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

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Stana Nenadic

In family financial affairs, sisters were treated as a package, bound together for life - or until they married - the individualised interests of each sister subordinated to those of the family as a whole.(56) Family trusts administered their collective wealth and when they died they often left joint wills and annuities which were similar in character to the joint wills and other types of inheritance arrangements that were typical of husband and wife.(57) Miss Mary Morris, whose family and business history is described above, left a life-interest in her estate to her widowed sister, who lived with her at the time of her death, nursed her in old age and ran a parallel lodgings business from the family home.(58) In business families - and most women entrepreneurs came from a small business background - there was a general expectation that their capital be available to aid family interests, even at the expense of their own.(59) This was true even in cases where the women in question were themselves in business.(60) Brothers did often enter the same areas of business and operated informal cooperative strategies, but they maintained their formal business independence and capacity for individual competitiveness, because they expected at some point in life to marry and support a family through their own efforts.(61) The non-individualised character of women's capital and women's business, coupled with the predominance of sister partners with a low expectation of marriage, informed how they regarded business investment and shaped their behaviour as entrepreneurs. It probably negated any imperative to maximize profits in the interests of self - one of the primary characteristics of the entrepreneur(62) - and promoted a business strategy whose primary rationale was stability rather than growth, profit accumulation for the future benefit of the family rather than the reinvestment of profit for the benefit of the firm.(63) Certainly, this was reflected in the community of women entrepreneurs in Edinburgh, which furnishes few examples of women engaged in active expansion, product diversification and risk taking, although there were many who made a good living from their businesses and had healthy bank accounts as a result.(64) In short, cultural norms conspired to make many women relatively inert in business - this was a cultivated inertia that compounded the broader economic problems of oversaturation in the sector in which they were most active. Male entrepreneurs, even in family firms, had much greater autonomy and were motivated by a social expectation that they act as individuals.

Clothing in Cultural Perspective

For the mass of women in the nineteenth century, the consumption of clothing was dominated by second-hand or hand-me-down clothes reworked at home, or by home made garments.(65) This was true even among the relatively wealthy. Single middle-class women living in their parents' home and not engaged in paid employment could spend up to three and a half hours a day in dressmaking for themselves.(66) The popularity of commercial paper patterns, home-dressmaking journals, and the domestic sewing machine in the later nineteenth century testify to the continuing role of home production, and underlined the fact that for many women, clothing required the expenditure of considerable personal effort.(67) Ready-made clothing did exist but before the rise of the department store, these "sweatshop" products were widely characterised as "cheap and nasty."(68)