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

Chapter 2. Why San Francisco Women Started Businesses

CHAPTER 2 Why San Francisco Women Started Businesses The stereotypical entrepreneur was motivated by a desire for riches and independence. But for businesswomen in San Francisco between  and , such dreams provided only brief inducement. Gold, the dust that inspired a worldwide migration to northern California, pulled women into proprietorship during the first decade of statehood.Yet gold’s lure was shortlived and, after , women in search of a stable income sought it in morepredictable realms. For those single women pursuing economic independence, proprietorship continued to be an attractive option, but one that required calculated risk and no promise of a steady income. Comparatively few single women were willing to take those odds, and they pursued proprietorship in only very small numbers relative to their presence in the paid labor force. But married and formerly married (divorced and widowed) women accepted the risks of proprietorship because they had few other income opportunities . Economic and family circumstances restricted their employment options so severely that proprietorship was perhaps their only choice—an enterprise they could pursue while maintaining their responsibilities to home and family. At the same time, however, changes in small business ownership such as increased difficulty securing capital, competition from mass marketers and large-scale retailers, and the rationalization of the commercial marketplace made proprietorship a decreasingly attractive option. In short, turning to small business ownership was a decision made within increasingly restrictive parameters. Thus, once alternative employment options became available to women with families at the beginning of the twentieth century, they fled business ownership in large numbers. The utility of proprietorship, it seems, had expired. Why San Francisco women started businesses, therefore, has much more to do with the factors pushing women into proprietorship than it does with the popularized, romantic pull of entrepreneurship. The city’s businesswomen were problem solvers who turned to economic enterprise to support themselves and their families because it allowed them to combine their domestic responsibilities with economic opportunity. The lure of profits drew only the earliest adopters to gold rush California. Thereafter, proprietorship was less about wealth than about subsistence for most small-scale businesswomen . an ‘‘apron full of gold’’: the early lure of proprietorship As soon as the earliest reports of ‘‘Gold!’’ reached communities around the world in , San Francisco quickly became a city populated by hoards of hungryand homeless men expecting to strike it rich. At first, men were forced to provide themselves and each other with ‘‘domestic’’ services such as cooking and laundering that women had always provided for their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. But as soon as married and single women arrived, many men were willing to pay them a high price for the same services, and women began to believe they too would ‘‘strike gold’’ in California. It did not take much for women to turn a profit selling their skills as cooks, homemakers, and laundresses to this first wave of migrants. For miners who had been away from their families and on their own for months, even years, a woman’s cooking was especially valuable. One female settler appears to have been turned into an entrepreneur on the spot by the appeals of a hungry miner: ‘‘Attracted by the unusual sight of a woman . . . a hungry miner . . . said to me ‘I’ll give you five dollars, ma’am, for them biscuit.’ It sounded like a fortune to me, and I looked at him to see if he meant it. And as I hesitated as such . . . he repeated his offer to purchase, and said he would give me ten dollars for bread made by a woman . . . In my dreams that night I saw crowds of bearded miners striking gold from the earth with every blow of the pick, each one seeming to leave a share for me.’’1 Luzena Stanley Wilson was not surprised that a miner wanted to buy her biscuit—such transactions Why San Francisco Women Started Businesses  were commonplace in cities throughout the United States where women sold boarding services to single male workers. What she had a hard time believing was that her cooking could be worth so much to anyone. In letters home to familyand friends, women commented on the unusually profitable enterprises they could conduct in the city during the early s. One woman wrote to a friend in Boston that ‘‘[a] smart woman can do very well in this country. . . . If I was...