Nineteenth Century Businesswomen A Retrospective Glance at Women Entrepreneurship

The book examines female entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century. Economic history has long accorded women entrepreneurs a very minor place, relegating them to the status of historical anecdotes. The hypothesis of women’s withdrawal from the business sphere after the eighteenth century has long dominated. However, this view has recently been subject to a fundamental questioning. Women did in fact actively contribute to economic development by occupying key positions in the business sphere as independent workers, investors and entrepreneurs. Businesswomen were no exception in the nineteenth century. They ran businesses of all sizes and in a wide range of industrial sectors.

This book helps to bring nineteenth-century women entrepreneurs out of invisibility, by examining their entrepreneurial practices and shedding light on the role of the legal framework in which they operated. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of economic history, business history, history of law, and economics and management sciences in general, interested in a better understanding of female entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1. Introduction. Women and the Industrialization Process: Bringing Female Entrepreneurs out of the Shadows.- Chapter 2. Women and Business in Urban Northern Europe.- Chapter 3. Female Factory Owners in the Industry of Moscow, 1840s–1860s.- Chapter 4. The Story of Rosa – The Fall of a Female Entrepreneur in the Nineteenth Century Pest-Buda.- Chapter 5. Doing Contexts. Women in Family Narratives.- Chapter 6. Handelsfrauen: On the Legal Conditions of Women's Commercial Activity in the Long Nineteenth Century in Central Europe.- Chapter 7. The Woman Trader in French Law in the Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 8. Self-Employed Women as Small Traders - Manufacturers and Retailers in the City of Bologna in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 9. Filomena Ferrari: From Farmer to Entrepreneur; A Successful Case of Swiss Migration to Italy in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 10. Women, Wealth, and Business (Milan, Nineteenth Century).- Chapter 11. Noblewomen, business and financial management in nineteenth-century France.- Chapter 12. A Female Competitor to the Miners of the Pyrenees: How Did Her Rivals View Claudine Le Breton-Pignal?.- Chapter 13. Myths and Biases: An Exploration of Women’s Historical Patenting Activities.

Charlotte Le Chapelain is Professor of Economics at Jean Moulin Lyon III University, France and member of the Centre Lyonnais d’Histoire du Droit et de la Pensée Politique (CHLDPP). She is an associate member of the Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (BETA). She holds a PhD and a Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in economics from the University of Strasbourg, France. Le Chapelain's research interests lie in the fields of cliometrics, economic history, history of economic thought, and business history with a focus in human capital, education, industrialization, economic growth, female entrepreneuship.