Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885 (review)

Susan Ingalls Lewis has written a thoughtful and at times wonderfully provocative book that establishes beyond doubt the visible and significant roles played by businesswomen in nineteenth-century Albany, New York. From three major sources—census, city directories, and R. G. Dun and Company manuscript credit reports–she has created a file of over two thousand businesswomen active at some point between 1830 and 1885. She employs a linked dataset of one thousand five hundred of these women active between 1875 and 1885 to explore the contours of female enterprise and the social and economic characteristics of those businesswomen, as individuals, family members, and participants in the wider urban environment. Albany’s businesswomen operated small enterprises but they were segmented by trade, birthplace, and class as well as representing different ages and different marital statuses. Lewis stresses the diversity of personal histories and the inappropriateness of simple classifications. With Edith Sparks’ recent monograph, [Capital Intentions, 2006], this work represents the most detailed and scholarly treatment of businesswomen’s activity in nineteenth-century American cities. Indeed, Lewis’ work nicely extends that of Sparks’ by employing a more systematic approach and showing that women operated in business in nonfrontier as well as the so-called frontier environment of nineteenth-century San Francisco. For this journal’s readers these findings might not come as a major surprise. For readers less familiar with business (and women’s) history, Lewis’ findings will be startling.

It is what Lewis does with her findings that makes this book of potentially special interest to readers of this journal. First, she thoughtfully critiques her sources and exposes the societal values and purposes that, in different ways, underlay their construction. By combining evidence from all three of her major sources, Lewis persuasively argues that a more complete and grounded appreciation of businesswomen’s activities can be uncovered. Her discussions of provenance are well presented and nicely reflect more general literature of this sort. Second, she interrogates various methodological perspectives. Stories of individual businesswomen, no matter how many, are by themselves insufficient but so too, is an equally narrow statistical approach. By combining elements of both approaches, she clearly demonstrates the ubiquity and diversity of women’s experience in Albany’s microbusiness world. Personally I would have liked her to have pushed the quantitative approach beyond that of simple descriptive analysis and to have, at least, employed more powerful regression methods.

Finally, Lewis uses her findings to argue for reconceptualizing various concepts and paradigms currently utilized—consciously or subconsciously—by many historians active today in such subfields as economics, labor, business, and women’s and gender history. Her major point of departure here is the contention that one cannot appreciate women as business people by employing the same concepts that enable one to understand men as business practitioners. Such a contention is not unreasonable. Lewis clearly demonstrates that women ran small businesses, enterprises often barely removed from activities of paid workers. Few women ran large enterprises and no woman reached the heights of the top male-run businesses in Albany. One can best understand these women, Lewis argues, by moving small business from the periphery to the center of scholarly attention. Only then can one appreciate how these micro-enterprises interacted with poor working-class people in the nineteenth-century cities. This approach complements much current work on small businesses, although I suspect Lewis would reasonably argue that her approach deepens and genders that perspective, not just adds to it. Lewis contends that the much critiqued separate spheres paradigm was of “little relevance” (p. 96) to the lives of businesswomen and in part she is obviously correct. Yet it might have been better to claim that those businesswomen confronted wider societal attitudes, some of which were bound up in the separate-spheres paradigm and that at some level such attitudes circumscribed and delimited businesswomen’s potential, as...