BUSINESSWOMEN IN 18TH-CENTURY LONDON

PROFESSOR AMY ERICKSON

Professor Amy Erickson is a Professor of Feminist History and she codirects the programme on The Occupational Structure of England & Wales 1379-1911 at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure (www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk).

As a historian investigating women’s employment in the period 1500-1800, I originally looked at the records of the London guilds, known as Companies, thinking that I would just eliminate them as a useful source of information because it was widely assumed that women were only admitted to the Companies in the late twentieth century.

What I found instead was that young women were trained as apprentices and that ‘mistresses’, as well as ‘masters’ of the Companies, took on and trained apprentices of their own. Women constituted only a small proportion of each Company’s membership, but that still amounted to many hundreds active in the business at any one time in the City.

The word ‘entrepreneur’ was first used in the eighteenth century to mean a person who undertook the risks of an enterprise; from the later nineteenth century, it meant someone in business on their own account, whether they employed others or not. The City of London until around 1800 required women, just like men, to hold guild membership and the ‘Freedom of the City’ in order to run a business. It was the only place in Britain which did so, and as a result, we know more about businesswomen in the City than anywhere else because the records survive.

In the 2019 outdoor exhibition City Women in the Eighteenth Century (now online at citywomen.hist.cam.ac.uk), I was able to showcase the little-known elite female entrepreneurs in the heart of the City of London, using their business cards (now in the

BROOK ROBINSON COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

British Museum) to tell their stories. These included silversmiths, jewellers, printers, fan-makers, chandlers (candle merchants), a whalebone merchant, and a wide range of textile dealers and clothing manufacturers and retailers.

In a subsequent study of marriage patterns and business succession among these wealthy entrepreneurs, I found that young women trained in trade did not relinquish that business upon marriage. Women who had married also continued to trade as widows, sometimes in partnership with an adult son but sometimes entirely separately. ‘‘Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London’ is forthcoming in the journal Business History and can be read at Taylor & Francis Online.

These entrepreneurs help me to understand employment more broadly because they took apprentices, employed journeywomen as well as journeymen, shopwomen, and subcontractors, and of course, they required domestic servants and wetnurses for their children.

I have now successfully secured a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership which will fund a PhD student to undertake their own study of female entrepreneurs in eighteenth-century London, which might focus on a particular area or a particular sector, such as the printing trades, or metal work, or food and drink provision.