The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades

Journal of Social History

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 624-645

  Nenadic, Stana ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0032033936     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh/31.3.625     Document Type: Review

References (102)

1. 1. Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century ... with an Account of the Building of South Bridge and a Sketch of the Fashions, Chiefly in Ladies' Attire During the Last 100 Years, edited by W. M Gilbert for J. & R. Allan Ltd., 80-86 South Bridge Street (Edinburgh, 1901).
2. A. Eddington, Edinburgh and the Lothians at the Opening of the Twentieth Century (Brighton, 1904), is a municipal history of the area built around a series of "heroic" business histories of local firms.
3. Peter Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Local Government (London, 1973).
4. See, Stana Nenadic, "The Small Family Firm in Victorian Britain," Business History 35 (1993): 86-114.
5. The point is made by James A. Schmiechen, "State Reform and the Local Economy: an Aspect of Industrialization in Late Victorian and Edwardian London," Economic History Review 2nd ser., 28 (1975): 413 to account for the relative lack of interest in nineteeth- century garment making businesses.
6. R. Roger, "Concentration and Fragmentation: Capital, Labour and the Structure of Mid-Victorian Scottish Industry," Journal of Urban History 14 (1988): 178-213. For a broad perspective on this issue, see Jonathan Brown and Mary B. Rose, eds. Entrepreneurship, Networks and Modern Business (Manchester, 1993), "Introduction": 1-8.
7. R. Roger, "Concentration and Fragmentation: Capital, Labour and the Structure of Mid-Victorian Scottish Industry," Journal of Urban History 14 (1988): 178-213. For a broad perspective on this issue, see Jonathan Brown and Mary B. Rose, eds. Entrepreneurship, Networks and Modern Business (Manchester, 1993), "Introduction": 1-8.
8. Bridge Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London 1989); Olwn Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (London, 1995).
9. Bridge Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London 1989); Olwn Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (London, 1995).
10. Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (New York, 1976); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, 1850-1880," Journal of Women's History 3 (1991): 65-89; Susan Ingalls Lewis, "'Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840- 1885," Business and Economiic History 2nd series, 22 (1992): 65-73; Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).
11. Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (New York, 1976); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, 1850-1880," Journal of Women's History 3 (1991): 65-89; Susan Ingalls Lewis, "'Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840- 1885," Business and Economiic History 2nd series, 22 (1992): 65-73; Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).
12. Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (New York, 1976); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, 1850-1880," Journal of Women's History 3 (1991): 65-89; Susan Ingalls Lewis, "'Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840- 1885," Business and Economiic History 2nd series, 22 (1992): 65-73; Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).
13. Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women (New York, 1976); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Business Ladies: Midwestern Women and Enterprise, 1850-1880," Journal of Women's History 3 (1991): 65-89; Susan Ingalls Lewis, "'Female Entrepreneurs in Albany, 1840- 1885," Business and Economiic History 2nd series, 22 (1992): 65-73; Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Urbana, 1997).
14. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984); Michael J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper's World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983).
15. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984); Michael J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper's World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983).
16. Notably, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987).
17. Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, 1994); M. Roper, Masculinity and the British Organisational Man since 1945 (Oxford, 1994).
18. Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore, 1994); M. Roper, Masculinity and the British Organisational Man since 1945 (Oxford, 1994).
19. Leonore Davidoff, "The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century England" in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (New York, 1979).
20. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 302.
21. British Parliamentary Papers - 1891 Census of Scotland, vol 2 part 2 (Shannon, 1970), 540-544, 718-722, 775-778.
22. Estimate is based on Post Office Directory entries: Nenadic, "Small family firm," 90.
23. PP Accounts and Papers vol. 57, 1893-4, Population Census for England and Wales for 1891 Summary tables, x-xxv.
24. Based on census details for the period 1861-91, 84% of the "record-linked" women entrepreneurs in the Edinburgh sample were unmarried and remained so throughout life.
25. Cary L. Cooper and Marilyn Davidson, Women in Management: Career Development for Managerial Success (London, 1984), v.
