Female Enterprise Behind the Discursive Veil in Nineteenth-Century Northern France

ISBN-13: 9781137574121 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 303 str.

Beatrice Craig

Opis

This volume explores the role of women in business in nineteenth-century Northern French textile centers. This book therefore seeks to answer three interrelated questions: How common were those women, and what kind of business did they run?

Spis treści

Introduction: Middle-class women and business in nineteenth-century northern France.- 2. Lille and its arrondissement in the nineteenth-century.- 3. Manufacturers and merchants in the first half of the nineteenth-century.- 4. Manufacturers and merchants after 1850.- 5. Separating spheres?.- 6. Women in crafts and retail.- 7. Why a continuing joint sphere?.- 8. Generating income.- 9. Behind the discursive veil.- Conclusion

O autorze

Béatrice Craig is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Women and Business since 1500: Invisible Presences in Europe and North America? (2015) and co-editor with R. Beachy and A. Owens of Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres (2006).

Blurb

This volume explores the role of women in business in nineteenth-century Northern French textile centers. Lille and the surrounding towns were then dominated by big and small family businesses, and many were run by women. Those women did not withdraw into the parlour as the century progressed and the ‘separate ideology’ spread. Neither did they become mere figure heads - most were business persons in their own rights. Yet, they have left almost no traces in the collective memory, and historians assume they ceased to exist. This book therefore seeks to answer three interrelated questions: How common were those women, and what kind of business did they run? What factors facilitated or impeded their activities? And finally, why have they been forgotten, and why has their representations in regional and academic history been so at odd with reality? Indirectly, this study also sheds light on the process of industrialization in this region, and on industrialists’ strategies.