Risk, success, and failure: female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England

Abstract

This article analyses female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Traditional views on female entrepreneurship in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century England point towards a decline in the number and relevance of women as business owners in comparison to the eighteenth century, and their retreat into a ‘separate sphere’ away from the world of trade and production. Recent studies, however, have deeply challenged this view, suggesting that women still played an important role as entrepreneurs during industrialization and beyond. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain unanswered with regard to the features of female entrepreneurship during these phases of British history, and issues such as scale of operation, attitude to risk, credit structure, and managerial styles are still widely debated. Using original sources, this article provides a novel view on these issues, analysing female entrepreneurship from the perspective of bankruptcy. Analysing statistics on women's bankruptcy derived from Board of Trade reports, as well as a sample of archival cases, this article argues that overall female business owners traded in ways similar to their male counterparts in terms of business size, risk‐taking, and, eventually, success.

The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911

“…We find much higher rates of female entrepreneurship from the Census records than any previous study (e.g. Kay, 2009;Aston and Di Martino, 2017) suggesting that, for all its problems, the Census is generally the most complete source available for the study of female entrepreneurship.…”

“…The high level of female participation evident from the original Census records demonstrates them to be generally a superior source of information to the trade directories, insurance, bankruptcy and other records that have been previously used, and counters many of the criticisms that have been levelled against the value of using published Census records (e.g. Barker, 2006;Kay, 2009;Aston and Di Martino, 2017). While defects certainly remain, the Census records appear to be a more complete coverage than has ever been previously envisaged.…”

“…However, these remained the most important groups, together with innkeepers, school proprietresses, milliners, and confectioners. These have mostly been previously recognised as important fields of female entrepreneurship (Davidoff and Hall, 1997;Kay, 2009;Aston and Di Martino, 2017), but the numerical prominence of female farmers and school proprietresses has not been given the prominence it clearly deserves. For female own account (Table 11), the top three categories remained the same, reflecting the strong female development in dressmaking, laundry and lodgings, often exploiting their dwelling house as business premises.…”

Regulation model for filing an actio pauliana lawsuit by creditors to revoke the debtor's legal actions prior to declaration of bankruptcy by the commercial court

“…Actio Pauliana is a right granted by law to a person to submit an application to the court for the revocation of all actions that are not required to be carried out by the Debtor (Aston & Di Martino, 2017). Actio Pauliana is the revocation of all legal actions carried out by the Debtor on his assets through the Court based on the request of the Creditor (the Curator if in Bankruptcy) which is known by the Debtor that the act is detrimental to the Creditor.…”

Reconfiguring the Victorian Female Ideal in the Mary Poppins Novels

“…On the one hand, many academics (e.g., Curran 1993, Green and Owens 2003, and Liggins 2014 tend to emphasise these social outcasts' poor and disadvantaged economic conditions in Victorian society on the grounds of their subordinate twofold social status (womanhood and widowhood/spinsterhood). However, on the other hand, others (e.g., Barker 2006, Gordon 2000, Nair 2000, Aston and Di Martino 2014, and Lieshout 2019, and considering her female entrepreneurs in the Mary Poppins books, P. L. Travers herself argues for middle-class women's, both widows and spinsters, influential economic role in society. So, according to the latter interpretations, "the patriarchal power under the law and the dominance of gender-related spheres have been shown to have been less pervasive than has often been presumed, allowing businesswomen to act more freely than has been thought" (Barker 171).…”