Aston challenges and reshapes the on-going debate concerning social status, economic opportunity, and gender roles in nineteenth-century society. Sources including trade directories, census returns, probate records, newspapers, advertisements, and photographs are analysed and linked to demonstrate conclusively that women in nineteenth-century England were far more prevalent in business than previously acknowledged. Moreover, women were able to establish and expand their businesses far beyond the scope of inter-generational caretakers in sectors of the economy traditionally viewed as unfeminine, and acquire the assets and possessions that were necessary to secure middle-class status. These women serve as a powerful reminder that the middle-class woman’s retreat from economic activity during the nineteenth-century, so often accepted as axiomatic, was not the case. In fact, women continued to act as autonomous and independent entrepreneurs, and used business ownership as a platform to participate in the economic, philanthropic, and political public sphere.

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.

"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.

This article analyses female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Traditional views on female entrepreneurship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England point towards a decline in the number and relevance of women as business owners in comparison to the eighteenth century, and their retreat into a 'separate sphere' away from the world of trade and production. Recent studies, however, have deeply challenged this view, suggesting that women still played an important role as entrepreneurs during industrialization and beyond. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain unanswered with regard to the features of female entrepreneurship during these phases of British history, and issues such as scale of operation, attitude to risk, credit structure, and managerial styles are still widely debated. Using original sources, this article provides a novel view on these issues, analysing female entrepreneurship from the perspective of bankruptcy. Analysing statistics on women's bankruptcy derived from Board of Trade reports, as well as a sample of archival cases, this article argues that overall female business owners traded in ways similar to their male counterparts in terms of business size, risk-taking, and, eventually, success.

An examination of women entrepreneurs who invested in, and often managed, non-feminine businesses such as shipping and shipbuilding in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.