The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Stana Nenadic

Out of the fifty-three business biographies that form the core of the Edinburgh study, forty-three involved women entrepreneurs whose success in business relied on their capacity to engage in a dove-tailing of income-generating activity with other female members of their family. Twenty-five were sibling partnerships and two were sibling and cousin partnerships; eleven were owned by widowed mother and daughter partnerships; four were male-female partnership (all comprising husband and wife) and eleven were single proprietorships, all but one a spinster. The Winter family provides another good illustration of a co-ordinated income-generating strategy among related women. The firm of Mrs Christian Winter, milliner and dressmaker was founded in Edinburgh 1846 when the owner - a milliner by training - was a forty-seven-year-old mother of five children. Her husband, a house factor, died a few years later and it seems probable that the firm was founded in the knowledge that the head-of-household's health was failing and in the realisation that the husband's employment could not be continued by his widow. By the mid-1850s, Mrs Winter was also operating a furnishings and trimmings shop and three of her daughters, now in their thirties, were running the garment-making business. One of the daughters was a straw hat maker and two were dressmakers. There was another daughter who was a laundress and a granddaughter, a furrier by trade, also periodically lived in the household. Two of the daughters married and moved to their own homes, but they remained involved with business interests of the family. The trimmings shop came to an end when Mrs Winter died in 1864, and the original firm continued in unbroken existence until 1894, when the last surviving sister, Jemima Brown, died at the age of sixty-five. She had been born in 1829 and married at the age of twenty-two to a lithographic printer, but practiced the trade of straw hat maker throughout her life.(50)

Business opportunities for women in the nineteenth century tended to be limited to a few sectors where the customers were dominated by women; hence the use of dovetailed strategies was partly dictated by an absence of alternatives. But there can be no doubt that the strategy worked, as the Morris and Winter families demonstrated with considerable success. Yet although highly successful as a device for generating an income for women, dovetailed strategies also had certain negative implications for successful engagement in efficient and competitive business practice of the kind that was designed to maximise profits and increase market share. And it is not surprising to discover that such partnerships were rare among male entrepreneurs, who preferred to maintain independence in business and only formed family partnership arrangements where a father after many years in business on his own account took a son into the firm.(51)

The downside of such partnership arrangements arose out of the fact that sisters - the core of most long-surviving businesses - were frequently regarded as interchangeable figures within a family. Even when single, they lacked a capacity for individualised identity. The interchangeability of women's identity is signalled in many ways. Sisters and daughters could become servants - they are sometimes even called "servant" in census schedules - or wife or mother substitutes when other female relatives had died.(52) The treatment of sisters in marriage frequently suggests an absence of a sense of individual identity. There were numberless occasions in both fact and fiction - it is, indeed, a stock subject of social satire - of the suitor who having been refused by one sister turns to another with his proposal of marriage.(53) It was common for a married woman to provide a home for an unmarried sister, and men at marriage expected their wives to form a sister-like arrangement with their own unmarried sisters, in anticipation that a sister might spend her life with the married couple. The Edinburgh firm of the Misses Cathels, active in business from 1854 to 1894, was such a case. The marriage of Jane Cathels late in life to an elderly widower living nearby took both of the sisters and their firm into a new domestic arrangement.(54) The common perception of the interchangeability of sisters in marriage was part of the background to the legal and moral debates of the 1860s over the question of marriage to a deceased wife's sister.(55)