Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London

Abstract

Research on eighteenth-century female entrepreneurs has not been widely acknowledged beyond specialists, despite repeated calls in the literature on business for more attention to the family and to women. This article employs a new source – trade or business cards, which were themselves new in the eighteenth century – together with a range of other sources, to create biographical sketches of wealthy businesswomen in luxury trades, in order to examine the relationship between business, marriage, and succession for women in highly skilled, highly capitalised trades. Despite legal restrictions on married women, marriage did not mark a hiatus in the careers of these women, who appear to have maintained their businesses regardless of marital status. As widows, they maintained proprietorship decades beyond their sons’ majority. The normality of eighteenth-century women in business has implications for the history of women, of business, and of work more broadly.