Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England

In 1859, the economist, social commentator and journalist Harriet Martineau wrote,Today, over 150 years later, Martineau’s comments still ring true and much of the female contribution to the nineteenth-century English urban economy, particularly in the world of business in the latter half of the nineteenth century, remains unacknowledged and hidden from history. This book seeks to address this issue by using data gathered from late nineteenth-century Birmingham and Leeds to highlight the commonplace occurrence of women engaging in business in nineteenth-century Britain; and by examining the social, political and economic activities of these women, to demonstrate the flaws and limitations of accepting gender as a lens through which to view the engagement of women in the urban economy.

On 13 May 1872, a sixty-six-year-old woman named Ann Buckley died at her home in Leeds, Yorkshire. She left behind an estate valued at £14,000, which included paintings and prints, musical instruments, a warehouse property on Greek Street in the centre of Leeds, four trust funds each worth £2500 and the ‘capital share and interest in the business of Cap Manufacturers and Clothiers now carried on by me in co-partnership with my sons’. Ann’s late husband John Buckley had established the business in 1834 and operated it until his death in December 1850. After John’s death, Ann became the sole proprietor and although she employed her sons Joshua and John Camm in the business from this date, and eventually made them partners in 1856, Ann remained the senior (and only named) partner in the business until her death in 1872. Ann’s last will and testament reveals that in addition to her capital stake in ‘Ann Buckley and Sons’, she was also the sole owner of the firm’s large warehouse building on Greek Street, where the business had relocated in the mid-1860s. Upon her death, Ann used her capital stake in Buckley and Sons, and her warehouse property on Greek Street, to secure the financial future of her two sons and business partners and her two surviving daughters Eliza and Amelia.

The recent reassessment of the position of female business owners in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, and new data emerging from the USA, argues that whilst industrialisation may have caused some economic and social changes, it did not necessarily result in women losing the opportunity to inherit, establish, own and operate business enterprises. Data from mid-nineteenth-century Birmingham and London and late nineteenth-century America shows that women continued to own businesses beyond 1850, contradicting the story that by the mid-nineteenth century, the opportunity for women to exercise economic agency had passed and their fate had become inextricably bound to the private, domestic sphere. The data presented in the following chapters will demonstrate that Birmingham and London were in fact only small sections of a much bigger picture, one where women continued to trade throughout the nineteenth century, and use their position as business owners to play an active role in nineteenth-century society.

The previous two chapters have established that there were a significant number of female business owners trading in mid- to late nineteenth-century England and they did so in many different trades other than those associated with female domestic duties. Yet more information can be uncovered about female business owners than simply the types of trade that they owned. Discovering how women became business owners, the length of time that they traded, if they traded alone or in partnerships, the locations that they traded from and the advertisements that they commissioned, enables us to start understanding the motivations, agency and skills of female business owners.

The previous chapters have explored the professional lives of female business owners in the nineteenth century, looking at how they came to be in trade, the different trades that they engaged in, the way that they traded and their geographical location within the busy urban centres of Birmingham and Leeds. The analysis carried out in these chapters has illuminated the complex nature and character of businesswomen and shown how their existence challenges established historical paradigms and changes our understanding of the economic agency of women in late nineteenth-century England. Chapter 5 builds on this analysis by using the 100 case studies from Birmingham and Leeds to investigate the personal lives of female business owners to demonstrate that although they may have owned successful businesses, they did not lose their feminine identity or have to ‘opt out’ of activities such as marriage and motherhood.

Previous chapters have explored the business lives of female entrepreneurs: how women came to be in trade, the locations that they traded from, the business strategies that they employed and the relationships between family and friends that bound all these experiences together. This chapter explores how the women came to leave trade, how they secured their financial future and what happened to their assets after their death. Central to this chapter is an examination of probate records of the 100 female business owners from Birmingham and Leeds. This will enable the composition of their financial portfolios to be examined and their methods of estate distribution to be analysed. Research by R.J. Morris into the investments of middle-class men argues that the contents of investment portfolios, and the way that they were distributed on death, can be seen as tangible manifestations of middle-class male status and behaviour. This chapter will use the probate records of the 100 female business owners to demonstrate that the estate distribution methods and behaviours observed by Morris were not the sole preserve of male testators, and that women were able to utilise the exact same methods to provide for their families and cement their middle-class status.

This book opened with a quote from Harriet Martineau voicing her concern that the people of Britain remained ignorant of the amount of business in the country carried out by women. Until very recently, many researchers of economic, business and women’s history in nineteenth-century England also shared this ignorance, and it is only through work by Barker, Phillips and Kay that the actions of businesswomen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have begun to be recognised. In spite of this recent work however, the business activities of women outside of London and in the latter half of the nineteenth century had, prior to this study, received very little academic attention. The preceding chapters have addressed the issue and through using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies and a wide range of sources, have built upon this new body of research to shed light on female business ownership in late nineteenth-century England.