She's the Boss

The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II

By Debra Michals

Rutgers University Press

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders – and women themselves – saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups so that today, they own more than 14 million businesses, 40% of all US companies.

She’s the Boss chronicles the forces that made entrepreneurship attractive to women. In rich detail, Debra Michals shares the stories of the countless women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities who contributed to this important history. The book also explores the intersection of women’s personal choices within changing social, political, and economic factors, such as the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, ongoing workplace and credit discrimination; civil and women’s rights activism and activist entrepreneurs, the 1970s recession and 1980s “Reagan Revolution,” and more recently, the internet, crowd-funding, and social entrepreneurship.

In less than half a century, women have gone from owning 7 percent of all businesses in the U.S. to nearly half of them. How? Debra Michals has gifted scholars with an illuminating, deeply researched, and much-needed history to explain this remarkable but still overlooked transformation. Joshua Clark Davis, author of From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs

This terrific and timely book not only tells the history of women's entrepreneurship since World War II in all its breadth and diversity but also makes you think 'Gee, maybe I should start my own business.' If so, you will be in excellent company. Susan Ware, author of Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

From home-based businesses to multi-million-dollar firms, this compelling history shows how some women in the mid-twentieth century opted out of discrimination and glass ceilings to combine work and family, make an income, and express creativity by becoming their own boss. Attentive to women of color and lesbians, with an eye on exemplary biographies and shifting political economy, Debra Michals explores the possibilities and limits of small business, including feminist and civil rights enterprises, under capitalism. Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and The Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

DEBRA MICHALS is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and chair pro tem of the humanities department at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Introduction
1 From War Worker to Business Owner: Women, Enterprise, and Postwar Reconversion, 1945-1950
2   Motherhood and Its Discontents: the 1950s, Domesticity, the Cold War, and Women’s Business Ownership
3   “Doin’ It for Themselves:” Race, Gender, and Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Socially Conscious 1960s
4   Sisterhood is (Economically) Powerful: Civil Rights, Feminism, and Women’s Business Ownership in the 1960s and 1970s
5   Becoming “Entrepreneurs:” Women’s Businesses in the ‘70s Recession and “Go-go” ‘80s
Epilogue: Women’s Entrepreneurship in the 1990s and Beyond
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

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