Historical Perspectives on Business Enterprise Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Series Editors ON EPTI AL W XC OM E E N N U Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885 Susan Ingalls Lewis T HE O HI O S T A T E U NIVER S I T Y P RE ss | C O L U MB us Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewis, Susan Ingalls, 1949– Unexceptional women : female proprietors in mid-nineteenth-century Albany, New York, 1830–1885 / Susan Ingalls Lewis. p. cm.—(Historical perspectives on business enterprise) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-0398-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Self-employed women—New York (State)—Albany. 2. Businesswomen—New York (State)—Albany. 3. Entrepreneurship—New York (State)—Albany. I. Title. HD6072.6.U52A43 2009 338.09747'4308209034—dc22 2008038410 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-0398-9) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9178-8) Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas Text design by Juliet Williams Typeset in ITC Galliard Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Ma- terials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is lovingly dedicated to the memory of my beautiful and talented friend Patricia Ann Doran (1948–1996) Artist, Ceramicist, Teacher, and Dean of Graduate and Continuing Education, the Massachusetts College of Art NTENT CO S List of Illustrations / ix Preface / xi Acknowledgments / xvii INTRODUCTION / 1 CHAPTER ONE Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Albany, 1830–85 / 15 CHAPTER TWO Female Microentrepreneurs: Linking Stories and Statistics / 34 CHAPTER THREE Doing Business: Patterns and Parameters / 51 CHAPTER FOUR Micronetworks and the Family Business Economy / 66 CHAPTER FIVE Business or Labor? Blurred Boundaries in the Careers of Self-Employed Craftswomen / 85 CHAPTER SIX “A Small but Safe Business”: Gendering Success for Nineteenth-Century Female Proprietors / 96 Contents CHAPTER SEVEN “Doing the Best Business of Any Firm or Man in the Line”: Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Albany / 117 CHAPTER EIGHT Illicit Business: Shady Tradeswomen in Albany / 142 CONCLUsiON Incorporating Businesswomen into History / 156 APPENDIX ONE Types of Female Self-Employment and Proprietorship in Albany, 1830–85 / 165 APPENDIX TWO Sources and Methods / 167 Notes / 173 Index / 195 viii STRATI LU ON IL S FIGURE 2.1 Trades of Albany businesswomen active at any time between 1875 and 1885 / 37 FIGURE 2.2 Marital status of female proprietors in Albany active at any time between 1875 and 1885 / 38 FIGURE 2.3 Nativity of businesswomen active in Albany at any time between 1875 and 1885 / 39 FIGURE 7.1 Advertisement for Grace Anderson, Confectioner, 1854 / 126 FIGURE 7.2 Mrs. S. S. Colt’s Scientific Advertiser, 1871 / 129 FIGURE 7.3 Advertisement for Julia Ridgway, 1854 / 132 FIGURE 7.4 Advertisement for Ridgway & Russ, 1878 / 133 FIGURE 7.5 The Kenmore Hotel, 1880s / 137 ix FA PRE CE In this book we describe the ways of knowing that women have cultivated and learned to value, ways we have come to believe are powerful but have been neglected and denigrated by the dominant intellectual ethos of our time. —Women’s Ways of Knowing, 19861 IN THE LATE 1980S, I WAS a graduate student whose embryonic ideas about women and gender—shaped largely by my own family background and personal experiences in the “real world” of working women—seemed to conflict with standard interpretations of women’s history. Before return- ing to school in 1988, I had been employed as a picture researcher, a medi- cal secretary, and a museum curator for nearly twenty years. Once enrolled in a program of public history with an emphasis on local and regional stud- ies, I immersed myself in a series of intensive “readings” courses. Although I had not originally intended to concentrate on women’s labor history, it bothered me that the female models then current in both women’s and labor history failed to reflect my own experiences and those of the women I had known. In contrast to paradigms of middle-class domesticity and male support, generations of women in my family had worked for a living outside the home. And while most historical analyses stressed the power- lessness and exploitation of female workers, the women I knew had found satisfaction, if not great wealth or authority, through their employment. Was my own experience, and that of my female friends and family mem- bers, so unique? The project that eventually turned into this book began with a term paper on milliners, written for a labor history course during my second xi Preface term in graduate school. Little did I suspect that the paper would lead to a fifteen-year research project on mid-nineteenth-century businesswomen in Albany, New York. Very early in this project, I