The Business of Women

Women throughout history have inhabited a conceptual space divorced from the world of business. Historians and social commentators have consequently tended to overlook the experiences of women entrepreneurs. Who were these women? What types of businesses did they establish? And how did they justify their work outside the home?

The Business of Women explores the lives of entrepreneurial women – how they were defined and how they defined themselves – in early twentieth-century British Columbia. Contrary to expectation, the profile of the businesswoman that emerges from both quantitative sources and case studies of the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs is not that of an unmarried or particularly rebellious woman. Rather, the typical businesswoman reconciled entrepreneurship with her identity as a wife, mother, or widow. The entrepreneurial woman was the product of a frontier ethos in British Columbia that translated into higher rates of marriage for women and more married women working outside the home than in any other province in Canada. Like men, they worked to support their families.

This groundbreaking study not only establishes women in the history of the world of business, it challenges commonly held beliefs about women, business, and the marriage between them. It will appeal to students and scholars of labour and business history and anyone interested in BC history or the history of women in Canada.