Lewis, Beech and Rudkin all took advantage of government opportunities and actively resisted its intrusions, and this was essential to their success. Close examination of the World War II and Korean War eras—key episodes in the expansion of the federal government as regulator and customer—shows that for these businesswomen building a relationship with government was both necessary and important. Military contracts and Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans kept Lewis and Beech in business while Excess Profits Tax posed a real threat that both women fought and wartime rationing as well as regulations by the Office of Price Administration fundamentally shaped Rudkin’s business strategy and success. Prevailing scholarly interpretations have argued that women’s businesses were too small to attract federal attention but the experience of these entrepreneurs reveals that for women who operated businesses big enough to cater to a national market, government programs were fundamental to their success and federal regulation threatened significant losses in profit. By the mid-twentieth century, in fact, developing a relationship with the federal government was hardly a choice; a strategic one could determine a business’ future.
No abstract
Mid-twentieth-century women could be “bosses” and “ladies” but this required them to effectively navigate inherent tensions between these two labels, to seize opportunities wherever they found them and sometimes to embrace stereotypical and status quo ideas to support their business success. Boss Lady tells this story, examining the history of three female entrepreneurs who established companies in the 1930s, sold them to major corporations in the 1960s/70s and became some of the first female board members in the country’s largest companies. Tillie Lewis, founder of Flotill Products in Stockton, California, Olive Ann Beech co-founder of Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, and Margaret Rudkin founder of Pepperidge Farm in Fairfield, Connecticut became the first women on the boards of the Ogden Corporation, Raytheon and Campbell’s Soup. These female leaders began their ascent to the top of the business world before women enjoyed widespread access to higher education, credit discrimination protections or federal incentives for business ownership. And they did so in the manufacturing sector which historically has drawn few female entrepreneurs because of its high barriers to entry. How they charted paths to success by leveraging their networks, capitalizing on relations with government, conforming to conventional labor management strategies, manipulating commonly-held gender ideas to their advantage, and asserting and advocating for themselves is the focus of the book. Restoring this earlier generation of female business leaders to the history of corporate America illustrates what it took for women to be successful in a man’s world in an era of obstacles.
The experiences of Lewis, Beech and Rudkin reveal that these female business leaders did not behave as champions of employees or women as feminists then and now might have hoped. Instead, they acted in commonplace ways as architects of a “new welfare capitalism” characteristic of American companies starting in the 1930s and made labor-management decisions designed to blunt the impact of unions within their companies like so many business leaders in the middle of the twentieth century. Leveraging the language of family, they built companies that asserted overtly employee-oriented policies that rewarded loyalty and efficiency with strong wages, benefits and noblesse oblige for the workers they wished to retain long term. All of them relied on this approach as a way to maintain control of labor-management relations, as an expedient business strategy and as one ideologically resonant with their beliefs. Lewis, Beech and Rudkin were business leaders of their time, evangelists for the free enterprise system, in favour of less government regulation, and in support of company cultures that treated their employees as resources with a responsibility to increase the company’s profit margin.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.