Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920 (review)

Business history is not the history of the dismal, but it can come close. Edith Sparks, in her history of business women in San Francisco from 1850 to 1920, notes that up to 80% of all small businesses failed within their first five years during the 1990s. Events were notably more difficult for the women Sparks looks at. Sparks examines the what (what kinds of businesses), why (the motivations of female business owners) and the how (strategies for beginning businesses) in chapters 1, 2, and 3 of her study. The remaining chapters discuss marketing strategies employed by women business owners, the financial management challenges for women often unschooled in basic business practices, and the results of failures for women. Finally, Sparks includes several appendices which contribute little to either her larger discussion or to the evidentiary basis of her study. Her research was, as she herself notes, located in the ephemeral. Female business owners left few complete records, their businesses failed at astonishingly high rates, and the challenges attendant to nineteenth-century women's history meant that Sparks employed evidence of "fleeting moments" rather than sustained recordkeeping or book-keeping. Sparks succeeds in illuminating the lives of some female business owners, especially in terms of the various pressures on women's decision-making. Women faced challenges not only in business ownership, such as accruing enough capital, addressing consumers' heightening demands for service and stock, broader economic vagaries plaguing all business owners, but also demands of family and relationships. Most female business owners were not single, and created businesses to address complex situations of family and economic life.

A benefit of locating her study in San Francisco is, Sparks maintains, the idiosyncrasies of the San Franciscan economic world. For example, in the 1850s women, according to Sparks, enjoyed surprisingly easy access to credit, especially if they were starting a business in the "accommodations" industry (such as a boarding house). But the window of opportunity closed as the pressing need to such businesses lessened in the decades following the Gold Rush. San Francisco provides Sparks, therefore, with a unique setting with which to evaluate female business owners' behavior.

One question I and other readers may be left with is the dismal aspect of it all. Yes, small business ownership did not prove to be an economic powerhouse for many women; most women during the 1850 to 1920 time frame of Sparks' study did indeed fail at building or even maintaining their businesses. Perhaps how failure is defined is part of the story. Sparks is sensitive to the very specific circumstances of the lives of those women who ventured into small business ownership, but she wields a one-dimensional definition of what "failure" was. Small business proprietorship may have been understood as a short-term venture—an effort to right a listing family ship, for example. A business that remained small-scale may not have been the failure Sparks suggests in her final comments; such a business offered women a manageable, if limited, business life, amenable to changes of responsibility and roles.