United States, and sparked the obvious questions: âwhat about the rest of the world?â and âwho else is working on this that we donât know about?â
This led us to reconsider the geographical frames of reference in which our own historical research was undertaken. We knew of North American scholarship, and European studies in the area, but all of these existed within national contexts.3 Comparative work was situated within European or, most recently and notably by BĂ©atrice Craig, trans-Atlantic frameworks. The rest of the globe has not generally featured in the discussion.4 Our ambition in this volume is to start the global conversation, to unite historians of businesswomen working on diverse parts of the world, incorporating areas south of the equator and east of the Urals. We want to explore, compare and contrast womenâs experiences of business, and examine how differing economies, cultures and legal structures affected their approaches, or perhaps excluded them altogether. We also want to investigate how the available sources and historiographical traditions of each place have determined the way that the stories of female entrepreneurs have been told or not told. Naturally, much of the scholarship is found in countries with stronger, longer historiographical traditions, where the history of business, entrepreneurship and gender has entered the accepted historical canon. Nevertheless, this volume breaks new ground in its geographical coverage, including chapters from Western Europe (France, Spain, and UK), Eastern Europe (Russia, Turkey), North America (Canada, the United States), Central and South America (Mexico, Brazil), Asia (China, Japan), Africa (Angola, South Africa) and Australasia (Australia, New Zealand). Of course, this mapping is far from complete and we eagerly anticipate the continuation of the project as the conversation widens. This is not a book about global entrepreneurs, although many of the businesswomen in the following pages were transnational migrants.5 Their businesses, however, were predominantly conducted locally and therefore national history remains the dominant framework. Most chapters address separate national contexts but what they do not do is assume national exceptionalism. Instead, our global perspective highlights similarities, illuminates differences and encourages economic, social, business and gender historians to ask new questions.
The female entrepreneurs who populate the following pages existed in multiple geographical areas with uneven economic development. Some economies were highly industrialised, others less so. Some national and local economies were hostage to the priorities of distant imperial governments, while for others, industrialisation was not yet (and in a few cases is still not) an inevitable conclusion. The focus of much existing scholarship on nineteenth-century female entrepreneurship is on women in towns and cities, indicative perhaps of the sources available though perhaps too on the false assumption that farmers were not entrepreneurial.6 Therefore, in addition to extending the geographical scope of the field, we also seek to include rural literatures and consider womenâs independent money-making activities across economies and industries, as well as borders, for the first time. Frontier societies, long-established European cities and new company towns all appear in these chapters and, while many of the businesswomen examined were urban-based, others were not. The laundresses of Mexico City, the merchants of Paris and the retailers of central and suburban Moscow sit alongside African farmers of the Eastern Cape, agricultural producers in England, the first Western settlers in British Colombia and New Zealand, and the pirates of the South China Sea.
Definitions
Business exists within local, national and international frameworks of religion, custom, government and personal relationships. We have deliberately employed very broad definitions of business and entrepreneurship to capture as many manifestations of female entrepreneurship as possible. The following chapters define businesswomen as women who were making money and business decisions on their own account, either as sole traders, employers, artisans, or by dealing in property or making financial investments. They were not waged workers or salaried employees following orders. They could be running their enterprises on a micro scale, as owners of international companies, or in the liminal space of the âgrey marketâ between legal enterprise and illegal activity. Their businesses could be full-time, part-time or seasonal and they may have had multiple enterprises at any one time or sequentially. Their businesses could last just a few months or several decades, or survive over multiple generations. We include women who were in partnership, formally or informally, with husbands or others. In particular, we acknowledge that many wives usually described in the records as âassisting in their husbandsâ businessesâ (or not described in the records at all) were frequently essential business partners and considered as such by their spouses, customers and themselves; they deserve this acknowledgement by historians.
Some definitions ofâor assumptions aboutâentrepreneurship privilege expansion and innovation.7 We prefer a more expansive definition of entrepreneur: someone who identifies opportunities for business, takes risks (however small they might seem), assumes responsibility for decisions and seeks to make money. Thus, a laundress who recognises a market for clean laundry, takes the risk of establishing herself in business, negotiates credit, is responsible if she fails to deliver clean laundry on time and who wants to make enough money to support herself and any dependants, is as entitled to the epithet âentrepreneurâ as Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie: she perhaps has more at stake. Entrepreneurship can take many forms, from a desire for almost limitless expansion to piecemeal work that provides sufficiency, and everything in-between. High-risk ventures with significant financial investments and potentially colossal returns have tended to dominate the literature surrounding entrepreneurship and business ownership and in the popular imagination, but they are hardly representative. More typical are the thousands of enterprises formed at kitchen tables that provided varying levels of income and security to their owners and then faded away, almostâbut not quiteâinto obscurity.
The question of how we define success is equally important. Business success is often evaluated solely in terms of growth and maximising profit. Such a definition devalues those businesspeopleâmen and womenâwho did not expand their enterprises to become international conglomerates, but instead persevered in building their businesses sufficiently to create a living for their families and then were satisfied. While some businesspeople may have wanted to expand, others had no such intentions. Another equally ...
