"This volume challenges those who see gender inequalities invariably defining and constraining the lives of women. But it also broadens the conversation about the degree to which business is a gender-blind institution, owned and managed by entrepreneurs whose gender identities shape and reflect economic and cultural change." – Mary A. Yeager, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles This is the first book to consider nineteenth-century businesswomen from a global perspective, moving beyond European and trans-Atlantic frameworks to include many other corners of the world. The women in these pages, who made money and business decisions for themselves rather than as employees, ran a wide variety of enterprises, from micro-businesses in the ‘grey market’ to large factories with international reach. They included publicans and farmers, midwives and property developers, milliners and plumbers, pirates and shopkeepers. Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective rejects the notion that nineteenth-century women were restricted to the home. Despite a variety of legal and structural restrictions, they found ways to make important but largely unrecognised contributions to economies around the world - many in business. Their impact on the economy and the economy’s impact on them challenge gender historians to think more about business and business historians to think more about gender and create a global history that is inclusive of multiple perspectives. Chapter one of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This pioneering work comprehensively examines the history of female entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire during nineteenth-century industrial development.

The book examines female entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century. Economic history has long accorded women entrepreneurs a very minor place, relegating them to the status of historical anecdotes. The hypothesis of women’s withdrawal from the business sphere after the eighteenth century has long dominated. However, this view has recently been subject to a fundamental questioning. Women did in fact actively contribute to economic development by occupying key positions in the business sphere as independent workers, investors and entrepreneurs. Businesswomen were no exception in the nineteenth century. They ran businesses of all sizes and in a wide range of industrial sectors. This book helps to bring nineteenth-century women entrepreneurs out of invisibility, by examining their entrepreneurial practices and shedding light on the role of the legal framework in which they operated. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of economic history, business history, history of law, and economics and management sciences in general, interested in a better understanding of female entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century.

A reappraisal of the business enterprises of women in the `long' eighteenth century, showing them to be more flourishing than previously thought.

Looking at women, business and finance in the long nineteenth century, this book challenges our traditional understanding of 'separate spheres' - whereby men operated in the public world of work and women in the private realm of the domestic. Drawing on case studies throughout Europe, this book reveals that there was much greater diversity in women's economic experience across all social strata than has previously been understood.International contributors take a new look at women's roles in finance and investment, family-owned businesses, retailing, service activities, and the artisanal trades. They reveal that elite and middle-class women often manipulated financial resources in a highly sophisticated manner. Family-owned businesses and retail trade geared to women, such as grocery and fashion, also offered women opportunities. Throughout, the book considers the impact of industrialization on women's economic agency and examines women in the accommodation business in London, female entrepreneurs in Italy, prostitutes in Germany, family businesses in Sweden, women in publishing in Spain and much more.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women's businesses - from small local concerns to financial empires - offered women independence, supported their families, and supplied essential goods and services to their communities and the world. They also contributed to much-needed legal and social change and set the stage for the female entrepreneurs who would come later. All this was accomplished despite immense financial barriers, an inequitable legal system, and the widely held belief that women had no business in business. Women's Concerns explores the lives of twelve women who owned and operated businesses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the ways they created personal and public identities and managed the contradictions between their entrepreneurial ambitions and deeply entrenched attitudes about women's roles.