A popular account ofthe development ofthe clothing trade in the South Bridge area of Edinburgh, published in 1901 as a publicity device by J. and R. Allan Ltd., a major department store owned by a male entrepreneur, failed to mention a single firm that was owned and operated by a woman, despite the fact that the women's garment trade had been centred on this area ofthe city for decades and there were numerous women with premises in South Bridge.1 This history of economic development in turn-of-the-century Edinburgh?like the similar histories of many other cities during the same period?provides a narrative of business evolution in which the rise of individual firms such as J. and R. Allan Ltd. is linked to the municipal and political affairs ofthe city.2 Women, of course, had no tradition of formal association with the administration of cities or nations and were consequently invisible to such commentators in the past.3 The preoccupations of modern historians have also obscured our understand? ing of the scale and role of women in business. There is a rhetoric common to most business histories that suggests that modern capitalist firms act on the basis of a uniform economic agenda and that behaviour within firms is dictated by entrepreneurial ambition. Such rhetoric was also articulated in the past, es? pecially in contemporary accounts of nineteenth-century business, with their focus on the self-made man, the individualist owner-manager, often engaged in heroic technical innovation and a dedicated pursuit of growth.4 Successful businesses?defined according to market share, employee numbers, commit? ment to innovation, and length of survival?have dominated the interests of business historians, and business behaviour that restricts growth, or innovation, or profit maximization has been characterised as the failure of entrepreneurship.5 Though size-dualism is widely recognised as a one ofthe defining characteristics of nineteenth-century business in Britain, and the vast majority of businesses were small in scale and unmodernised in their structure and strategy, business and economic historians have tended to find this a problematic phenomenon.6 The flowering of women's history over the past twenty years has raised aware? ness of the presence of women in the nineteenth-century business world in certain contexts, particularly in the early-modern period7 and in such pioneer economies as the United States.8 We know a great deal more about women's roles within the family context of small-scale retail,9 and women's contributions to family-firm finance or their strategic marriages to support business partnerships has generated much interest.10 The impact of gender on corporate development and on the internal characteristics of large financial business has also attracted