Women Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century France – INDUSTRIFEM

INDUSTRIFEM

Women Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century France

Were all business leaders in the nineteenth century men? One might think so when reading works in economic history, business history, and the history of entrepreneurship. At a time when gender issues occupy an increasingly prominent place in research in economic history and the history of economic thought, female entrepreneurship remains a blind spot. With regard to the process of industrialization, women’s contribution has mainly been assessed in terms of their participation as wage earners and their remuneration (the “gender wage gap”) in the labor market (Goldin 1995; Merouani and Perrin 2022). Women’s economic participation outside the framework of wage labor has not been the subject of thorough examination. Several normative and contextual factors explain this gap (see Baijot and Le Chapelain 2022). Yet such an examination is essential in order to provide a richer perspective on women’s contribution to long-term economic development. Women business leaders were not exceptions in nineteenth-century France. They managed firms of all sizes (from independent passementerie workers to ironmasters overseeing several hundred workers) and in numerous industrial sectors (the textile industry as well as metallurgy, printing, and others). Nevertheless, they remain in the shadows, including in works on women’s history (Perrot 1998). From this gap emerged the INDUSTRIFEM project. Its aim is to bring French women entrepreneurs out of invisibility by compiling an inventory of them and analyzing the modalities and conditions of their entrepreneurial activities. On this basis, it contributes, on the one hand, to a re-examination of women’s contribution to the process of industrialization in the nineteenth century and, on the other hand, to a reflection on the definition—or redefinition—of what constitutes the nature of entrepreneurial activity. In its very construction, the inventory questions what entrepreneurship is and, drawing on the diversity of women’s entrepreneurial trajectories in the nineteenth century, challenges the relevance of the dominant representation of the heroic male entrepreneur (Galluzzo 2023), on whose shoulders industrialization, development, and growth in the nineteenth century are said to have rested. By restoring these women entrepreneurs—long erased from collective memory—the INDUSTRIFEM project contributes, alongside work carried out in other social sciences, to revising mistaken beliefs and representations about entrepreneurship. Because these representations still affect women today, and because their underrepresentation in leadership and corporate governance remains a major issue in contemporary societies, the project seeks to make widely known, today, the existence of this female entrepreneurship in history.