26. On this broad theme, see Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington, 1989).
27. John Galt, "The Seamstress" in John Galt, Selected Short Stories, ed. by Ian A. Gordon (Edinburgh, 1978), 21. The story was first published in 1833.
28. On emotional investment in goods, including clothing, see, Stana Nenadic, "Middle Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720-1840," Past and Present no. 145 (1994): 122-156.
29. Oliver M. Westall "The Competitive Environment of British Business, 1850-1914" in Kirby and Rose, Business Enterprise in Modern Britain: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (London, 1994), 217.
30. See note 26 for the nominal record-linkage approach to firms based on annual city directories. The fifty-three detailed business biographies - drawn from a population that comprised all women's firms in this sector for the period 1861 to 1891 - were of long surviving firms whose affairs were traced from core information taken from city directories, census and property valuation rolls, through to sequestration records and confirmation inventories of wealth at death. The family histories and connections of the women entrepreneurs were also traced using standard family reconstitution techniques based on registrations of births, marriages and deaths.
31. François Crouzet, The Victorian Economy (London, 1982), trans. by A. S. Forster, 187-9.
32. PP Accounts and Papers vol. 57, 1893-4, Industrial Census of Britain for 1891 (London, 1893).
33. The identification of firms was based on the nominal listings contained in the annual city directory. These were linked to information contained in census schedules and in property rate books. An account of the methodology employed in the study is given in S. Nenadic, "Record Linkage and the Small Family Firm: Edinburgh 1861 to 1891," Bulletin of the John Ryland Institute of Manchester 74 (1992): 169-195.
34. This distribution of women-owned businesses is similar to that in Philadelphia in 1860, though here the percentage of women who were single was much lower. C. Goldin, "The Economic Status of Women in the Early Republic: Quantitative Evidence," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1986): 377-93.
35. Schmeichen, "State Reform and the Local Economy"; R. A. Church, "Labour Supply and Innovation, 1850 to 1860; the Boot and Shoe Industry," Business History 12 (1970): 25-45; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation," Past and Present no. 108 (1985): 133-76.
36. Schmeichen, "State Reform and the Local Economy"; R. A. Church, "Labour Supply and Innovation, 1850 to 1860; the Boot and Shoe Industry," Business History 12 (1970): 25-45; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation," Past and Present no. 108 (1985): 133-76.
37. Schmeichen, "State Reform and the Local Economy"; R. A. Church, "Labour Supply and Innovation, 1850 to 1860; the Boot and Shoe Industry," Business History 12 (1970): 25-45; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation," Past and Present no. 108 (1985): 133-76.
38. Schmeichen, "State Reform and the Local Economy"; R. A. Church, "Labour Supply and Innovation, 1850 to 1860; the Boot and Shoe Industry," Business History 12 (1970): 25-45; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation," Past and Present no. 108 (1985): 133-76.
39. Crouzet, Victorian Economy, 187-9.
40. In 1891 there were 203 male drapers and mercers in Edinburgh who were also commercial employers and 30 women. Census of Scotland, 1891.
41. For a literary evocation of the classic nineteenth-century department store, founded by a woman but made successful by her husband, with a detailed description of the distinctly feminised culture of hedonistic luxury that was cultivated in such stores see, Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (Paris, 1883).
42. See, E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849-1850 (London, 1971), 428-439.
43. See, E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849-1850 (London, 1971), 428-439.
44. British Parliamentary Papers - 1891 Census of Scotland vol. 2 part 2 (Shannon, 1970).
45. Thompson and Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew, 428-439
46. For a survey of this issue in popular perceptions and the government response see, C. Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London, 1990); J. A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour: The London Clothing Trades, 1860-1914 (London, 1984).
47. For a survey of this issue in popular perceptions and the government response see, C. Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London, 1990); J. A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour: The London Clothing Trades, 1860-1914 (London, 1984).
