Female Self–Making in Mid–Nineteenth–Century America

This article describes the efforts of two respectable, young, Quaker women, Elizabeth McClintock and Anna Southwick, to seek their fortunes in the fabric import business in Philadelphia in 1849. It suggests that the power and fragility of gendered work conventions, middle–class anxieties about preserving gender distinctions, the allocation of gendered space, well–intentioned generational paternalism, and market conditions converged to problematize the process of self–making for women, and argues that the intersection of social practices and economic realities acted both to constrain and expand female attempts to intrude themselves into the male–dominated world of business. By exploring attempts to broaden the context for the exercise of female entrepreneurship in an age that idealized the “self–made man,” it expands our understanding of the various strategies that women quite self–consciously used to try to improve their position in American society.