Doing Contexts: Women in Family Narratives

The role of context, defined as “circumstances, conditions, situations or environments that are external to the respective phenomenon and enable or constrain it”, has gained increased prominence in entrepreneurship studies in the last half century. Contexts were initially treated as what is “out there” and to which economic agents could only react; more recently, researchers have shown interest in the ways entrepreneurs, especially female ones, participate in this process or “do context”. Even more recently, they have also raised the issue of the researchers’ role in constructing these contexts, through their choice of subject, questions, sources and method, and thereby contributing to creating the context in which contemporary female entrepreneurship occurs. This chapter presents two examples of entrepreneurs “doing contexts” and by so doing shaping later historians’ understanding of past female entrepreneurship.