Amy Erickson

This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) theme is Accelerate Action – a call for ‘swift and decisive steps’ to advance gender equality across the personal and professional spheres. Since 2001, IWD has been a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to ‘advancing and celebrating’ women’s equality, but its history goes much further back. 

The history of IWD

IWD originated in 1908 with demands for better working conditions: women marched in New York City and Chicago demanding shorter hours, better pay, their own union, and full suffrage. In 1909, 400 immigrant women at the Triangle Shirtwaist (blouse) Factory in New York went on strike. Clara Lemlich (Ukrainian, speaking in Yiddish) led the largest industry-wide walkout in the city’s history, an ‘uprising’ of 20,000 women garment workers. This resulted in the first permanent trade unions for women in the USA.

Members of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) of New York pose with a banner calling for the 8 hour day.

Theresa Malkiel (Russian), head of the Woman’s Committee of the Socialist Party of America, proposed the first National Woman’s Day on 28 February 1910. In the same year, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, attended by over 100 women from 17 countries, German activists Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin proposed an International Women’s Day to campaign for equal political and labour rights. This proposal broke with the mainstream socialist argument that working-class women must seek progress through supporting working-class men.  

Theresa Malkiel, c.1910.

On 19 March 1911, more than one million people attended IWD rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. One week later, the Triangle Factory fire in New York City killed more than 140 mostly Jewish women workers, sharpening demands to improve working conditions in the US.

Factory employment provided opportunities for workers to share information and to organise protests on a large scale. But factory work was not the most common form of employment at this time, and many working women were not included in these types of networks. Although women have always worked for pay, this was rarely in a large place like a factory; in an earlier blog, we explored the prevalence of women working from home (either their own or someone else’s), or in small shops and workshops.  

Olwen Hufton characterised women’s work prior to c.1900 as an ‘economy of makeshifts’, picking up odd jobs as and when to make ends meet. This undoubtedly describes the labour of that half of the population of both sexes who had few or no assets. And women were always in a worse position than men because their wages were lower.  

However, among that half of the population which had assets of any kind, the picture is more complicated. This post explores the least-known form of women’s work: business ownership, often known as entrepreneurship. It argues that a better understanding of the diversity of women’s past economic roles can only help to ‘Accelerate Action’, as this year’s IWD theme asks. 

Female entrepreneurs in the past

The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs is based on the England and Wales census data from 1851-1911. It uses the original meaning of ‘entrepreneur’ as someone who takes the risk of business upon themselves – that is, who is self-employed, or employs others. Carry van Lieshout and colleagues have found that around one third of late-19th-century entrepreneurs were female. The great majority of these, like the majority of male entrepreneurs, ran small businesses.  

Women were probably more likely to be entrepreneurs of necessity (needing to work from home with small children) than to be opportunity entrepreneurs, spotting gaps in the market that could profitably be filled. But there were certainly those as well. In a culture where women’s wages stagnated between one half and two thirds of men’s wages over centuries, small business offered the possibility of self-sufficiency. 

Eighteenth-century evidence from account books, guild records, and business cards shows women in business even at elite levels in the City of London. This evidence of women in business was discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when history was developing as a field of study in universities. Historians then were surprised to find women working in an apparently self-determined way outside of the low-paid, low-skilled jobs of service and factory work which dominated their own day.  

However, when interest in women’s history reappeared at the end of 20th century, the focus was on history from below. The earlier work was dismissed as being too rosy and overly optimistic. Hufton in 1984 argued that ‘the success stories of women in business are restricted to a handful of women … and these success stories are usually closely associated with the performance of husband or father’. Research in the 21st century has shown that certainly many women inherited businesses from their father or mother or husband, but there is no evidence that familial influence was any greater than with men who inherited businesses from their father or mother or wife.

A handful of women?

The Sleepe sisters, whose mid-18th century business cards are represented here, all learned their trade of fan-making from their mother. Their father was a musician. 

Business cards of Martha Sleepe, Mary Sansom, and Esther Sleepe. British Museum.

All three sisters, like their mother, were located in Cheapside, the most expensive shopping street in London. Mary Sleepe married John Sansom, who worked in imported woods, so produced the only known card representing husband and wife in different businesses (middle image above, showing Mary Sleepe at the top of the card, and John Sansom below). Being listed first, Mary appears to have had more name recognition than her husband. When Esther Sleepe married Charles Burney, a musician like her father,, she simply changed her surname and address on her new business card (below).

