Historical Female Entrepreneurship

In 2006 entrepreneur Lucy Martin argued that male business proprietors start by thinking ‘in ten years time I want to retire with £20 million’ but their female equivalent think ‘I want to take control of my life, I want my own money, I want to see my kids’. ¹ The expressions may be very modern but their meaning has significant continuity with the businesswomen encountered in this historical study. Independence, limited options and domestic commitments were primary motivators for women setting-up in business in the nineteenth century. Although the goals of business proprietors were not and are not now always gender specific to the extreme, there has continued to be a gender distinction, particularly in terms of self-representation and representation by others. The humble dressmaker of 1850 with whom we started this book was keen to mark out her business practices as different to what she perceived as the normal pursuit of profits. ² Similarly, when businesswomen of the year competitions today run with the headline: ‘Don’t try to be like a man’, it does not raise an eyebrow. ³