The Story of Rosa: The Fall of a Female Entrepreneur in the Nineteenth-Century Pest-Buda

In this paper, we examine the bankruptcy of a nineteenth-century entrepreneur in Pest, Rosa Sandrovits. After discussing the career options of women in the 1869 Pest, we will focus on a single aspect of Rosa’s story, Rosa’s bills of exchange. Through these, we can show the prejudices that limit the lives of female entrepreneurs in nineteenth-century Hungary. To do this, we will examine the laws regulating bills of exchange in the era, its parliamentary debate and its reception in the century. As we shall see, Rosa presented her own bankruptcy through the very prejudices we hear about in the debate. However, Rosa did not accept these laws and prejudices limiting women but mobilized them in her own interests. As a result, Rosa has avoided a criminal lawsuit and returned to where she came from: historical obscurity.