Negotiating the Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Town: Female Entrepreneurs Claim Their Place

During the eighteenth century, a number of shifts took place in urban commerce, including shifting structures and operation of guilds, alterations to burgher rights and a growing commercial culture based on increasing trade and consumption. The world of business was increasingly cast in a masculine mould, while tract literature was progressively more often describing women's ‘proper place' as the world of home and children. These changes altered the gendered characteristics of many town economies, and changed the structures within women had to operate. Yet many women consciously continued to work in the commercial world, projecting their own image of themselves and of their business. Often these women have to be understood and their lives collected from many of the fairly opaque records that made up their daily lives. This paper is an attempt to probe some of these lives looking primarily at the ways such women positioned themselves in their working world. Thus, we can hear women's voices through their activities in the commercial market, through the ways they conducted business and the ways they used the materials of the business world. This paper will explore some of these considerations based on research primarily on Aberdeen Scotland, but with continental comparisons. It will examine the gendered context and the ways that the idea of the town and constructions of gender reshaped the urban terrain. It analyses how women operated as a significant part of the commercial community, how they occupied many key spaces within it and how their physical presence as businesswomen and consumers contributed to shaping the identity of women as well as the public face of the town. Specifically it will investigate some of the ways women utilised the opportunities open to them and how they negotiated some of the challenges.