Abstract
Women are currently underrepresented in the business world, either as firm owners or managers. This has led many to assume that independent business women were almost nonexistent in the prefeminist past; if they were involved in a business, it had to have been in their husband’s or in the one of an immediate male relative, and by the nineteenth century, the spread of the “separate sphere ideology” would have made even this involvement problematic. Recent research on the topic on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain has however challenged this assumption, uncovering instead a robust female presence among high-end and mid-brow retailers, some crafts and even among large-scale business owners. Historians like Hunt, Barker, Philips, Kay, and Aston argue that as far as the middling sorts were concerned, the business of life often translated into a life in business. Supporting a family was a responsibility shared by husbands and wives, and although a lot of women assisted father, brothers, or sons in their activities, a significant proportion were running their own, independent business. 1
Women in business may not have been an exclusively English phenomenon. Work in English by Van den Heuvel on the Netherland, Beachy and Rabuzzi on Germany, Ulianova on Russia, and mine on northern France describe a similar situation. 2 However, the literature in English on continental business women is limited, leaving large parts of the continent in the dark. Carol Gold’s study of Copenhagen business women is therefore a welcome addition to the existing corpus. The book is based on a database of some 3,000 women identified from a wide variety of sources, who legally worked on their own, were properly licensed, and paid the business tax when wealthy enough between 1740 and 1835. It is comprised of four chapters and a conclusion. The introduction places the subject in its historiographical context, describes the economic and social conditions of the time, details the methodology used, and highlights the difficulties in making those women visible. It then successively discusses three categories of self-employed women: peddlers and market women who carried out their activities in the street, middle-class merchants and craftsperson who conducted their business indoors, and finally a small group of mostly widowed women who ran large family firms.
Her conclusions will not surprise those familiar with the field. Copenhagen self-employed women were very similar to their counterparts in Britain and other parts of Europe depicted by the studies mentioned above. The proportion of women among business tax payers (7 percent) falls within the range of business run by women elsewhere (between 6 percent and 14 percent). Those women were not all widows, although most women running a large business were; a significant proportion were married, and their business was independent and even unrelated to their husband’s. This undermines the older concept of the “family economy,” which claimed that women worked as part of a household team. Most self-employed women were clustered in a few sectors associated with female responsibilities (food, textiles, and clothing), but they were not confined to those and the rest was spread thinly over a wide range of occupation. Widows however were the ones more likely to be found in nonconventionally feminine sectors. Self-employed women therefore were neither ghettoized nor immiserated by definition.
Although well-documented and relying on a broad range of sources, Gold’s study provides the reader with only an impressionistic picture of business women—or as she states, with a sense of what was possible for women to do. This again will not surprise those who have tried to make past women more visible: the sources always tell us less than we want to know. Those who produced them were not particularly interested in documenting female activities. Gold further argues that women’s low visibility results from the fact they engaged in activities their contemporaries considered normal and appropriate.
Gold ventures a few explanations as to why Copenhagen women could so easily run a business: there was the royal government’s determination to undermine the power of the guilds by granting women permission to go into trade—but guilds themselves were tolerant of women engaging in their activities without being members; there was also the authorities’ desire to limit the number of women liable to become public charge because of a dead, absent, or incapable husband. The Danish inheritance laws also facilitated widow’s economic activities, as the husband’s estate was not settled until the widow remarried (if she remarried). I found this proviso interesting because the custom of Lille (in northern France) also let the surviving spouse remain in full possession of a couple’s assets until he or she remarried. The reason was to prevent the premature dissolution of a family business.
Women historians, and especially historians of women in business, will find the book well done, interesting, and useful. I am however afraid that it will be deemed anecdotical outside this narrow group. It is short (144 pages plus notes and bibliography) and the patchy nature of the evidence shows through. A more sustained engagement with the historiography, and a more robust comparison with the situation elsewhere (at least with England), could have minimized this problem, by showing there was, at least in North-Western Europe, a business culture that easily accommodated women’s activities and did not seem to have seriously discriminated against them. Gold in particular stresses that middling sorts women did not necessarily work with their husband as part of the family economy as Tilly and Scott had defined it but that the two-occupation household was quite common. Tilly and Scott’s work has aged well but is certainly not cutting hedge any more, and other authors have documented the existence of many two-occupation households in the urban areas. Gold, for instance, could have compared Copenhagen with the London described by Erickson in her 2008 article, article she lists in the bibliography but underuses. She also shows that Copenhagen self-employed women were an integral component of the city’s economy, a conclusion which echoes Hannah Barker on the centrality of businesswomen in English urban society—but again, it is left to the readers familiar with Barker’s work to note the similarities. The book in short stops short of its potential.
On a different note, the book is materially attractive and includes lovely illustrations, perhaps because it was produced by a museum. In the days of the not-so-cheap paperbacks, this is worth noting.