In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women's businesses - from small local concerns to
financial empires - offered women independence supported their families and supplied
essential goods and services to their communities and the world. They also contributed to
much-needed legal and social change and set the stage for the female entrepreneurs who would
come later. All this was accomplished despite immense financial barriers an inequitable legal
system and the widely held belief that women had no business in business. Women's Concerns
explores the lives of twelve women who owned and operated businesses in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the ways they created personal and public identities and
managed the contradictions between their entrepreneurial ambitions and deeply entrenched
attitudes about women's roles.