had the opportunity to take part in an informal panel discussion, “Women in Communities,” as part of an annual New York State Women’s Studies Conference.2 This was my introduction to the wide scope of women’s studies and the manner in which it integrates a broad range of academic disciplines. The theme of the conference was “Women’s Ways of Knowing,” and psychologist Blythe Clinchy presented the keynote address. In retrospect, I realize that many of my ideas about both scholarship and teaching—what had been rather inchoate and unsophisticated “feelings” up to that point—crystallized while listening to Clinchy’s talk. In her discussion of “women’s ways” I was able to recognize the validity of using my own life experiences, and the stories of women in my own maternal family as passed down through the genera- tions, as models against which to check historical hypotheses. As I began the research for what I planned to be my master’s thesis, I assumed that I might find fifty or so millinery entrepreneurs active in mid- nineteenth-century Albany. I took for granted that these would be rare and exceptional women, and that finding out everything I could about each one of them would be a fairly straightforward and limited task. To my surprise, using city directories and credit records, I quickly uncovered more than two hundred female millinery proprietors within a far more numerous population of businesswomen who were not milliners. Eventu- ally, my research on this single American city during a fifty-five-year period (1830–85) revealed that the population of women in business exceeded two thousand individuals. When I decided to expand my study to include all mid-nineteenth-century businesswomen in the city of Albany, I was intrigued by a subset of women who—like the women in my own family and those I had met while working—did not seem to fit comfortably into the paradigms presented by feminist historians of the 1970s and ’80s. That is, I was discovering women who were (to draw on the wording of Gerda Lerner’s well-known article) neither “ladies” nor “mill girls.”3 One benefit of allowing any project to unfold over time is the oppor- tunity to reassess one’s original assumptions, to test theses, and to explore important questions from many angles as one’s views develop. While exploring the scope of businesswomen’s enterprises in mid-nineteenth-cen- tury Albany, my interpretations have gone through a series of stages. The first stage of my work was simply a reaction to what I thought of as the “victimization” school of women’s labor history. Considering milliners as entrepreneurs and artisans as well as downtrodden workers, I argued for a richer, more complex, and more heterogeneous model of nineteenth-cen- tury working women.4 As part of my continued resistance to the “exploited xii Preface and oppressed” characterization of nineteenth-century women, my early explorations of Albany’s female entrepreneurs might well be seen as a con- tribution to the “women were there, too” school of feminist history.5 In presentations, I stressed not only the ways in which business was open to mid-nineteenth-century women in Albany but also the size and variety of the community of businesswomen who took advantage of this option. In addition, I focused my research on the most prominent and successful of the hundreds of female proprietors in the Albany business community, and particularly on those whose commercial, artisanal, or industrial efforts had been investigated and recorded at length by the credit examiners of the R.G. Dun Mercantile Agency.6 Although I realized that such excep- tional businesswomen constituted only the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of women’s economic activity in the marketplace, initially I found little to say about the mass of women either neglected or dismissed by the R.G. Dun investigators. The second stage of my thinking came when I recognized the need to uncover the rest of that iceberg—the women who remained to be excavated through painstaking research in city directories and census list- ings. Mid-nineteenth-century Albany did support a few relatively success- ful female entrepreneurs, who built up flourishing business concerns from relatively modest capital investments. However, to understand the vital role played by business in the lives of the vast majority of Albany’s enterprising women, one must move beyond the concept of mid-nineteenth-century entrepreneurial “success” based on traditional male models. The celebrated stories of Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger find echoes in the careers of relatively few of the women who engaged in business ventures in Albany during this period, and even the most successful rarely managed to build up establishments worth more than $10,000 (about $1 million in today’s currency).