The Business of Women: Marriage, Family, and Entrepreneurship in British Columbia, 1901–51 (review)

Melanie Buddle has provided a rare glimpse into a category of women’s work which is often hidden in plain view. This study of entrepreneurial women in British Columbia has two foci: a statistical and anecdotal examination of women who were earning a living for their families through operating small businesses in the first half of the twentieth century; and a study of the women and activities of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs in British Columbia up to the 1960s, organizations Buddle describes as characterized by race and class privilege. Buddle identifies the lack of sources available to accomplish a thorough examination of her topics, a limitation which would not surprise Canadian women’s historians. She used Canadian Census Data, club records for Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Vancouver and Victoria, the Canadian Families Project data base, newspaper accounts and archival collections. The sparse collection of personal archives results in a study that relies heavily on census data and lacks rich documentation of personal examples and stories.

A central theme of the book is the uniqueness of the British Columbia demographic profile between 1901–1951. This profile highlights the ratio of women to men, resulting from the frontier status of the province, which included a large population of single men in resource extraction industries; the high percentage of married women, which was the highest in Canada during the period studied; and the highest participation rate for women as entrepreneurs in Canada. The participation figures of British Columbia widowed and divorced women in self- employment, also higher than other provinces, are consistent with this profile. The study focuses only on those women who are sole entrepreneurs, not those participating in a business shared with their spouses, the rationale being that married women who were partners in business enterprises with their husbands are missed in census data. Buddle argues that the vestiges of the frontier history of British Columbia and its particular demographics, which provided opportunities for women to commercialize traditional sex roles in early British Columbia, continued to affect women’s labour force participation well into the twentieth century. The demand for domestic services providing food, lodging, laundry services, and sewing, created an entry point for women into small self-owned businesses. The actual number of women entrepreneurs in British Columbia during the period of study constituted a small percentage of the total population of women in the work force. And self-employed business women were predominantly both older than wage earning women, and married. It is interesting to note the percentage of B.C. women working as self-employed farmers was significantly below the Canadian percentage for the same occupation. Across Canada, excluding B.C., self-employed farmers were the largest group of women entrepreneurs from 1901 through to 1951. In British Columbia, other self-employment occupations such as sewers, and lodging-house keepers, and in later years retailers, outranked famers.

While incorporating gender into the history of business, Buddle defends a focus only on women and women’s organizations, which reflects the current politics around gender studies rather than any methodological issues. She acknowledges the difficulty of addressing the categories of race and ethnicity in her study due to the reliance on census data which does not record these in relation to women’s entrepreneurial activities. Chapters four and five, which focus on organized business and professional women, are exclusively about Anglo –Canadian women, who are white and predominantly middle class. This study reflects the recurring frustration experienced by most Canadian historians: the dearth of available sources that document the lives of the diverse populations of Canadian women, which continues to limit the scope of historical projects and of archival collections.

The first chapter introduces the main themes of the chapters, some theoretical considerations, and related Canadian historiography about entrepreneurial women. Chapter two explains what Buddle claims is an unexpected connection between marriage and business for white women in British Columbia and the opportunities...