This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

For centuries, almost all economic activity was family-based. The family business rested on the division of labor among family members. Therefore the family was both socially and economically the foundation of the family business. Families were not only production units, but also education and consumption units that conveyed norm structures, values and professional identity to next generation. Although female family members have always been active participants in family businesses over the centuries, their role has often been neglected in previous studies. Women in Business Families: From Past to Present presents both conceptual and theoretically informed empirical papers addressing three related themes relevant for family business and gender in past and in present: heroic women entrepreneurs; invisibility / visibility of women in businesses; and business succession. The book Women in Business Families: From Past to Present balances between both historical and contemporary analyses. The chapters integrate the notions of time and gender in focusing on family businesses or business families in past and in present. This volume will be of vital reading to researchers and academics in the fields of Gender Studies, Family Business, Organizational studies, Entrepreneurship and the various related disciplines.

"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 book focuses on early examples of women who may be said to have anticipated, in one way or another, modern professional and/or career-oriented women. The contributors to the book discuss women who may at least in some respect be seen as professionally ambitious, unlike the great majority of working women in the past. In order to improve their positions or to find better business opportunities, the women discussed in this book invested in developing their qualifications and professional skills, took economic or other kinds of risks, or moved to other countries. Socially, they range from elite women to women of middle-class and lower middle-class origin. In terms of theory, the book brings fresh insights into issues that have been long discussed in the field of women’s history and are also debated today. However, despite its focus on women, the book is conceptually not so much focused on gender as it is on profession, business, career, qualifications, skills, and work. By applying such concepts to analyzing women’s endeavours, the book aims at challenging the conventional ideas about them.

Women, fashion, consumption, luxury, and education are the main subjects of our researchers. The contributors of this volume accompanied women and objects in their travels across Modern Europe and offered thorough and diverse analyses connecting the circulation of people with the circulation of ideas. Making use of archive materials, visual sources and museum collections, the authors point out the richness of the region and the role of women in promoting new ideas of modernity. This will help the public to better know and understand the importance of women's sociability in building new nations and constructing new identities in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

This book examines property legislation and the actual position of women in receiving, holding and passing on family property as daughters, wives and as widows throughout history. Traditionally the prevailing view has been that women have been disadvantaged in the distribution of property and therefore less interesting as objects of study. This volume challenges this view and explores the securing of property for families or for individuals through transfers in the shape of dowries, marriage contracts, wills and other arrangements, as well as how women used and distributed the property they were holding.The scope of the volume is both urban and rural, analysing the position of women in relation to family property through contributions from a wide geographic area. The chapters investigate the situation in southern and northern Europe, across the Atlantic and Africa throughout the 18th to the 20th century. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in gender and history and social history.

This volume explores the role of women in business in nineteenth-century Northern French textile centers. Lille and the surrounding towns were then dominated by big and small family businesses, and many were run by women. Those women did not withdraw into the parlour as the century progressed and the ‘separate ideology’ spread. Neither did they become mere figure heads - most were business persons in their own rights. Yet, they have left almost no traces in the collective memory, and historians assume they ceased to exist. This book therefore seeks to answer three interrelated questions: How common were those women, and what kind of business did they run? What factors facilitated or impeded their activities? And finally, why have they been forgotten, and why has their representations in regional and academic history been so at odd with reality? Indirectly, this study also sheds light on the process of industrialization in this region, and on industrialists’ strategies.

What does material culture tell us about gendered identities and how does gender reveal the meaning of spaces and things? If we look at the objects that we own, covet and which surround us in our everyday culture, there is a clear connection between ideas about gender and the material world. This book explores the material culture of the past to shed light on historical experiences and identities. Some essays focus on specific objects, such as an eighteenth-century jug or a 20th powder puff, others on broader material environments, such as the sixteenth-century guild or the interior of a 20th century pub, while still others focus on the paraphernalia associated with certain actions, such as letter-writing or maintaining 18th century men's hair. Written by scholars in a range of history-related disciplines, the essays in this book offer exposés of current research methods and interests. These demonstrate to students how a relationship between material culture and gender is being addressed, while also revealing a variety of intellectual approaches and topics.