Take nothing for granted: Expanding the conversation about business, gender, and feminism

Abstract

Scholarly conversations about business, gender, feminism, and history remain limited. In this afterword to the journal’s special issue on how these themes intertwine, six experienced colleagues reflect on their work and working lives to shed light on why this is so: Jennifer Aston, Hannah Barker, Gabrielle Durepos, Shennette Garrett-Scott, Peter James Hudson, and Angel Kwolek-Folland. They each emphasise the importance of taking nothing for granted, empirically, methodologically, or theoretically, in their efforts to bring business history into dialogue with gender and race and feminism. In particular, the group recommends looking beyond ‘big business history’, recognising that business happens at home as well as outside it, and remembering always that all of us carry and embody gender.

Keywords:

• Business History
• ommissions
• gender
• feminism
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Herbert Aptheker (1954) Laureates of imperialism: Big business re-writes American history, New York: Masses and Mainstream; George David Smith (1993) “Why companies can’t afford to ignore the past,” in Arnita A. Jones and Philip L. Cantelon, eds., Corporate archives and history: Making the past work, Malabar, FL: Krieger.

2 Mira Wilkins (1966) “The businessman abroad,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 368 (1): 83–94.

3 See, for instance, Angela Davis (1981) “Reflections on the Black woman’s role in the community of slaves,” The Black Scholar, 12 (6), pp. 2–15; Deborah Gray White (1999) Ar'n't I a woman?: Female slaves in the plantation South, WW Norton & Company; Jennifer Morgan (2004), Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in New World Slavery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Jennifer L. Morgan (2021), Reckoning with slavery: Gender, kinship, and capitalism in the early Black Atlantic, Durham: Duke University Press; Marisa Fuentes (2016) Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Sasha Turner (2017) Contested bodies: Pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), Wicked flesh: Black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic World, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

4 Carla Freeman (2000) High tech and high heels in the global economy: Women, work, and pink-collar identities in the Caribbean, Duke University Press; Marion Werner (2015) Global displacements: The making of uneven development in the Caribbean, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Also see Maria Mies (2014) Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labor, 3^rd Edition, London: Zed Books.

5 Caroline Hossein (2016) Politicized microfinance: Money, power, and violence in the Black Americas, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

6 Kamala Kempadoo (2004), Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, race and sexual labour, New York; Routledge.

7 Emily S. Rosenberg (2004) Financial missionaries to the world: The politics and culture of dollar diplomacy, Durham: Duke University Press; Mary A. Rend (2001), Taking Haiti: Military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915 – 1940, Chapel Hill: UNC Press. See also Susie J. Pak (2013) Gentlemen bankers: The world of J. P. Morgan, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

8 LaShawn Harris (2016) Sex workers, psychics, and numbers runners: Black women in New York City's underground economy, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Aston

Jennifer Aston is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University at Newcastle, UK. She is the author of Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy (2016), and together with Dr Catherine Bishop (Macquarie University, Sydney), co-edited Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (2020). She is a co-founder of reWOMEN (researching Women of Management and Enterprise Network).

Hannah Barker

Hannah Barker is Professor of British History at the University of Manchester, UK. She is currently Director of the John Rylands Research Institute. Hannah’s research has assessed the impact of industrialisation on women’s employment, and specifically the degree to which the advent of modern capitalism marginalised women workers in her book The Business of Women (2007). Her most recent monograph, Family and Business During the Industrial Revolution (2017) builds upon this intervention and examines the concept of ‘family strategy’ in terms of small family businesses.

Gabrielle Durepos

Gabrielle (Gabi) Durepos is Associate Professor in the Department of Business and Tourism, at Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. Gabrielle’s co-authored book: ANTi-History: Theorizing the Past, History, and Historiography in Management and Organization Studies, develops a critical organizational history to reveal the role of history in liberationary politics. She is a coeditor of both the Sage Encyclopedia of Case Study Research as well as the SAGE Major Work on Case Study Methods in Business Research.

Shenette Garrett-Scott

Shennette Garret-Scott is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Mississippi, USA. She is a historian of gender, race, and capitalism. Shennette’s award-winning first book Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) is the first full-length history of finance capitalism that centres black women and the banking institutions and networks they built from the eve of the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Peter James Hudson

Peter James Hudson is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, University of California Los Angeles, USA. His research interests are in the history of capitalism, white supremacy, and U.S. imperialism; the intellectual and political-economic history of the Caribbean and the Black world; and the history of Black radicalism and global anti-imperialism. He is the author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Angel Kwolek-Folland

Angel Kwolek-Folland is Professor Emerita of History, University of Florida, USA. She is the former Director of UF’s Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research (2000-2005), and President of the South Eastern Women’s Studies Association. Angel’s published work includes the books Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 and Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States.

Hannah Dean

Hannah Dean is Lecturer in Management, University of St Andrews, UK. Her research focuses on the history of women entrepreneurs. Hannah led a three-year project funded by the British Academy which was entitled ‘The journey of female entrepreneurs in Yorkshire: An oral history perspective’. The project collected oral history accounts from female entrepreneurs to capture women’s contributions to the UK economy and society.

Linda Perriton

Linda Perriton is Professor of Human Resource Management, University of Stirling, UK. Her research focuses on women in management and business, specifically the different approaches they have taken to their own training as managers from the 18th to the 20th century. Linda is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project that seeks to bridge between economic and business history to understand how migration, gender, age, and infrastructure shaped entrepreneurial activity in Glasgow in the 19th century.

Scott Taylor

Scott Taylor is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. His current research centres on misogyny at work, following on from analysis of the presence and absence of feminism in organization and management studies, including business history. Scott’s research has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences, and in contributions to edited research handbooks.

Mary Yeager

Mary A. Yeager is Professor Emerita of Business and Economic History in the history department of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her intellectual journey maps the making of a feminist business historian. Her publications on a variety of “manly” topics and industries in economic history gave way in the 1990s to an interest in social and economic inequalities. A three volume edited collection on women in business (around the world) fostered a sharp cultural and collaborative turn. In 1999 she asked if there would ever be a feminist business history. In her Presidential Address to the combined EBH/BHC conf.