48. Examples given in Nenadic, "Record Linkage and the Family Firm."
49. A case is described in the sequestration of 1804 of the Misses McLeod, milliners, straw hat makers, dressmakers and staymakers in Edinburgh, who owed £193 to trade suppliers in London, which had allowed them to set up in trade. The sisters absconded to the United States with the goods and the court case was abandoned. Scottish Record Office. CS96/3824.
50. British Parliamentary Papers - 1891 Census of Scotland vol. 2 part 2 (Shannon, 1970).
51. Nenadic, "Small Family Firm," 108-109
52. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. CS280/1/1: CS280/41/26/7.
53. See cases cited in Nenadic, "Record Linkage."
54. Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. CS280/1/1
55. Eighty-four percent in the period 1861-1891. In the USA, where spinsterhood was less pervasive, married women dominated the garment trades. See Goldin, "The Economic Status of Women in the Early Republic," 375-404.
56. M. Anderson, "The Social Position of Spinsters in Mid-Victorian Britain," Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 377-93.
57. M. Anderson, "The Social Position of Spinsters in Mid-Victorian Britain," Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 377-93.
58. E. Sanderson, "The Edinburgh Milliners, 1720-1820," Costume 20 (1986): 18-28.
59. Of fifty-threee business biographies for the second half of the nineteenth-century, seven involved the use of this family income strategy.
60. Case study based on record-linkage and family reconstitution - see note 23.
61. Case study based on record-linkage and family reconstitution - see note 23.
62. Nenadic, "The Small Family Firm," 94.
63. See, Leonore Davidoff, "Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England," Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 406-28.
64. Famous cases include Florence Nightingale, see Toni McNaron, The Sister Bond: A Feminist View of a Timeless Connection (New York, 1985). Notable fictonal cases include MrCollins' courting of the Bennet sisters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (first published in 1814).
65. For the case-study approach, see note 23. When sisters left the firm, the consequences could be severe for those who remained behind. Two of the relatively rare cases of bankruptcy in Edinburgh women's garment firms were attributed to this cause. Magdalen Dunbar, milliner and dressmaker sequestered in 1815, cited the marriage of her sister and her removal from Edinburgh as the cause of business failure. Agnes Dow, a silk mercer, haberdasher and milliner in Leith in the 1830s was bankrupted following the loss of a sister-partner who suffered from a chronic mental illness. SRO CS96/3562; SRO CS96/4068.
66. K. M. Boyd, Scottish Church Attitudes to Sex, Marriage and the Family (Edinburgh, 1987).
67. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes, part 2.
68. Anne McCrum, "Women and Inheritance in the Nineteenth-Century." Unpublished paper presented to the Scottish Family History Seminar, University of Edinburgh, 1995.
69. Scottish Record Office, SC70/1/410 248-254.
70. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, part 2.
71. As witnessed by the behaviour of the Misses Sarah and Catherine Cameron in 1882, stationers in Melrose, a small town to the south of Edinburgh, who made a major strategic financial intervention during the bankruptcy of their brother Robert Cameron, a stationer and publisher in Edinburgh, in order to save his firm from bankruptcy. A few years later the firm came to be known as R. M. Cameron and Son. Case cited in Stana Nenadic, "The Life-Cycle of Firms in Late Nineteenth Century Britain" in Phillippe Jobert and Michael Moss, eds., The Birth and Death of Companies in Historical Perspective (Carnforth, 1990), 193.
72. Intra-firm business strategies employed by brothers are discussed in Nenadic, "Small Family Firm," 94.
73. For a recent and influential account of the entrepreneur see, M. Casson, "Entrepreneurship and Business Culture" in J. Brown and M. B. Rose, eds., Entrepreneurship, Networks and Modern Business (Manchester, 1993).
74. For different reasons, women-owned firms today also tend to seek stability - though this characteristic is not unique to women. See, Richard Scase and Robert Goffee, Women in Charge: The Experiences of Female Entrepreneurs (London, 1985).
75. Bank deposits dominated women's wealth in all social groups. Stana Nenadic, "The Structure, Values and Influence of the Scottish Urban Middle Class: Glasgow 1800 to 1870" (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1986), ch. 2.
