Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-f97m6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-11T23:40:38.975Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender and Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Angel Kwolek-Folland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In response to an invitation from the editor of Enterprise & Society, last year David Sicilia and I put out a call for papers for a special issue of the journal that would focus on gender and business history. The call elicited twenty-five submissions, an impressive array of scholarship from authors who addressed the subject from a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. From these submissions, we chose the four articles that appear in this volume and three others that will be published in the next issue of Enterprise & Society (June 2001). We made our final selections on the basis of thematic, national, and organizational representativeness and on the ways in which the articles complemented each other and revealed aspects of the “state of the field.” Let me thank the more than fifty referees who generously read and commented anonymously on the original submissions. I enjoyed working with them, with the authors, and with David in this communal endeavor.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Enterprise and Society 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1. See, for example, Scott, Joan W., Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, Minn., 1989)Google Scholar.

2. John, Richard R., “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand after Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 151–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipartito, Kenneth, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 1–41.Google Scholar

3. Earle, Alice Morse, Home Life in Colonial Days (New York, 1898)Google Scholar, and Stage Coach and Tavern Days (New York, 1900)Google Scholar.

4. Dexter, Elisabeth Anthony, Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 (Boston, 1924)Google Scholar; Spruill, Julia Cherry, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; and Fucini, Joseph J. and Fucini, Suzy, Entrepreneurs: The Men and Women behind Famous Brand Names and How They Made It (Boston, 1985).Google Scholar

5. Kwolek-Folland, Angel, Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. Had these historians been as sensitive to ethnicity and race as we are today, they also would have found African American, Jewish, Irish, Native American, and other women doing business.

6. Smith, Bonnie G., Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1981).Google Scholar

7. Heidi Hartmann, , “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs 1 (Spring 1976): 137—70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” ibid. 6 (Spring 1981): 366–94Google Scholar; Sanday, Peggy, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Inequality (New York, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Hareven, Tamara, “Family Time and Industrial Time: Family and Work in a Planned Corporation Town, 1900-1924,” Journal of Urban History 1 (1975): 365—89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Tilly, Louise and Scott, Joan W., Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

9. For a useful overview, see Connell, R. W., Masculinities (Berkeley, Calif., 1995)Google Scholar.

10. Several works that deal with masculinity and business history include Davis, Clark, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore, Md., 2000)Google Scholar; Kwolek-Folland, Angel, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, Md., 1994)Google Scholar; Raucher, Alan R., “Dime Store Chains: The Making of Organization Men, 1880-1940,” Business History Review 65 (Spring 1991): 130—63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and San-dage, Scott, Forgotten Men: Failure in American Culture, 1819-1893Google Scholar (forthcoming).

11. See, for example, Ehrenreich, Barbara, “Fondling My Stock Options,” The Progressive 64, no. 7 (July 2000): 16Google Scholar, and “Helping the Rich Stay that Way,” Time 143, no. 16 (18 April 1994): 86—87Google Scholar; and Nader, Ralph, “Big Consumer,” Mother Jones 15, no. 7 (Nov.-Dec. 1990): 21—23.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Czarniawska, Barbara, Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutionalldentity (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar; Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana, Ill., 1987)Google Scholar; special issue on “Corporate Culture” of Social Text 44 (Fall/Winter 1995)Google Scholar; Zelizer, Viviana, The Social Meaning of Money (Princeton, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar; and Zukin, Sharon and DiMaggio, Paul, Structures of Capital: The Social Organization of the Economy (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

13. Blaszczyk, Regina, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, Md., 2000)Google Scholar; Kwolek-Folland, , Engendering Business;Google Scholar Peiss, Kathy, Hope in a Jar: The Making of American Beauty Culture (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Rose, Mark H., Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park, Pa., 1995)Google Scholar; and Scanlon, Jennifer, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Walker, Juliet E. K., The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. For a comprehensive collection of essays on women and business, see Yeager, Mary A., ed., Women in Business (Cheltenham, U.K., 1999).Google Scholar

14. See, for example, Tone, Andrea, “Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age,” Journal ofAmerican History 87, no. 2 (Sept. 2000): 435—59.Google Scholar

15. On the importance of unpaid household labor to the development of modern capitalism, see Boydston, Jeanne, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

16. See, for example, Ginzberg, Lori D., Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn., 1990)Google Scholar; Sander, Kathleen, The Business of Charity: The Woman’s Exchange Movement, 1832-1900 (Urbana, Ill., 1998)Google Scholar; Tetrault, Lisa, Ph.D. candidate in U.S. women’s history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, communication with author, March 2000.Google Scholar

17. Brown, Elsa Barkley, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs 14 (Spring 1989): 610—35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weare, Walter B., Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana, Ill., 1977)Google Scholar.

18. Gordon, Avery, “The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management,” Social Text 44 (Fall/Winter 1995): 3—30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Grameen Bank home page: http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/>, information as of Feb.2000.

20. On the intersection of class, race, and gender in women’s small businesses, see Gamber, Wendy, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1997). On race and women’s businesses, see Walker, History of Black Business in America.Google Scholar