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

It is commonly believed that married women in Canada did not typically participate in the labour force a century ago. In The Business of Women, Melanie Buddle challenges this view by showing that in British Columbia in the early 20th century, it was not unusual for married women to support their families through self-employment and business ownership. While self-employment was more common for women in BC than elsewhere in Canada, the experiences of these women were not entirely unique. Through her look at women’s entrepreneurship in BC in the opening half of the 20th century, Buddle not only sheds light on a little-studied phenomenon, but also provides many insights that promise to enrich our understanding of both women’s history and the history of business.

Buddle’s book can be divided into two parts. The first provides context and draws on census data and secondary historical sources to document (white) women’s entrepreneurial activity. The second examines both wage-earning and self-employed women’s involvement in Business and Professional Women’s Clubs in Victoria and Vancouver to learn more about entrepreneurial women, consider their activity within these clubs, and, in one of the book’s most interesting chapters, explore the challenge of being a woman in the masculine business world.

In the first part of the book, Buddle shows that women working in BC were more likely to be married than those living elsewhere in Canada, and that most married women in the BC labour force were self-employed. Buddle explores the regional factors that drew married women into the labour force in BC, especially early in the century. Although these factors remain a little murky, Buddle emphasizes the province’s frontier status, the gender imbalance that meant that, especially at the turn of the 20th century, men far outnumbered women, and a resource-based economy which often led men away from their homes to earn a living in more remote locations. In combination, these factors created a situation where most BC women married, but many did not have a spouse at home to provide a steady income. Abandoned, widowed, separated, and married women whose spouses could not provide a sufficient income, needed to find a way to support themselves and their children. Buddle explains that, for these women, wage work was not an attractive option: not only were employers often reluctant to hire married women, but wage work required long hours away from home and children. Some women, then, turned to self-employment, and found a way to support their families through work in and around the home – keeping a boarding house, running a hotel, sewing, dressmaking, taking in laundry, or farming. Others established businesses or took over those started by their husbands; although these businesses took them out of the home, they nonetheless provided them with some flexibility to meet the competing demands on their time. The frontier environment and gender imbalance provided opportunities for women to take on these roles, and ensured a demand for many food, housing, and laundry services that women could provide.

In these opening chapters, Buddle’s analysis is important in two ways. First, it encourages us to expand our traditional understandings of ‘business’ to include women’s entrepreneurial activity which was often small-scale, and entailed tasks – such as running a boarding house, or making dresses – that could be viewed as ‘feminine’ (although Buddle is careful to point out that these women were challenging norms of femininity through their business activity). Second, it highlights that historically married women did work, and not only was their work not entirely incompatible with family, but it was frequently motivated by family responsibilities. This latter insight is an important one. Because, nation-wide, it was uncommon for women to be reported as working in the census, it has been easy to conclude that married women did not or could not work. In contrast, Buddle’s research encourages us not to dismiss...