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.