Women and Business Since 1500

This volume surveys the role women have played in various types of business as owners co-owners and decision-making managers in European and North American societies since the sixteenth century. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship it identifies the economic social legal and cultural factors that have facilitated or restricted women's participation in business. It pays particular attention to the ways in which gender norms and their evolution shaped not only those women's experience of business but the ways they were perceived by contemporaries documented in sources and partly as a consequence viewed by historians.