76. Beverley Lemire, Fashion's Favourites: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991); W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (1981), ch. 5, 12.
77. Beverley Lemire, Fashion's Favourites: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991); W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (1981), ch. 5, 12.
78. Estimated from Z. Shonfield, The Precariously Privileged: A Professional Family in Victorian London (Oxford, 1987), 62-3.
79. R. B. Davies, "'Peacefully Working to Conquer the World': The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets," Business History Review 43 (1969): 299-325; MargaretWalsh, "The Democratization of Fashion: The Emergence of the Women's Dress Pattern Industry," Journal of American History 66 (1979): 229-313.
80. R. B. Davies, "'Peacefully Working to Conquer the World': The Singer Manufacturing Company in Foreign Markets," Business History Review 43 (1969): 299-325; MargaretWalsh, "The Democratization of Fashion: The Emergence of the Women's Dress Pattern Industry," Journal of American History 66 (1979): 229-313.
81. The term was coined by Charles Kingsley and is cited in James A. Schmiechen, "State Reform and the Local Economy," 415.
82. The best indication of this comes through nineteenth-century novels. See, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (London, 1853) and Mary Barton (London, 1848); also Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (London, 1839) where the character of Madame Mantalini, the employer of Kate Nickleby, provides an insight to the darker side of the industry.
83. The fifty-three Edinburgh business biographies include two French-owned dressmaking firms, Madame Souyris and Madame Roques - which were connected through marriage. The first was a husband and wife business, and the second involved a dressmaking wife who was married to a hairdresser and perfumier.
84. A. Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914 (London, 1989); R. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982).
85. A. Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914 (London, 1989); R. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982).
86. This was true of the firm of J. and R. Allen of Edinburgh, Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century, advertising end-piece.
87. Madame Mantalini's house and shop gives a good indications of this, Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. 11; and it is reflected also in the inventories of women who went bankrupt in Edinburgh.
88. This is the reason for the decision by Mary Barton - the daughter of a factory worker - to enter a dressmaking apprenticeship; see Gaskell, Mary Barton, ch.2.
89. The moral dimension was complex, partly a product of the commercialisation of a commodity with a traditional symbolic relationship with virtue, partly connected with the fact that brothels often masqueraded as dressmaking establishments, and dressmaking establishments hired showroom women for their good looks. Gaskell's Ruth, provides a fictional perspective of the issue. Walkley, Ghost in the Looking Glass looks at the link between prostitution and the poor seamstress.
90. Fraser, Coming of the Mass Market, ch. 12.
91. J. A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labour.
92. Fraser, Coming of the Mass Market; Adburgham, Shops and Shopping.
93. Fraser, Coming of the Mass Market; Adburgham, Shops and Shopping.
94. Angela John, ed., Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800- 1918 (London, 1986); Elizabeth Roberts, Women's Work, 1840-1940 (London, 1988), p. 39-40. There was a massive drop in the numbers of dressmakers and milliners between 1911 and 1931.
95. Angela John, ed., Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800- 1918 (London, 1986); Elizabeth Roberts, Women's Work, 1840-1940 (London, 1988), p. 39-40. There was a massive drop in the numbers of dressmakers and milliners between 1911 and 1931.
96. Ruth Freeman and Patricia Klaus, "Blessed or Not? The New Spinster in England and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," Journal of Family History 9 (1984): 394-414.
97. Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century, 267-8
98. P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (London, 1938), ch. 14.
99. Nenadic, "Small Family Firm," 95.
100. See, Philip Scranton, "Build a Firm, Start Another: The Bromleys and Family FirmEntrepreneurship in the Philadelphia Region" in Geoffrey Jones and Mary B. Rose, eds., Family Capitalism (London, 1993), 151.
101. On the international context see, Oliver M. Westall, "The Competitive Environment of British Business, 1850-1914" in Kirby and Rose, Business Enterprise in Modern Britain, 207-35.
102. See, Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London, 1991).