Trade card for Esther Burney fan shop, 1745–1820. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Examples of businesswomen like those in the Sleepe family have previously been thought of as very rare exceptions. But a rapidly growing body of research over the last 20 years has found more and more substantial businesswomen, to the point where they can no longer be thought of even as unusual. They are connected to some of the 18th century’s best-known names. The Sleepes were the novelist Frances Burney’s mother, aunts and grandmother. William Hogarth’s sisters ran a children’s clothing shop, his mother sold medicines, and his principal patron was Mary Edwards, who managed large estates of her own. After his death, his widow Jane Hogarth managed the print business for 25 years.  

Caricaturist James Gillray’s printer (and landlady and personal support) was Hannah Humphrey. Poet and scholar Thomas Gray’s mother and aunt were milliners who paid for his education at Eton and Cambridge. Elizabeth Baring founded Baring’s Bank with her sons; Eleanor Coade invented coadestone, which decorates some of the most prominent buildings in Britain and around the world; ‘bluestocking’ Elisabeth Montagu was also a colliery owner; Mary Blackstone, mother of the jurist William, was a silk mercer; Elizabeth Howland, daughter of East India Company chairman Josiah Child, built Howland Docks in Surrey. Wealthy gentlewoman Ellen Morewood saw no conflict between having her portrait painted by George Romney and running her Derbyshire colliery and ironstone extraction operation.

George Romney, Ellen Morewood (1790).

Thousands of businesswomen are of course unknown today: printers, dressmakers, school proprietors, and actresses and playwrights who were also theatre shareholders. At the gentry and aristocratic end, women running estates were not ‘remarkable’ or even ‘unusual’, as National Trust houses would have us believe. It was a regular occurrence.  

Why this matters today

Some historians see women in business as agents of their own destiny; others see them as capitalist collaborators. We do not know how they saw themselves, or whether they were in fact exploited or exploitative. Without taking a moral position, their existence is significant because it must change the way we see women in the past: there is no suggestion that women should restrict their market activities until the end of the 18th century, and then it is only for a tiny slice of the population. This history must also change the way we see business: a mixed-sex market is quite different to the all-male market that has often been assumed as the norm.  

Most women in high-prestige, highly paid jobs today, believe that they are newcomers in their fields. They accept limits on their expectations because they believe that improvements will take time. To think of oneself instead as the inheritor of a long line of antecedent female businesswomen and entrepreneurs might severely limit ones patience with the status quo. Feeling exceptional is not as empowering as feeling part of a longer history.

Conclusion

A better understanding of women’s past economic roles and the history of women’s work is crucial if we are to ‘Accelerate Action’, as this year’s IWD theme asks. In the West, IWD fell into abeyance after the First World War because of its association with communism. In the late 1960s, second-wave feminism revived IWD as a day of protest, and the date was fixed on March 8 in Europe and the US. In 1975 the day was adopted by the United Nations, as ‘a time to reflect on progress made’ and ‘celebrate acts of courage and determination’ by ordinary women.  

History suggests that critical thinking is just as important as celebration.  

National Federation of Women Workers Banner; People’s History Museum.

Further reading

Free online

• Collinge, P., ‘Ellen Morewood (1741-1824), colliery owner and ironstone extractor‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2016).
• Erickson, A. L., City Women in the 18th Century 
• Erickson, A. L., ‘Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London’, Business History 66:1 (2024). 
• van Lieshout, C., et al, ‘Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851-1911’, Social History 44:4 (2019). 
• https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Timeline 
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Strike | American Experience | Official Site | PBS

Paywall

• Aston, J., Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2020). 
• Aston, J., and Anderson, O., Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England (Bloomsbury, 2024). 
• Aston, J., and Bishop, C., (eds.), Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2020). 
• Bishop, C., Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (New South, 2015). 
• Collins, J., ‘Jane Holt, milliner, and other women in business: Apprentices, freewomen and mistresses in the Clothworkers’ Company, 1606-1800′, Textile History 44 (2013).
• Gowing, L., Ingenious trade: Women and work in seventeenth-century London (2021).

Tags: entrepreneurs, women's employment, women's history, women's work

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