Abstract
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.
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Notes
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Aston, J. (2016). The Social Network. In: Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30880-7_5
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