Women and Business since 1500: Invisible Presences in Europe and North America?

Description

This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners, co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship, it identifies the economic, social, legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms, and their evolution, shaped not only those women's experience of business, but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries, documented in sources and, partly as a consequence, viewed by historians.

Beatrice Craig is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa, Canada, where she teaches courses on women's history. Her main area of research is the socio-economic and socio-cultural impacts of the emergence of industrial capitalism on Atlantic societies. Her previous publications include Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres (with Robert Beachy and Alastair Owens, 2006).