Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England

Engagement in the Urban Economy

Jennifer Aston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319308807
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

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 aplatform to participate in the economic, philanthropic, and political public sphere.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jennifer AstonFemale Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century EnglandPalgrave Studies in Economic History10.1007/978-3-319-30880-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jennifer Aston¹

(1)

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

End Abstract

In 1859, the economist, social commentator and journalist Harriet Martineau wrote,

‘we go on talking as if it were still true that every woman is, or ought to be, supported by her father, brother or husband…We are (probably to a man) unaware of the amount of the business life in England done by women’. ¹

Today, over 150 years later, Martineau’s comments still ring true and much of the female contribution to the nineteenth-century English urban economy, particularly in the world of business in the latter half of the nineteenth century, remains unacknowledged and hidden from history. This book seeks to address this issue by using data gathered from late nineteenth-century Birmingham and Leeds to highlight the commonplace occurrence of women engaging in business in nineteenth-century Britain; and by examining the social, political and economic activities of these women, to demonstrate the flaws and limitations of accepting gender as a lens through which to view the engagement of women in the urban economy.

Local history societies and lecturers delivering undergraduate modules focusing primarily on the local community have long been aware of the breadth and depth of female involvement in the local economy. However this knowledge has not generally been expanded to an examination on a larger scale. The importance of working-class women’s contribution to the family economy has been the focus of much academic attention from historians including Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck writing in the early twentieth century, and Maxine Berg, Jane Humphries, Sally Alexander, June Purvis, Pat Hudson and Pamela Sharp in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Yet women who were acting as economic agents on their own account in the nineteenth century have received scant attention, save for the mention that widows would sometimes act as caretakers of their late husband’s firm until a son reached the age of majority.²

There are of course some significant exceptions to this, notably the publication of Hannah Barker’s The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830 and Nicola Phillips’ Women in Business 1700–1850, both published in 2006, and Alison C Kay’s The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise, Home and Household in London c.1800–1870 published in 2009. These monographs represent a move from a historiography which tended to view women in terms of the different ways in which they related to men, to one that looks instead for examples of women acting independently. Yet a common feature of these publications is that they focus only on the eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries, meaning that although Barker, Phillips and Kay show conclusively that female business ownership was a common occurrence and that women had far more legal and economic opportunities than previously assumed, the lives of women trading beyond 1870 remain unexamined.

There is however an important story to be told; unpublished research has given a tantalising glimpse of the wealth of information that can be discovered about the lives of female business owners in late nineteenth-century Britain, and has sketched a picture of continuity rather than change.³ Studies which look beyond 1870 are particularly important in light of women’s changing legal position, most notably after the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, giving married women the right to acquire, inherit and dispose of real and personal property in the same way as unmarried women. Other post-1850 legislation which directly addressed the position of women in nineteenth-century England and Wales included the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1878, and the Infant Custody Act of 1873. It was only after these Acts of Parliament were enacted that women were able to protect their earned assets and their children from erstwhile husbands, although the cost of doing so may still have been so prohibitively high as to prevent the vast majority of women from seeking recourse under them. Analysis of female business ownership in the context of post-1850 legislation is especially important as it enables us to test Phillips’ assertion that women traded successfully in spite of the restrictions imposed by the English legal system for a later period, as well as determining what (if any) impact such legislation had on the inclination of women to enter the business world.⁴

Legal sources can also help to uncover information about the material culture experienced by businesswomen. Historians including Beverly Lemire have shown how intertwined everyday life and business were, and the examination of the women’s probate records can act as a springboard to uncovering far more information about the life of businesswomen in 1800s England.⁵ The friendship and familial networks of the women can be charted by extracting the names of their executors, trustees, and beneficiaries. This data extends our understanding of the relationships experienced by women far beyond the basic family information given in sources such as census returns. Uncovering the networks of trusted executors and beloved beneficiaries has revealed that nineteenth-century businesswomen had networks that stretched far beyond their local area and often internationally.

The probate records of men have been analysed by several historians including Alastair Owens and R.J. Morris, in an effort to determine common behaviours that might indicate certain economic or social status, namely, membership of the elusive ‘middle classes’. The value of the estates is really only the beginning of the story; much more important are the methods of wealth distribution employed, the people listed as executors, trustees, and beneficiaries, and the individual items - be they philanthropic donations, domestic chattels or the tools of business - listed in the wills. The inclusion, and indeed the exclusion, of these items offers one way to begin classification of a group of people for whom difference is almost more identifying than similarity.

Significantly, the items bequeathed by the businesswomen, the relationships that they had, the networks that they belonged to, and the way their last wills and testaments were constructed, reveal that the probate behaviour of female business owners mirrored those of middle-class men.⁶ These findings are critically important to our understanding of female engagement in the late nineteenth-century urban economy, as they strongly suggest that contrary to much of the historiography, it was possible for women to cultivate and maintain middle-class status whilst also acting as independent economic agents beyond 1850. This suggests a high degree of continuity between the economic abilities and social status of businesswomen in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and those in the late nineteenth century. Crucially however, the evidence base for these conclusions is extremely small, thus emphasising the importance of a large-scale study.

