Unexceptional Women

<div><i>Unexceptional Women:</i><i>Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany New York 1830-1885</i> by Susan Ingalls Lewis challenges our conceptions about mid-nineteenth-century American women business and labor offering a detailed study of female proprietors in one industrializing American city. Analyzing the careers of more than two thousand women who owned or operated businesses between 1830 and 1885 Lewis argues that business provided a common important and varied occupation for nineteenth-century working women. Based on meticulous research in city directories census records and credit reports this study provides both a demographic portrait of Albany's female proprietors and an examination of the size scope longevity financing and creditworthiness of their ventures.<br> Although the growing city did produce several remarkable businesswomen in trades as diverse as hotel management plumbing and the marketing of pianos on the installment plan Albany's female proprietors were most often self-employed artisans shopkeepers petty manufacturers and service providers. These women used business as a method of self-employment and survival as a means of both individual and family mobility and as a strategy for immigrant assimilation into an urban economy and middle-class lifestyle.  <br> Intriguingly among the ranks of Albany's female proprietors Lewis discovered substantial evidence of such supposedly recent phenomena as self-employment dual-income marriages working motherhood home-based business and the juggling of domestic and professional priorities. The stories of these businesswomen make fascinating reading while simultaneously providing the basis for a theoretical discussion of how to define and understand enterprise for mid-nineteenth-century women.<br>  </div>