Introduction: Women and the Industrialization Process—Bringing Female Entrepreneurs Out of the Shadows

Women’s involvement in the economy in the past has mainly been analysed through the single prism of women salaried workers. Women’s economic participation outside wage employment still remains a blind spot; yet an understanding of it is essential to provide a comprehensive picture of women’s economic role in the long run. Economic and business history has long remained silent on women’s involvement in the nineteenth-century economic and business spheres as independent workers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Nineteenth-century businesswomen have thus disappeared from collective memory. A growing body of literature is now challenging the long-held view that women withdrew from the business world with the rise of industrialization. But achieving a wider understanding of nineteenth-century women’s presence in business activities will be a long process, and it is this process to which the present book contributes.