Nearly a decade on from the publication of The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830, Women in Business 1700–1850 and The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise, Home, and Household in London, 1800–1870, are many unexplore avenues of research, particularly in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, which remains completely unexamined. As will be demonstrated in the following chapters, female business owners remained an integral part of the urban economy across England throughout the nineteenth century and the economic opportunities available to them were not decreasing as the century progressed. Perhaps more importantly, however, the role that business ownership played in the lives of women is explored, thus challenging the assumption that women trading after 1850 were unable to combine entrepreneurship with actively cultivating middle-class status through political and philanthropic activities.

The term businesswoman has been used in many different ways and to describe many different types of economic activity. During the nineteenth century ‘businesswoman’ was interchangeable with female worker and could mean literally ‘a woman who is involved in businesses’, not necessarily as an owner. This definition lacks accuracy and following it would obscure important differences between the lives of women workers and women who owned business enterprises. This distinction is important: women who were employers were able to exert power over employees, dictating their pay and working conditions. Failing to acknowledge this power dynamic removes the ability to recognise women’s agency, and their potential to exploit, as well as to be exploited. The definition followed in the following pages is borrowed from Wendy Gamber who states that a businesswoman ‘is a term to describe female entrepreneurs, self-employed women who ran their own concerns’ and is considered as interchangeable with the term female business owner.⁷ Subsequently this study will not examine women who were involved in business as paid employees, except with respect to daughters and other female relatives of the business owners who were also sometimes employed in the firms.⁸

Recovering data on the lives of women in nineteenth-century England is an often difficult and frustrating task due to problems of data recording and the sometimes sporadic survival of sources. Although there are several groups of people who can prove to be elusive in historical records, it can be particularly difficult to capture female economic contributions in official documents such as census returns because women’s jobs were often seasonal and temporary. The well-established notion of a woman acting in a supportive role to the male head of the household owes a significant debt to the way that census enumerators recorded female occupations. Bridget Hill has found that although the enumerators of the 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871 censuses were supposed to record the occupations of wives and children as well as those of the head of the household, there was very little consistency between each enumerator and as such female occupations were ‘consistently under-recorded’.⁹ This is a particular problem for married women who were often recorded as having their husband’s occupation rather than their own.¹⁰ The under-representation of female occupations was made worse when enumerators of the 1881 census were instructed to consider all women as unoccupied and therefore the recording of female occupations in the 1881, 1891 and 1901 censuses is even more elusive. For those women whose occupations are recorded in the census data, there are still further difficulties to overcome: misspelled names, remarriage and the subsequent change of name, being away on the night of the census, and even the misfiling of online archives are all ways that census records can be absent. Clearly, census returns are an unsatisfactory way of accessing any form of comprehensive data on female engagement in the urban economy, although when the names of businesswomen have been identified, any census data is invaluable in uncovering more details about their lives, and acting as a check on the reliability of the various data sources.

The selection of sources is a crucial element to the success of any research but particularly so for studies of women’s economic and social history where the lack of official sources available to historians and economists trying to examine the role that women played in the past is an issue that recurs repeatedly, regardless of the period or often even the country that one is researching. One suggested solution to this problem is to use a wider range of alternative, ‘unofficial’ sources to create a patchwork effect and try to fill the gaps left by official source material and this is the approach that has been adopted very successfully by historians, including Barker, Phillips and Kay.¹¹ Thus far, historians have used two main sources, trade directories and insurance records, as a primary way to identify women who owned businesses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Both of these records have then been linked to other sources, including census returns, trade cards, family records, personal correspondence, probate records, newspapers, advertisements, maps, rate books, census returns and contemporary literature, to uncover more about the lives of the female business owners.

Research carried out in Birmingham between 1870 and 1881 revealed a significant number of women registering their firms in the trade directories of the town. Moreover, these female-owned firms were of a variety of sizes, trading for different lengths of time in many different sectors, highlighting the need for further examination.¹² As a source for researching the nineteenth-century urban economy, trade directories are incredibly useful because every self-respecting nineteenth-century town would have had at least one trade directory, and by the latter half of the century there was at least one directory published every year. The first trade directories were small publications with simple alphabetical lists, either by trade or surname, giving details of the name, address and trade of people within the town. As the nineteenth century progressed, the trade directories became more elaborate and included several separate volumes giving information on trade people, a street index with details of residents and advertisements. In addition to this, the directories often included maps and histories of the towns and surrounding areas and useful information about local transport timetables, local council members and the meeting times of local societies. Penelope Corfield has argued that the most important purpose of the directories was to act as a guidebook to the town or city equipping a visitor or traveller with everything they needed to know about their new environment.¹³ The later trade directories from Birmingham certainly support this argument but they also show that the publishers of the directories did not want to simply give visitors information, they also sought to broadcast the superior qualities of their particular town through advertising the full range of civic amenities and societies that were available to its inhabitants.

Regardless of the various extra elements that the publishers of trade directories included over the years, the lists of businesses within the town remained at their core. Although business owners had to pay a subscription fee to register their firms in the directory, the charge was relatively small, and the number of small businesses registered in the directories attests to the affordability of the fee. Further evidence suggesting that registering in a trade directory was affordable for all but the very poorest or temporary of firms can be found in the section of the directories that contained the residential details of everyone in the town. In these lists the individual buildings on each street are given together with the name and occupation of the person who owned or rented the premises; virtually every property in the Birmingham directories has the details of the occupier recorded next to them. In addition to registering a firm, it was also possible for business owners to place advertisements in the trade directori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Locating Female Business Owners in the Historiography
• 3. Women and Their Businesses
• 4. Who Was the Victorian Businesswoman?
• 5. The Social Network
• 6. Life After Death
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter