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152 Alice Morgan Person “My life has been out of the ordinary run of woman’s life” Angela Robbins    On January 31, 1884, Alice Morgan Person stepped off the train in Charlotte and into a new phase of her life and career. Person’s family had been among the state’s slaveholders, and their losses after the Civil War, combined with her husband Joseph’s debilitating stroke, led Alice to assume an unexpected duty to her family. For several years, she had been operating a small patent medicine business she founded out of her rural Franklin County home. Success encouraged her to expand. Leaving her family behind, she took on a business partner for the necessary capital and relocated to the state’s fastest-growing city. That October, recently widowed and her Charlotte partnership having already failed, she set up a booth at the North Carolina State Exposition in Raleigh, capitalizing on the sizeable crowds drawn to its agricultural and industrial exhibitions in order to sell what she called Mrs. Joe Person’s Remedy. While there, she found inspiration to create a one-woman medicine show built upon her piano-playing talent that would carry her farther from home but reward her with additional income and fame. In the meantime, she relocated her family to a more modest house and resigned herself to the fact that the Person farm, which she had been struggling to maintain, would be sold at public auction. With determination, industry, and almost constant traveling, she built a profitable business through which she supported her family. As to her decision to take on the role of breadwinner over the domesticity demanded of a woman of her status, “somebody had to work,” Person acknowledged resolutely, “and the place was mine.” Few North Carolina businesswomen who were Alice Person’s contempo- Alice Morgan Person 153 raries shared her family’s pre–Civil War status or achieved the reputation and wealth she did, but elements of her story resonated for many. As a result of the severe economic dislocation after the Civil War, thousands of white women from various socioeconomic backgrounds now had to work to support themselves and their families in the few acceptable jobs open to them. For educated women like Person, teaching was often the clear choice. Even more women created opportunities for themselves in larger cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham , Winston, and Greensboro by turning their homes or rental properties into boardinghouses and engaging in dressmaking, millinery, and shopkeeping . White women usually ran these small business ventures, which typically required little initial investment, provided minimal remuneration, and did no damage to their respectability because the work did not appear to get in the way of their domestic duties. Businesswomen managed their various responsibilities by hiring other white women as well as black women (who rarely had the same opportunities) to work for them as laundresses and domestic servants, chambermaids, and seamstresses. By the early twentieth century, the female labor force had changed dramatically. The new economy relied on the cheap labor of lower-class women and their children in textile mills and tobacco factories, while middle-class women increasingly attended colleges and pursued careers in teaching and nursing or filled clerical and sales positions. Women’s businesses that had an impact in urban business districts in the late nineteenth century gradually disappeared. Not only did Alice Person’s business place her outside the realm of women’s customary work, but she also broke through gender conventions. Her workaday routine was to travel, often and alone, spending extended periods of time away from home. Hers was, in the estimation of many—particularly medical professionals—not a respectable occupation for anyone, much less a woman. Yet she lived during the height of the popularity of patent medicines, and Person imagined she might earn a million dollars with her remedy. Considering the paltry income earned through traditional women’s work, this demonstrates her healthy dose of ambition—a decidedly “unwomanly” trait—and helps to explain her unorthodox choice. Reflecting on the challenges facing a woman who stepped out of her domestic sphere and into the public world of business, Person declared, “it was something new then to see a woman, and a Southern woman at that, doing man’s work.” The transition was not seamless, and even as Person cast off traditional gender roles, she remained invested in them, presenting herself as a fighter as well as a lady, self-reliant but also dependent on men. Person resolved...

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