Galina Ulianova, ‘Independent managers: Female factory owners in the northern provinces of the Russian Empire, c. 1760–1810’

Focusing on women as manufactory-owners, this chapter explores women as active subjects of entrepreneurship and it attempts to study their practices as a right to independent ownership of property. This legal issue was the most important factor that definitively shaped the Russian woman’s gender role in business and household structures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter is based on a broad range of sources, including manufactory accounting reports submitted to the Department of Manufacturing in 1795–1803. It has enabled the reconstruction the biographies of fourteen female owners of seventeen enterprises situated in the three northern provinces of the Russian Empire (Arkhangelsk, Vologda, St Petersburg).