One of the nice things about working on DECRA is that you are encouraged (compelled?) to develop a community of colleagues in your area. To this end, in early 2023 I held a workshop collating new work on Australian women in business history. I have very fond memories of this day, listening to interesting new work from scholars across economics, history, management and law. Happily, several of these papers now form a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, which has just been published, open access! I previously posted about my contribution to this issue, which discusses women in family business succession. You can also access the introduction, and the other articles here.
The issue explores the place of women in Australian business history, acknowledging their centrality to various enterprises, and the need to redress their absence from dominant narratives about business and corporate success. Business historians have largely neglected the role of women, with Beatrice Craig aptly noting that ‘one does not search for what one believes does not exist’. Women were often hidden in the source material, and business history was largely interested in the large corporations that often excluded women rather than the smaller or informal businesses women had access to. Business history has also had limited engagement with the concept of gender, with, masculinity central to the operation of enterprise, but assumed natural and thereby made invisible in the source material and literature. Women’s and feminist historians also neglected businesswomen, assuming that, in the nineteenth century, middle class white women (and thus all women) retreated into the domestic sphere. Some focussed on women’s labour, but women who were able to, or forced to own and operate businesses fell through the cracks.
From the 1990s, historians internationally have sought to ‘re-engender’ business history. Well-established research, in a range of countries and time periods, has uncovered women’s resistance to or subversion of social and legal barriers to their independence, with women compelled by the ‘economic realities of life’ to provide for themselves and their families. Most has focussed on small business, which had low barriers to entry, required little start-up capital, and could often be combined with domestic and caring responsibilities. Other women found entrepreneurial success via finance and investment, with wealthy women able to secure financial independence in face of legal barriers to property ownership, unequal wages, and concern over the age, health or death of their husband. Family business presented mixed prospects, with some women able to leverage the benefit of family connections, while most were confined by the primogeniture criterion, or succession through the first-born male.
The 1990s were a pretty grim time for Australian business history, with a missing generation of early career researchers diverted into other disciplines, countries, or out of the academy all together (I discuss this in my book. Those remaining had little interest in women or gender in business history, and so research in this field has generally minimised the place of women, and the gendered dimensions of business. Some recent contributions have examined women in small business, the professions, corporations, and family business, though there is still much more to be done.
The articles in this special issue contributes to this recent work, highlighting the opportunities for twenty-first century researchers seeking to understand Australia’s ‘gendered enterprise’. Articles examine barriers for women in business, including initiatives by the state – notably legal restrictions and employment conditions – which rendered women economically dependent on male family members or husbands. Australian society presented equally forceful, intangible, barriers, with the predominance of the nuclear family, and a misogynistic, larrikin culture conferring women to very low status. Women were seen as caretakers, mothers and homemakers, not business owners. These cultural constructions were enduring, and held weight in Australian society long after the legal and employment status of women improved.
It is tempting to consider the relative importance of women’s business. In our well-meaning attempts to advocate for more women in business, we often adopt the ‘business case’ or the argument that women are naturally distinctive entrepreneurs, and as such businesses run by women are more successful or sustainable than those run by men. Besides the risks of reproducing gender stereotypes and the gendered division of labour, the business case presents several conceptual and methodological challenges, namely the myriad measures of ‘success’ including size, scale, profitability, longevity or sustainability. The articles in this issue also suggest that women’s success may be contaminated by bias in source material, women’s lack of access to training or mentorship, or attitudinal attitudes to women in business.
As such, our approach has been to explore women’s success, not as an immutable feminine outcome, but as mediated through the institutions in which women lived. We find that women’s business was often initiated by restrictions on their access to the formal labour market. Women were relied upon for their entrepreneurial abilities, and their work was absolutely essential for the functioning of the business or the financial success of their family. Articles also discuss the way women’s access to business was intersectional, particularly the role of class and the rural-urban divide. The articles also present several provocation for future research, particularly the intersectional questions of race, ethnicity, migration, sexuality, and disability. We discuss women and (binary) gender, though a gender history of Australia’s male business community is sorely needed. There are also now substantial opportunities for comparative research, engaging with flourishing research on these topics overseas.
Thanks to the authors for their fantastic contributions. Thanks also to the team at the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, in particular the editor Kris Inwood, who skilfully shepherded these contributions through rigorous peer review on a tight deadline. I hope you enjoy the collection.